Theological, Cultural and Educational Reflections

Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies, p/b, London, John Murray, 2021 (2016)  

First novel by young Irish writer Lisa McInerney lets the reader into the underbelly of city life in current day Ireland.  Based on the city of Cork the novel describes the drug, crime and prostitution scene in frank and lurid detail including prison life for offenders. There is a thread of black humour throughout the novel which keeps the reader engaged and in addition there are threads of well meaning but hopeless religious do-gooders who usually end up making things worse. There is a deal of bitterness and anger thrown at the efforts of the church in this novel.

The main thread of the novel is based around school dropout Ryan Cusack, his girlfriend Karine D’Arcy, and his alcoholic and sometimes violent father. There follows a trail of teenage sexual encounters, drug addled users, brutal crime bosses, beaten up prostitutes, failed families and dodgy religious organisations. 

In the final chapter there is a faint glimmer of hope from a somewhat crazed source but the glimmer is very faint and untrustworthy.  This is the sort of teenage warning literature that used to be given to high school English teachers when I began my teaching career fifty years ago. I presume the intention was to warn the Year 9’s off the bad life but in my experience the outcome was titillation and little else. 

If one has the view that a key purpose of good literature is to uplift the reader and bring light and hope into even the darkest trauma, then this is not the novel to read. If the writer’s purpose is to display her handling of ironic and grim humour with plenty of sex thrown in then the writer has succeeded admirably.There is a genuine task for sociologists to detail the causes and motivations of the underground criminal drug world and the task is urgent. The creation of a fiction of unredeemed hopelessness where the only light is black humour seems to me to be a pointless exercise for the reader. There are so many more important things to be doing!  2 stars

Marcel Proust:  In Search of Lost Time: The Prisoner: Trans., Intro & Notes, Carol Clark, p/b,  Camberwell, Penguin, 2003 (1923).  

The Prisoner takes up in some detail the ongoing relationship between the Narrator (for the first time actually admitting that his name is ‘Marcel’) and his girlfriend Albertine, whom he met on vacation in Balbec way back in Book 2 (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).  The Narrator has come to an understanding with Albertine.  She will come to live with him at his parents flat in Paris and he will provide for her on the understanding that she will only leave the house under the guardianship of someone the Narrator approves of, and never at night except with the Narrator. 

His purpose is to prevent her from marrying anyone else and also to stop her from behaving badly with other women.  Albertine has her own bedroom but they are quite intimate with each other, sometimes sleeping in the same bed and with the Narrator regularly undressing Albertine but never actually having sexual intercourse.  (This presumably to safeguard Albertine’s honour and marriageabiltiy in case the relationship breaks up, although this is never explicity stated).

Albertine has accepted these limitations on her freedom and in exchange the Narrator showers her with very expensive presents, dresses, jewellery, artworks, painting lessons, even offering to buy her a yacht which never eventuates. Thus Albertine effectively becomes the Narrator’s “prisoner” and indeed the Narrator is also “imprisoned” in the same house, keeping a wary and very jealous eye on Albertine In spite of the dislike and close attention of the Narrator’s maid Françine, Albertine finds many ways to do what she needs to do when out of the house. She is aided especially by her friend from Balbec,  Andrée,  whom the Narrator trusts implicitly but unwisely. 

Of couse Albertine’s activities gradually come to the knowledge of the Narrator. The peculiarity of the Narrator’s behaviour with Albertine leads him to say that his behaviour would so often give the reader the impression of strange changes in direction that he would think me almost mad. (p.320f). This was often my feeling I have to admit. As the translator Carol Clark writes: “The Prisoner” is a strange mixture of the improbable and the painfully realistic.” One reason for the curious nature of their sexual behaviour was the challenge of what would and would not be publishable in the 1920’s. 

A major sub-story of The Prisoner, is the increasingly overt and homosexually active behaviour of M. de Charlus,  who has taken guardianship of the outstanding violinist Morel who also displays his own sexually aggressive habits. Baron de Charlus who has taken a very dominant role throughout Books 2-5 meets his sad Waterloo at a musical soiree organised by M. and Mme Verdurin. The Narrator is opposed to homosexuality throughout the five volumes, although it was well known that Proust himself was a homosexual, which perhaps explains his sympathy and respect for Baron de Charlus after his very public downfall. 

In spite of the at times pathetic and rather ridiculous nature of the “imprisonment” of Albertine, there are  once again many beautiful and thought provoking passages in this novel which delve deeply into literature (especially the writing of Dostoyevski) art, music, the philosophy of love and jealousy and much more besides.  The translation is outstanding and the explanatory notes, as always, helpful and informative. Proust died before the final three volumes of his massive work were completely finalised and the editors of this new version have done an excellent job in pulling the various elements of the final three volumes together.   The climax of this novel leaves the reader gasping and regretful that the relationship is actually over.  For the first time in five novels I am now quite keen to read Book 6, The Fugitive.  5 stars.

Peter Frankopan: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, p/b, London, Bloomsbury, 2016  

Croatian born Peter Frankopan is the Professor of Global History at Oxford University and also with his wife runs a chain of exclusive international hotels as well as managing a $14 million trust from his parent’s supermarket chain! His mother was a Swedish Professor of international Law.

This book stayed on the British Sunday Times Non-Fiction charts for nine months and I understand why. It is certainly the most readable, stunning and extraordinary non-fiction book I have ever read and I have read a few. The reference section runs to 94 pages in small type and contains material from over ten languages.

The sweep of Frankopan’s writings is vast, sweeping through the earliest tribes emerging from the silk road steppes inciuding Attila the Hun’s reign of terror and much later the all conqurering Mongol empire lead by Genghis Khan and his son Ogödei who became the Great Khan. The extraordinary cultures and wealth generated from the silk roads is the essence of this book. This does not mean Frankopan ignores Egypt, the Greeks and the Romans. Frankopan handles with effective and fascinating details the tensions and trauma associated with Christianity’s hammering out of the theology of Christ as the Son of God over five centuries as well as the impact of Islam from the C7th onwards. 

Nevertheless, never far away are the Silk Roads and he effectively argues that after the fall of Rome, Europe was a backwater for a thousand years while the real action and culture was elsewhere from Venice eastwards. It is so refreshing to read a world history that is not Western-centric.

When it comes to the British and American ascendancy and the European wars Frankopan once again demonstrates the importance of Russia and its links with the east. The bankruptcy of England following the second world war and the importance of the Persian and Arabic oil supplies, along with the power of China brings the story full circle back to the Silk Roads.

Frankopan’s style is dynamic, elegant, sure-footed, exciting, racy and impossible to put down. Any thoughtful student prepared to read this book will immediately make  history their life’s work. In my version this book runs to 521 pages but I could not put it down. If, like me, you are tired of the shallow gotcha and point scoring that is called news on today’s television screens I suggest you give the tv a rest and take to this book.  Your view of the world will never be the same! 10 stars!

John Dickson:  Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History,  h/b, Grand Rapids, Zondervan Reflective, 2021 

John Dickson is an outstanding Australian historian with over 20 books to his credit. He is a visiting academic at Oxford University teaching Classics; he teaches a course on the historical Jesus at the University of Sydney and is Distinguished Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Public Christianity at Ridley College.

Bullies and Saintsis a sobering read for committed Christians. Whilst a number of Dickson’s books have been of an apologetic nature aimed at persuading folk on the edge to check out the vast array of evidence for the Christian faith, this book is aimed at believing Christians who might get quite a shock when they read it. I know I did. 

Dickson throws a very powerful spotlight on the less attractive side of Christian history as well as giving credit to Christianity’s world changing impact on our world and on our lives. The reader is truly amazed by the extraordinary transformation of the pagan Roman Empire into a Christian nation in just three hundred or so years. Equally powerful and  moving are Dickson’s accounts of individual Christian leaders including Gregory of Nazianzus, Alcuin of York, Benedict of Nursia, Catherine of Siena, Francis of Assisi and the faithful witness of the Eastern Byzantine Church little known to many Western Christians.  They truly are “the saints” and it is good to learn of their faith, courage and determination to change the world for Christ. 

Equally overwhelming and indeed at times dispiriting are the “bullies”. Here, far too frequently, the Christian reader has to recoil in shame at the antics and horrific behaviour of Christian leaders at various times, whose intentions may well have been honourable but whose practices when you get down to detail were shameful and very unChristian!  The list is long and included the bullying of non-Christians in the Roman Empire once Christianity became the official religion of Rome; the hapless mess of the Crusading era including the appalling sacking of Constantinople and the massacre of helpless victims in the Jerusalem temple; the Christian warfare unleashed by Augustine’s doctrine of a just war including in later centuries the coercion and violence of Charlemagne; The Inquisition era (although the number of deaths involved is relatively small compared with earlier and later tragedies); Martin Luther’s vicious and destructive writing against the Jews; The wars of religion in the 1600’s involving appalling loss of life in Germany and Czechoslovakia; The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland; and in some ways the most horrific of all,  the damage done by Christian leaders in child abuse in the modern church, 

These chapters give one pause and are indeed dispiriting to read. Yes it can be argued that the thirty years war following the Reformation was largely political (France vs the might of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire; The Irish “troubles” brought about by political machinations rather than religious), yet to outsiders it all just looks like religion is the problem. One saving grace is the recognition in our own day by non-Christian historians like Terry Eagleton, Raymond Gaita and Tom Holland that our current Western world view of the intrinsic value of humanity and ethics would not have been possible without the Christian revolution.

Church History is not the most commonly read diet of the average Christian. Bullies and Saints will certainly change the way a Christian views the world since Christ’s teaching of repentance, love and faithfulness. It will give food for thought but also encouragement to everyone who gets 

behind a microphone to commend the Christian Gospel. 5 stars!

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned, p/b, London, Vintage Books, 2010 (1921)  

This is certainly one of the saddest and most depressing books I have read in a long time. Scott Fitzgerald is a master story teller especially of the high life of the roaring twenties, in which he himself played a major part. 

In this novel Anthony Patch,  heir to a vast fortune, finishes University and finds himself unable to contemplate any particular form of work. “ it astonishes me…I don’t understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work.”  [p.64]. As can be seen from this quotation, Anthony’s life of travel. parties, friendships, outings and socialising is pleasant enough and his generosity makes him many friends.

His life is magically enhanced by his attraction to the gorgeous Gloria Gilbert,  a young lady who was equally determined to use her beauty, dancing skills and dynamic personality to live her life to the full and die forever young.  Everything goes fine for a time but their hectic lifestyle is expensive and although Anthony lives in expectation of a wonderful fortune, his grandfather is a long living survivor and his allowance, reasonable enough, was no match for their outgoings. In addition Anthony gradually develops a serious alcohol addiction.

LIfe gets more complicated when Anthony is drafted into the US army towards the end of the first world war. Although the war ended before he had to fight the American economy was going down the tube at the same time and Anthony and Gloria had to cut their cloth. The result is a continuing and depressing downward spiral. There are some humorous events but the direction is all downhill. There is a very funny unexpected ending which caps off a story which I suspect was true of a number of wealthy young men during the high life of the twenties.  Fitzgerald was part of this world and the truth to life is searing in places. This story, though sad, is hard to put down. Fitzgerald, though disregarded in his own time, is now regarded as one of the finest American novelists of all time. If you read this book you will, I think, agree…it is a story not easily forgotten. 

5 stars

Peter Adam: Written For Us: Receiving God’s Words in the Bible, p/b, Nottingham, IVP, 2008  

The Revd Dr Peter Adam, former Principal of Ridley College Melbourne, Vicar emeritus of St Jude’s Carlton,  and world renowned for his speaking and writing gifts has written a significant book about what the Bible teaches about itself.   Although this book was first published in 2008 it is still in print and available at Koorong and online.   In summary this book is about receiving God’s words, written for his people, by his Spirit, about his Son. Peter takes each of these phrases in turn and develops his understanding of their meaning in a way which is easy to understand, helpful and indeed provocative. Although the book tends to be aimed at Christian leaders I think the average church attender would be very encouraged by reading it. 

Some of the key ideas Peter develops are outlined below:

• The Church has greater value than the Bible, for the Bible is the means to achieve an end, and the end or purpose is the creation of God’s church. The Church is composed of God’s people, who are made in God’s image…and are being transformed into the image of the Lord Jesus. (page 46)
• Canonising does not confer authority on the text. It acknowledges authority already present.  (p47 quoting Kenneth Craig: The Lively Credentials of God.)
• It is important to recognise the variety of styles of authority in Scripture. (eg direct command, entreaty, parable, encouragement, stories of the past, appeals not to demean ourselves, warnings, promises)….It is important to take notice of this variety, otherwise we can tend to read  one style of authority (‘Do this because God told you to do it’) into every part of the Bible, and so misrepresent God. We might also tend to adopt this one style of authority ourselves, which would mar God’s image in us.  (p.48)
• We can trust the authority of the Bible because of the example and teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ. For Christ authenticated the Bible as he taught about the Old Testament, referred to his own teaching and promised the ministry of the Holy Spirit of truth and ministry of his own apostles and their associates. (p.52)
• God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit…. and our personal response to God and our response to Scripture is a response to the Holy Spirit. (p54)
• Exegesis of the Bible is an act of sustained humility (Eugene Peterson, p. 57)
• The Bible is the product of the divine Spirit, but it is not itself divine. It effectively conveys divine truth, but it is not God.  (p.59)
• We were created to believe God, and if we do not believe God, we will believe other words and serve other gods. (p.70)
• Unless one is to betray the future, one must ensure that the past abides (p.107)
• Greater responsibility brings greater judgment. (p.127)
• Be alert and not over confident; we can fall as easily when we think we are safe (p134)
• Pastoral intelligence requires Biblical understanding, theological awareness, a loving understanding of people, and a good perception of how different people hear, change, and are motivated. (p.148)
• So much damage is done when we focus in our teaching on secondary issues, and neglect to teach the content of the faith. (p.148)
• The idea that we can be non-aligned in matters of religion is ridiculous. There is no neutral ground. (p222)

These quotations are just a taste of the riches of this thoughtful book. I warmly commend it.

 5 stars

THEODORE ROETHKE

I attended Melbourne University between the years 1967-169 studying for an Arts Degree and living for two years at Ridley College and one year in a Canning St Carlton flat with two friends. I say “studying” because although I faithfully attended lectures, pracs and tutorials my actual “studying” was somewhat casual and intermittent and in at least one subject I regularly received the message at the end of the year “passed but advised not to continue”. My real passions were working with the Melbourne University Evangelical Union as it was then called (now the Christian Union), and also playing in a folk music group called The Saints and Sinners. 

It was when playing with this group that I was introduced to Ann Richter who before too long became my girl friend and at the end of my fourth year (Dip.Ed.), my wife. In our courting days Ann was working full time at Radio Station 3KZ as a copy writer and later publicity manager and so my time at University in those halcyon days was even less centred on the University itself. My first major was English and while I don’t recall much of what I read two writers stood out. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin remains my favourite novel of all time but a much less well known poet, American Theodore Roethke wrote many lines which chimed in with my then infatuation with Ann and have remained with me through the fifty one years of our marriage and I hope many more to come. Lines such as from the poem The Waking:

All lovers live by longing, and endure:

Summon a vision and declare it pure.

Herewith a poem by Roethke that means a lot to me still.

1 Words for the Wind 

Love, love, a lily’s my care,

She’s sweeter than a tree

Loving, I use the air

Most lovingly: I breathe;

Mad in the wind I wear

Myself as I should be

My brother the vine is glad.

Are flower and seed the same?

What do the great dead say?

Sweet Phoebe, she’s my theme:

She sways whenever I sway.

‘O love me while I am,

You green thing in my way!’

I cried, and birds came down

And made my song their own.

Motion can keep me still:

She kissed me out of thought

As a lovely substance will:

She wandered; I did not:

I stayed, and light fell

Across her pulsing throat;

I stared, and a garden stone

Slowly became the moon.

The shallow stream runs slack;

The wind creaks slowly by;

Out of a nestling’s beak

Comes a tremulous cry

I cannot answer back;

A shape from deep in the eye,—

That woman I saw in a stone, —

Keeps pace when I walk alone.

11 The sun declares the earth;

The stones leap in the stream;

On a wide plain, beyond

The far stretch of a dream,

A field breaks like the sea;

The wind’s white with her name,

And I walk with the wind.

The dove’s my will today.

She sways, half in the sun:

Rose, easy on a stem,

One with the sighting vine,

One to be merry with,

And pleased to meet the moon.

She likes wherever I am.

Passion’s enough to give

Shape to a random joy:

I cry delight: I know

The root, the core of cry:

Swan-heart, arbutus calm,

She moves when time is shy:

Love has a thing to do.

The loam gleams like a wet coal;

The green, the springing green

Makes an intenser day

Under the rising moon;

I smile, no mineral man;

I bear, but not alone,

The burden of this joy.

111 Under a southern wind,

The birds and fishes move

North, in a single stream:

The sharp stars swing around:

I get a step beyond

The wind, and there I am;

I’m odd and full of love.

Wisdom, where is it found?

Those who embrace, believe,

Whatever was, still is,

Says a song tied to a tree.

Below, on the ferny ground,

In rivery air, at ease,

I walk with my true love.

What time’s my heart? I care.

I cherish what I have

Had of the temporal:

I am no longer young

But the winds and waters are;

What falls away will fall:

All things bring me to love.

1V The breath of a long root,

The shy perimeter

Of the unfolding rose,

The green, the altered leaf,

The oyster’s sweeping foot,

And the incipient star,—

Are part of what she is.

She wakes the ends of life.

Being myself, I sing

The soul’s immediate joy.

Light, light, where’s my repose?

A wind writhes round a tree.

A thing is done: a thing

Body and Spirit know

When I do what she does:

Creaturely creature, she!—

I kiss her moving mouth,

Her swart hilarious skin;

She breaks my breath in half;

She frolics like a beast;

And I dance round and round,

A fond and foolish man,

And see and suffer myself

In another being, at last.

  Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)

Educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard; started of with law but found his strength and interest in poetry. Won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Much of his plant imagery comes from his father’s substantial greenhouses where he grew up. Struggled with and overcame a  mental disorder.  Married Beatrice O’Connell later in life. She organised the publication of his last set of poems.

Peter Ackroyd: The Fall of Troy, p/b, London, Vintage Books, 2007  

Peter Ackroyd is arguably the most prolific writer currently writing in English. HIs remarkable writing career includes many novels, six major biographies, and four major works of non-fiction based on the city of London. The Fall of Troy is a fictional novel loosely based on the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890). 

Schleimann was a complex and driven man who made a fortune in America with various schemes many of which were of a dubious nature. In later life he obtained American citizenship also in a dubious manner and divorced his wife, marrying the younger Sophia. At the same time  Schleimann developed a passion for archaeology and he focussed  on the site of Hissarlik in modern Turkey on land owned by the family of another amateur archaelogist Frank Calvert who suggested he try there. 

Although Schliemann’s methods were disastrous by modern standards (using large scale engineering equipment and heavy machinery, ruining many levels and artifacts), Schliemann did in fact uncover many layers of an ancient city in Hissarlik , Turkey, which most scholars today do regard as containing the ancient city of Troy. Schleimann also uncovered an extremely valuable cache of ancient and beautiful jewellery but his hopes of finding the Troy of Homer were dashed by later analysis of the Hissarlik site.  New analysis of its  written materials and a reassessment of  other finds used by Schliemann along with further research on the site led  eventually to a date closer to c. 3000-2000 BC, a much earlier and more primitive society than the time of Homer’s epic in C8th-C7th BC

Peter Ackroyd’s novel uses many of the above elements of Schleimann’s life to tell his fictional story of Heinrich Obermann, an amateur archaelogist, linguist and historian, who like Schliemann was an obsessive. Ackroyd’s Heinrich Obermann could converse in at least eight languages, as could Schleimann and Herr Obermann also was married to a Sophia. From these likenesses onwards the story takes the reader on a far more sinister and unsettling journey. Mysterious  events occur which quickly immerse the reader in a drama impossible to put down.  Ackroyd’s ability to build suspense and the fear of something threatening is outstanding. I have to say the novel builds to a point where it is quite impossible to put down!  Ackroyd is a master story teller and this is one of his best.  5 stars 

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Ed, E. Martin Browne, p/b Ringwood, Penguin,  1962 (1947)  

C20th playwright Tennessee Williams was one of America’s most successful writers for the stage with many of his plays becoming equally successful movies. Most of his plays revolve file:///.file/id=6571367.8621200842 around the themes of anger, envy and violence,  attributes which, on his own admission he had been guilty of himself in life.  He rejects the idea that file:///.file/id=6571367.8621200842 his works are about hate and argues that writing about human selfishness and uncontrolled violence, usually to do with alcohol, can highlight the tragedy of meaningless and hurtful human relationships. His own father, a travelling salesman, was an alcolholic and violent towards his son.

This play is based around two sisters. Stella who is living with Stanley Kowalski and about to have a child, and her sister the beautiful Blanche Du Bois, a failed school teacher who has lived on the wild side but whose good looks are fading and who has lost the family home and needs shelter.  Stella and Stanley live in a poor and lazy area of New Orleans in a tiny two bedroom one bathroom apartment of a larger boarding house. Stella’s husband Stanley is large, noisy, dominant and alcohol addicted and very angry that Blanche has lost the family’s inheritance.  

Blanche forms a relationship with Stanley’s friend Mitch but lies about her past to do so. Stanley does some digging and uncovers Blanche’s doubtful history. The stage is set for a violent conflagration after Stella goes to hospital to have her baby and Stanley and Blanche are left alone in the house. 

Williams has produced a powerful and disturbing play wired with electricity with the future of the relationships left to the imagination.  5 stars. 

Brian S. Rosner: Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God, [New Studies in Biblical Theology Series], p/b, Downers Grove, Inter Varsity Press, 2013  

Brian Rosner is the current Principal of Ridley College Melbourne and has contributed widely to the theological scene in Australia, Britain and the United States. Paul and the Law asks the key question What is the relationship of the Biblical Law of Moses to the Christian understanding of faith in Christ?  He bases his response on the work of Paul as the major contributor to the apostolic witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is not to diminish the writer of Hebrews of the epistles of James, Peter, John and Jude but simply to limit the size of an already substantial work.

In a nutshell, Rosner argues that Christians are not subject to the Jewish law in the sense of being obedient to every command in the Pentateuch, because the Messiah, Jesus has come to fulfil the law and the prophets. While this is true the law and the commandments of God remain central to Paul’s theology. In Rosner’s analysis, some of the laws are repudiated, for example circumcision; some of the laws are replaced because we walk no longer in the law of the Mosaic letter but in the law of faith and the law of the Spirit; and some of the laws are reappropriated as prophecy and wisdom for example the moral teaching of the Mosaic law.

These three themes are analysed with an extended and clear analysis of the key texts. In addition Rosner interacts with the conclusions of other scholars both ancient and modern. In addition Rosner makes use of a vast array  of Biblical and extra Biblical material including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus and many other relevant sources.

‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen 

justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c. 

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend 

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. 

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must 

Disappointment all I endeavour end? 

    Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, 

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost 

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust 

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, 

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes 

Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again 

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes 

Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, 

Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. 

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Books read May 2022

BOOKS READ MAY 2002

Rod Dreher: The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,  p/b, Sentinel, New York, 2018  

Rod Dreher was brought up in a strict Methodist home and went his own way until finding Christianity in his twenties. He was, for many years a member of the Roman Catholic Church and more recently he joined the Orthodox Church in the USA.  He has been an aggressive commentator, journalist and writer for many years with some strong opinions which have brought him into considerable controversy and some of which he has retreated from. 

I was interested to read this book initially because I have always been a fan of the C5th/C6th writing of Benedict.  Benedict formulated a Rule for monks who wished to join his monastery and whose gentle but powerful and practical theology has influenced many Christians to this day, and not just those in the Orthodox Church. His influence and ideas have spread well beyond the monastery walls to aid many followers in their life of walking with Christ.

I was therefore quite surprised to find that there is only one chapter in this book dealing with St Benedict (chapter 3) and that relates to the year 2000 re-opening of the St Benedict’s monastery in Norcia, Italy, which had been suppressed in 1810 by Napoleon.  The Prior of the re-opened monastery is a 65 year old American Father Cassian who reopened the monastery with six other monks in 2000. Since the book was written massive earthquakes have shattered both the monastery and the old church to which it was attached in Norcia but there are hopes of rebuilding.  For those who would like to deepen their knowledge of the Rule of St Benedict  I would warmly recommend Esther de Waal’s Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict, 1984 and reprinted many times since and still in print. It is a precious experience to read and I would count it in my top three Christian books I have ever read for helping me to draw closer to Christ.  

What we do have with Dreher’s  Benedict Option?  In brief this book seeks to find a way for conservative Christians to respond to the collapse of traditional Christian faith in mainstream American society. (He frequently refers to “The West” but his narrative and description largely refers to the USA, although there are some similarities with the collapse of conservative Christianity in Western Europe and in Australia and Canada.)

Dreher’s energetic ideas, packed with references to fellow travellers and writers, books and seminars revolve around an analysis of the demise of mainstream conservative American Christian culture, and how to re-energise it. He has chapters which include: a short history of the  conservative Christian collapse in America; political issues; the need for a recovery of ancient forms of worship and church order;  the idea of a Christian village; the challenges of Christian education in a negative school environment; the powerful impact of Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015,  and its impact on conservative Christians holding their jobs and livelihoods in American society; and two thoughtful and helpful chapters on Eros and the New Counter-Culture and on Man and the Machine. 

My initial disappointment about the content colours somewhat my view of this book but I think many would agree that Dreher’s work would have been better with strong editing, a slower pace and far fewer examples of discussions, books and conversation which come staccato like one after another. I keep having the feeling that Dreher is keen to show off his vast network of people and ideas.

A major weakness of the book in my view is that no attention at all is given to gay Christians who choose to remain celibate. In addition there is no discussion about ways in which conservative Christian churches might relate to gay members who wish to remain in the church. A chapter on mediating a response to deep differences of opinion within a church congregation would, I believe,  have significantly strengthened the appeal of this book.   3 stars. 

The book comes with a useful study guide and an excellent index. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night, London, Vintage, 2010 (1934).  

Insightful and beautifully written novel from the post-World War 1 late twenties world of rich and famous Americans spending substantial amounts of their money on the French Riviera. The key players are the world renowned psychiatric clinician Dr Dick Diver and his patient and later wife Nicole who brought exceptional wealth to their marriage.

As with Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, the lifestyle, wealth and passion for the good food and alcohol of the good life bring with it many challenges and many tragedies. The difference with this novel, I think, is that we really like the key characters and wish things could be different. The novel is in two parts with the dramatic strength raised to far greater heights in part two.

Raymond Chandler wrote of Fitzgerald’s prose that it’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite. I cannot do better than that. The prose carries you away and it is very hard to put the book down once started. The rhythm, characters and story line carry you along as if you are there in person and cannot escape.  This is a seriously top drawer novel.  5 stars

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn:  One Day in the Life ot Ivan Denisovich; Trans. H.T. Willett, Foreward, Alexis Klimoff, p/b, London, Vintage, 2003 (1962, in Russian)  

I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago many years ago and was deeply scarred by its horror,   use of terror to persuade, the torture,  cannibalism, murder, exiled list of Humanists, attacks on the Russian Church, the irrelevance of innocence, the insanity of Stalin, the sheer horror of his regime, the destruction of Warsaw, the failure of the allies to negotiate meaningfully with Russia after World War 11 and much much more horror. How can humanity survive such terror and stupidity? 

And further,  once Solzhenitsyn was safely ensconced in the USA and equally depressed by the triviality of the concerns of the average American,  how powerfully he could write: “Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness: it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? and why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well….

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells the story of just one day of the fictional Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, in a Russian Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation or for no reason at all.

Solzhenitsyn was no stranger to such a labour camp having spent four years hard labour in such a  camp and a further four years exiled in Southern Kazakhstan where he almost died from undiagnosed cancer.  Curiously the story details a relatively “happy” day for Shukhov but the “happiness” simply underlines the horror and brutality of the conditions under which the men worked, ate, froze to death in Arctic conditions and fought with each other for tiny morsels of food. Solzhenitsyn’s story, permitted to be published by Krushchev was never published in Russia. 

Solzhenitsyn survived attacks on his life and was eventually expelled from Soviet Russia and lived for some years in the USA.  His writings went a long way to dispelling the more charitable views about Stalin and Communism which followed from Russian support for the West in its struggle with Hitler’s Germany in World War 11. Solzenhitsyn eventually  returned to Russia in 1994.

This cleverly written story now seems to have a new life following Russia’s 2022 brutal and  indiscriminate military assault on the people of Ukraine.    5 stars.

Richard Rohr: The Universal Christ, p/b, London, SPCK, 2019  

Richard Rohr is an American Franciscan Catholic priest and founder of the Centre and School for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque New Mexico.  He has written many books and has a high media profile especially in Australia,  due to his online writing and classes. He is currently in remission from cancer but has said publicly that he is ready for death. He has called The Universal Christ his “end of life book”. 

The Universal Christ is a high octane read! Rohr has an energetic almost frenetic writing style which pushes ahead at an alarming rate throwing ideas, Biblical quotations and thought starters at the reader from start to finish.  Rohr’s focus is on the positiveness, the joys, the goodness, and the power of the Christian Gospel and other world faiths especially Buddhism.  There is not much at all in this book about sin, evil or Satan. In this regard there is a strong similarity with the Creational Spirituality of former Dominican monk and now Anglican priest Matthew Fox, especially his powerful book Original Blessing (1983).

I believe there are two books contained in The Universal Christ.  The first book contains the establishment of Rohr’s thesis that there is a clear distinction between Jesus of the New Testament, a map for the time-bound and personal level of life (p.20) and the figure of Christ who is the blueprint for all time and space and life itself. (p.20) Such a thesis will be contested not just by Christians but I am sure by those of other faiths as well. Christians will have difficulty with a sentence like Jesus is a Third someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together. (p.19).  It has been hard enough for Christians to attempt to explain the idea of the Trinity!  Jesus as Not just God and not just man, a third someone,  is not going to do the job I think. Similarly  World leaders of other faiths are not necessarily going to fall in line to install “Christ” as the unifying power behind the world’s great religions.

Universalism itself has never been far away from the thoughts of many theologians including John Hick, Karl Barth,  liberal Catholics  Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner and evangelicals like Clark H. Pinnock in his persuasive book A Wideness in God’s Mercy (1992).

Laying aside this energetic argument in the first three chapters, Rohr proceeds to fourteen memorable chapters which will challenge and at times upset many earnest Christian readers but will make them pause, reconsider, think again  and read again. Not all will agree with Rohr’s conclusions about such topics as the following:  original goodness; the best criticism of the bad is still the practice of the better; people formed by God’s love are indestructible; God is eternal discovery and eternal growth; anonymous Christians (Rahner); the full journey towards wholeness must include the negative experiences (Jung) .. we must listen to what is urging us;  God protects us into and through death; the risen Christ is leading us somewhere good and positive; life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful; invoked or not invoked, God is still present (Jung); great love and great suffering brings us back to God; we must love God through, in, with, and even because of this world; Christianity’s unique trump card is always and forever incarnation; doing is more important than saying; following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world; the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it; if you are frightened into God it is never the true God that you meet; Even God has to use love and suffering to teach you all the lessons that really matter; God comes to you disguised as your life…and there are many more challenging ideas and themes.

This book comes with Two Practices called Beyond Mere Theology…telling is not training. The practices are Simply That you Are; and All Physical Reality as a Mirror. In addition there is an epitaph from Simone Weil, an Afterword entitled Love After Love and two appendices: 1. The Four World Views; 2. The Pattern of Spiritual Transformation. Finally there is a detailed bibliography. 4 stars.

Books read April 2022

Steven Runciman: The Fall of Constantinople 1453, h/b, London, Folio, 2013   

Steven Runciman was one of Britain’s most outstanding C20th historians and certainly the leading  historian of the Byzantine Empire and the history of the Crusades. Runciman inherited wealth from his grandfather and so was able to lead the life of a free-lancing scholar after an outstanding career at Oxford where his strength in languages was extraordinary including Latin, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian. He did however hold down  several major roles both in the Second World War and in academia. He was an aesthete and a successful gambler with a strong interest in the occult. He died in 2003 aged 97 soon after a remarkable final journey to Mt Athos, flown in by helicopter!

His in depth histories of Crusades and the final Fall of Constantinople are marked by his more favourable understanding of both Islamic and Byzantine societies than previous scholars and had a significant impact on the way historians now understand Byzantine and Islamic history and the tensions between Western and Eastern European Christians.

The Collapse of Constantinople really began in 1204 when the fourth European crusade against Islam was launched.  Spurred on by  the Venetians the Crusaders entered Orthodox Christian Constantinople and sacked the city with most of its wealth and remarkable artwork finding its way to Venice and elsewhere in Europe. This tragedy markedly weakened the Byzantine Empire which gradually lost more and more ground to Islam including large parts of the Balkans, even laying siege to Vienna itself. By 1453  mighty Constantinople had been reduced to 4,983 available Greeks and slightly under 2000 foreigners ready to face a Turkish army of 80 000 fighting men.

On the water the Greeks were also hugely outnumbered. They had about 23 ships against 130 ships in Sultan Mehmet’s fleet. In addition the Hungarian engineer Orban created the largest cannon yet made for Sultan Mehmet. He had gone first to the Emperor Constatine X1 but his purse was empty and Orban found a better offer. Not one European power came to the Emperor’s aid with the exception of the famous Genoese soldier Giovanni Giustininani who brought with him seven hundred well armed soldiers and fought bravely.

The Emperor’s army fought bravely for seven weeks against these huge odds.  The Sultan’s army battered the walls by day and the Greeks repaired them by night. The Greeks more mobile tiny fleet had the better of the war on the water.  In the end it was a near thing. Some on the Sultan’s side thought that the city was impregnable and they should call off the siege but the Sultan called for one last massive assault. It was unsuccessful and a retreat was being considered when a tiny unimportant side gate in the city wall was left open and the Sultan’s army poured in, overwhelming and slaughtering the unprepared Greeks. The victory was complete and a horrific slaughter and rapine ensued.

Apart from a few far-flung outpost islands the Byzantine Empire was no longer. The Sultan now controlled the whole of the Balkan Peninsular and now the greatest prize of all, Constantinople.  In short time all but three of the Christian churches were converted to mosques and vast numbers of Orthodox Christians either fled elsewhere, changed their faith or were enslaved or murdered. Trebizon soon followed and other Orthodox strongholds followed.  Only Russia stood alone for the Orthodox faith. 

This is a gripping story told without sentimentality or partisanship by Runciman. Once this book gets hold of you it won’t let you go. Orthodox Christianity is gaining ground in the West today..its quiet spirituality seems to refresh after the wearying disputes between disagreeing Christian followers. Who could tell where the next stage of this story goes in our own troubled C21st. 5 stars.

Alan Bennett: The Uncommon Reader, p/b, London, Profile Books, 2008  

Alan Bennett is a multi-talented actor, author, playwright and screenwriter who sprang to fame in 1960 at the Edinburgh Festival along with the gloriously funny trio of Dudley Moore, Johnathan Miller and Peter Cook.  Equally well known is his true account of The Lady in the Van about a fifteen year stay of a woman originally unknown to him who parked her car in his driveway for fifteen years.  The story was made into a very popular movie.

The Uncommon Reader is a gem of a fantasy which has Queen Elizabeth 11 coming across an official mobile library in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and meeting a keen reader Norman from the kitchen staff who is strongly attracted to gay authors. Norman’s passion inspires the Queen to start reading which, in her normal role she has no time for.  Bennett manages to include sixty five authors in this section of the novel along with many humorous insights into both literature and the Queen’s activities.  He manages to do this in such a way that we find the Queen’s behaviour believable.

After Norman’s opponents in the Palace get rid of Norman the Queen begins to consider writing as well as reading and the novel concludes with a fascinating address by the Queen to all of her Privy Counsellors in which she extols the values of both reading and writing to her amazed councillors. 

This is a gentle and thought provoking humorous yarn by a master of the theatre and comedy. 

4 stars. 

Murray Seiffert:  Gumbuli of Ngukurr: Aboriginal Elder in Arnhem Land, h/b, Brunswick East,  Acorn Press, 2011

The late Dr Murray Seiffert, who died just twelve months ago, has written an extraordinary history of an Aboriginal young man from tiny Bickerton Island in Arnhem Land who for over thirty years was the priest and leader of the town of Ngukurr, a community which began as a mission station on the Roper River.

Murray and I were friends and colleagues for over fifty years sharing time at Ridley College, teaching in north central Victoria, fellow worshippers at St James Ivanhoe for 17 years and sharing in many co-family events. Murray was an outstanding sportsman, agricultural scientist, teacher, sociologist and theologian and godfather to our second son David. For five years Murray worked with his wife Marjory as the Academic Dean of Nungalinya College in Darwin, during which time he had many opportunities to talk with  Gumbuli and visit Ngukurr. 

Michael Gumbuli Wurramara was only the second Aboriginal man to be ordained priest in the Northern Territory. He was converted by missionaries from the Church Missionary Society working on Groote Island, a large island close to Bickerton Island, east of Darwin. Inevitably, Gumbuli’s story can only  be told by being combined with the larger story of the planting of the Christian Gospel in Arnhem Land.  Gumbuli was born in 1935 and it is not hard to remember that as late as 1930 mass atrocities against Aborigines on the Australian mainland were still occurring. There is a Gippsland connection with the founding of the Roper River Mission (later called Ngukurr). The Gippsland Aboriginal community provided a generous financial contribution to the cost of the boats used to transport the team from Groote Island including Gumbuli which established the original mission on the Roper River. 

Gumbuli’s remarkable forty two year marriage to Dixie Daniels, his quiet but strong leadership style, his courage to face the spiritual dangers of native ceremony, his extraordinary energy to be a priest/town leader/mechanic/ cattle station missionary/retreat leader/daily worship leader, and his own personal faith and commitment both to the Bible’s truth and to Anglican order is exceptional. He was well worthy of his Order of Australia in 2010.

There are many critical issues to be examined in this remarkable history and Gumbuli was in the middle of them. Not least is the creation of the Kriol (formerly Pidgin) Bible. Gumbuli not only spoke good English but was fluent in Kriol, Anindilyakwa and other tribal languages. His encouragement to create a complete Kriol Bible was essential to its final achievement. Other key issues included the ongoing tension between Christian faith and aboriginal ceremony/culture (including the sharp differences between Uniting Church and Anglican approaches to the validity of the  serpent creation story);  the tragedy of native polygamy; the many disputes over alcohol at Ngukurr; the early poverty of Government financial support; the difficulty of maintaining good staff; problems with the police; disastrous floods and droughts and many other challenges. 

One remarkable feature of the story of Australian aborigines accepting the Gospel is the impact of Festo Kivingeri, exceptional Ugandan evangelist and Christian spokesman during the reign of Idi Amin. He came to the Territory and made a powerful impact which Gumbuli and others were able to build upon. 

Murray Seiffert has managed in this book to make everything interesting and one reason, oddly,  is the outstanding documentation. There is barely a sentence recorded that is not footnoted for source. The result is, in my experience, an unparalleled honesty and accuracy in the account of events. Murray’s voice is not intruded on this text…we read the very words spoken by government officials, missionaries, nurses, bishops, and eye witnesses of events and other key figures. The reader does not have to stop and check these comments (although being me I did!), but the detail gave me confidence to know that I was reading exciting history from the hundreds of people actually involved.

Another feature of interest for people my age is the many references to amazing individuals and figures known to me personally or by reputation from my own lifetime! Thus we read of Bishops Clyde Woods, Richard Appleby, Ken Mason, Arthur Malcolm and Philip Freier, CMS stalwarts Barry and Margaret Butler, Gwen and Lance Tremlett, George Pearson, Joy and John Sandefur, Keith Cole, David Woodbridge, Sister Ednar Brooker and many others.

Who should read this remarkable book? Anyone like me who has only been to Alice Springs and Darwin and has only a feeble knowledge of the story of the coming of Christianity to Arnhem Land. It will make you cry and also make you thank God for faithful servants.  5 stars

Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices, Ed. Douglas Cleverdon; Lithographs, Ceri Richards, h/b, London, Folio, 1972 (1954). 

C20th English/Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (he spoke no Welsh) carried this radio play around with him for some seven years before finally passing it on to his friend and publisher Douglas Cleverdon during Thomas’s preparation for his fourth recital tour to the USA. Thomas died in a New York hospital on the 9th November 1953 after falling into a coma. The radio play was broadcast by the B.B.C. on 25 January 1954 with Richard Burton taking the First Voice. The play was acclaimed as a master piece and was awarded the international Italia Prize as the finest radio work of the year. The first full-blown theatre production was staged at the Edinburgh Festival in August  1956 and subsequently in London, at the New Theatre, where it ran for seven months. 

The play describes the thoughts and desires of the townsfolk of the made up town of Llareggub based on the Welsh seaside village of Laugharne where Thomas lived from 1938 to 1940 and to which he returned in 1949.  Several of Laugharne’s well-known characters appear in Under Milk Wood especially the blind old sea captain “Captain Cat”.  Topographically the play is also based on the fishing town of Newquay with its steep street  running down to the harbour.  Thomas lived in Newquay with his wife Caitlin and his children from 1945.

The Radio Play beautifully and humorously portrays one complete day in Llareggub from the early morning dreaming of Captain Cat as he remembers his former girl friend Rosie Probert and his drowned fellow sailors Dancing Williams, Tom-Fred the donkeyman, Jonah Jarvis, Alfred Pomeroy Jones  and Curly Bevan all spring to life as first drowned down to fifth drowned. As Captain Cat wakes up many other voices of the village are heard, the draper, the cobbler, the dress maker, the sweet-shop keeper, Mrs Waldo, Miss Myfanwy Price, the Undertaker, Mr and Mrs Ogmore- Pritchard, Organ Morgan and 61 other voices including the school children and their teacher;  Rev Eli Jenkins and Bessie Bighead. Captain Cat hears them waking up and starting their day, the women gossiping around the town, the children bursting out from school with their bullying and teasing, the two Mrs Dai Bread, the men dreaming of school teacher Gossamer Beynon high heels, Polly Garter and her many lovers, the dreamy afternoon as the sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town…Captain Cat remembers Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch, whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many another seaman…while The Reverend Eli Jenkins inky in his cool front parlour or poem-room tells only the truth in his Lifework—the Population, main industry etc etc finishing each day with his sunset poem:  We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

and Thou, I know, wilt be the first,

To see our best side, not our worst…    and gradually,  First Voice proclaims: The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood….

There is sadness and joy in this play for voices; heaving life and fading memories, desires, lusts, burdens, failures, dreams and life ongoing in Llareggub.   I read this play as an old(er) man myself and contemplate life’s passing with all its promise and hopes, hurts and fears, triumphs and tragedies, and as I see one or another folk I have loved pass away.  Dylan Thomas loved life to the utmost and loved a drink too often to live a longer life. But he has given us some amazing poetry and this delightful and endearing radio play.  5 stars.

Tom Wolfe: Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, p/b, London, Picador, 1990 (1976) 

Tom Wolfe was a C20th  American journalist and novelist and a leader in the “New Journalism” of the sixties which intertwined literary techniques with news writing and journalism. Wolfe had an extraordinary gift for uncovering the minutest details of the American spirit from the sixties and into the new millennium. His book The Bonfire of the Vanities, chronicled the social class, greed, ambition and money hunger of America in the eighties and  made him a household name although the film of the novel bombed.

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter and Vine was Wolfe’s second novel and its various short stories demonstrate his exrtraordinary gifts of observation, detailed analysis, hard-earned knowledge of each subject, and his gloriously outrageous gifts of self-deprecating humour. The book’s title and first story describes a middle aged married New Yorker with children adding up his finances after a cocktail party he gave six weeks ago and resulting in  a series of cancelled cheques which have just come in the mail.  Clutter & Vine was the name of the florists to whom he owed $209.60 and Mauve Gloves & Madmen were the caterers to whom he owed $257.50.  He proceeds to tote up his $1000/month apartment in New York, his rented summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, his children’s school and college fees, his recent large dinner parties and much much more. The $ value looks small in 2022 money but the reader feels the pressure rising.

The third story, The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie, describes the experience of an American bomber pilot flying in VietNam towards the end of the war when American losses had begun to reach very high numbers. Whatever views the reader has towards the logic and horror of the war the story of the reality for this two man bomber team leaves one gasping for air. There is no humour in this section!

Another rather sad story covers the inside gen on the creation of commercial advertisements with sports superstars.  Equally troubling is  “The intelligent Coed’s Guide to America”, on how American undergrads responded to the likes of Günter Grass, Solzhenitsyn and Stalinism, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse’s doctrine of “repressive tolerance” and much more. More humorous but in some ways still rather frightening is “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” which throws clarifying light on what has recently occurred in the Trump era. Other topics include brief essays on violent crime, “pornoviolence”, teenage sexuality, Funky Chic on early eighties fashion, and “honks and wonks” on New York accents.   While these topics sound heavy and they are, Tom Wolfe manages to describe the action with humour, wisdom and a light touch.  There is so much good that comes out of America…there is also so much we could do without. 

I have never been a keen reader or student of sociology, but if you must go there, Tom Wolfe is the man to help you understand it, in America anyway.   4 stars.

Marion Kaminski:  Venice: Art and Architecture, Trans. Mark Cole & Eithne McCarthy, h/b, Konigswinter, Cologne, Könemann, 2005 

Venice is a unique European city. Although the Dutch also have their canals, they seem to be laid out in ordered patterns.  Venice is a crazy place full of twists and turns, mystery, hidden wonders and endless complexity.  It would take more than a year to unlock the artistic wonders of Venice and another year to follow through the remnants of Venice’s amazing history. Venice was  independent until 1866 (apart from a brief sojourn under Napoleon); she was queen of the seas, withstanding much more powerful opponents including being a major player in the sea battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman Turks; surviving a series of horrific plagues; and regularly fighting off the rest of Italy often including the papacy.  Venice is full of intrigue, mystery, masks and above all extraordinary architecture and art. 

Marion Kaminski has masterfully found a sensible way through the art and architecture of this tantalizing and complex seemingly floating city. The illustrations in this Könemann collection are of the highest standards and the information is just enough, never too much but calling out the reader for all the things they missed when they visited Venice.  Murano, Torcello and Burano are beautifully covered and the reproduction of major art works is outstanding, including the Peggy Guggenheim collection.  Some of Palladio’s most amazing church architecture is in Venice alongside many other outstanding architects.

The reader finishes the book feeling that Venice deserves to feel hugely proud of what they achieved as a republic and still today as part of Italy…and yet massively huge tourist ships and pressure from hard working immigrants threaten the very lifeblood of Venice whose residents regularly flee elsewhere.

This treasury of art and architecture comes complete with excellent potted histories of events, useful maps, surprising articles about Venetian heroes including Vivaldi, Marco Polo and Giacomo Casanova, a glossary of architectural terms, biographies of major artists, analysis of Venetian architecture and an effective index.  5 stars.

Michael McGirr: Ideas to Save Your Life: Philosophy for Wisdom, Solace and Pleasure, h/b, Australia, Text Publishing, 2021 

Michael McGirr joined the Jesuits immediately after finishing high school and trained with them for fourteen years before becoming a priest for seven years. He was an outstanding chaplain and teacher of English, Literature and Philosophy at St Kevin’s College  in Melbourne. After leaving the  priesthood he married, had children, became a widely regarded professional book reviewer of almost 1000 titles, had periods  of unemployment, published seven books and now works for a major international aid and development NGO.

 I met Michael once in mid-career at a seminar at  St Kevins when I was also teaching religion and literature in schools. I have been to many seminars and forgotten most but I have never forgotten meeting Michael McGirr. His extraordinary erudition, and a mind overflowing with dynamic and interesting ideas almost over powered the whole seminar room and left me gasping. 

Ideas to Save Your Life is ostensibly a book about twenty three or so philosophers from the ancients like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Horace and Epicurus through the Renaissance and beyond to Avicenna,  Montaigne, Spinoza, and  Margaret Cavendish to the “moderns” like Kierkegaard,  Thoreau, William James, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, Wallace Stevens, Alan Turing and epiphenomonenal qualia,  Iris Murdoch,and Michel Foucault.  McGirr deals with these complex and powerful philosophers with a light and sympathetic touch, extracting their central ideas in an entertaining way which draws the reader in even when the going gets tough for which McGirr always gives warning.

McGirr notes that it is a mistake to think that philosophy has a narrow meaning. Philosophy is a dangerous sport for control freaks and people who need to know everything. It is a carnival of ideas, possibilities, suggestions, connections, history, and, above all, tricky questions. (p19).

If this is all the book was about it would be worth buying and reading, but even more interesting in some ways is  what in some ways becomes McGirr’s own life story;  his family,  experiences of teaching and learning, and adventures too numerous to mention here. Michael is, all at the same time, thoughtful, sensitive, very funny, searingly honest, challenging, and opinionated in a carefully negotiated way. He is always interesting in such a way that you must read on. 

After reading this book  I don’t think for a minute you will run off and read Spinoza. I do think you will stop, ponder, consider your own life and ideas, and want to go back and pick up on all the pencil marks you made on the book on the way through. 5 stars

Thomas Mann:  Tristan,  Translated H.T. Loewe-Porter, p/b, Ringwood, Penguin/Secker  &  Warburg,  1985 (1902) 

German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955)  wrote this little novella in 1902, one of the earliest of his works. It is set in a sanatorium, called the Einfried in the mountains of Central Europe. Thomas Mann lived for some time in a sanatorium in Davos Switzerland due to the illness of his wife and he had ample time to study the impact of such a place on those who were compelled or chose to be there. Several of his novels focus on the impact of such a place on patients. As with so many of Mann’s novels this novella focuses on the character of the artist, in this case, a writer.

Tristan, a title referencing the doomed medieval love affair between Tristan and Isolde, tells the story of the hapless author Detlev Spinell, author of a failed story about European culture and beauty. He  is staying at the sanatorium for the  purely personal reason of kickstarting  his writing career.  He falls seriously in love with the beautiful but rather fey and unwell Gabriele, the wife of successful, powerful and sexually unfaithful German business man Herr Klöterjahn.  The German stays long enough only to see his wife settled in and then returns home to his business and his young son. 

Spinell of course engineers to have plenty of time to conquer the heart of the listless Gabriele and is making some progress. In his foolish stupidity he writes a letter to Klöterjahn detailing with some force his impression of the man’s unpleasant personality and implying his unfitness to be the wife of the delightful Gabriele.  Klöterjahn returns in haste to demolish Spinell only to be interrupted by news of the grave seriousness of his wife’s illness. The hapless Spinell runs away in haste never to be heard of again. 

Mann’s major works delve deeply into the themes of beauty culture and passion. This first little novella is just the beginning of an outstandlingly successful writing career. (4 stars)

Thomas Mann: Tonio Kröger, Translated, H T Lowe-Porter, p/b, Ringwood, Penguin/Martin  Secker & Warburg, 1985 (1903). 

Thomas Mann, (1875-1955), Nobel Prize winning German novelist wrote this novelette in 1903. The theme of the novel is the “tragedy” or the “burden” of the artist, condemned not just to live life but to portray it, in this case as a writer.  There may well be some autobiographical components in this novelette. Thomas Mann spent his early life in the Baltic town of Lubeck, (Buddenbrooks in his novel about the Lubeck of his growing up).  Although eventually married with five children, Mann spent a large amount of his life, each morning till midday locked in his study working on his writing leaving his wife to the heavy hitting of bringing up their exceptionally talented five children.

This story of an unmarried writer Tonio Kröger and the burden he feels from having to think and write about life instead of just “living” it,  is very sensitively and passionately written. He describes early childhood school experiences of already focussing on inward thoughts and meanings instead of simply joining in with classmates and being part of the group. At a young age he became aware that he took the process of living much more thoughtfully and deeply than his rambunctious school mates. He had deep desires and thoughts and read widely early but his ideas and feelings made little sense to his classmates. 

Once Tonio Kröger left home he lead a free-wheeling freedom loving life making a living through his writing, exploring everything  that life had to offer with no boundaries to his passions. Achieving success but with few real friends he eventually takes a trip back to the region of his childhood to try to re-engage with what his life could have been really about but his few friends had long forgotten him and he found their life lost to him. The outpouring of his grief attached to the loneliness of the artist and his longing to be ‘common place” to his artist friend LIsabeta is some of the most powerful literature I have read for a very long time. 

Thomas Mann, even in translation, has the ability to grip his readers and keep them on tenterhooks. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this short novel.  (5 stars).

David Talbot Rice:    Art of the Byzantine Era, p/b, London, Thames & Hudson, 1963  

The study of Byzantine art and culture in situ is a demanding one requiring research in remote areas of the south Balkans, modern  Constantinople (Istanbul) in Turkey, Trebizon and especially the rock churches of ancient Cappodocia and Cicilia, the Peloponese peninsula in Southern Greece, the monastic communities in the mountains of northern Greece, Egypt, Ravenna, the tufa monuments and churches of ancient Armenia and Georgia and the ancient churches of Macedonia and Bulgaria, and the beautiful remaining Byzantine churches and monuments at Cefalu, Monreale and Palermo in Sicily.

David Talbot Rice was educated at Rugby, a friend of Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton and other members of the “bright young things” who were later to be “found” in Brideshead Revisited. He was also an outstanding archaeologist and art critic, a founding lecturer of the Courtauld Institute in London and Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University for many years. He has published widely in the areas of Western and Eastern art contributed numerous articles to specialised journals. 

This book covers largely the period from the reign of Justinian 1 (527-565) to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The task of locating the stunning artwork of the Byzantine era was made much harder by the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders when much of the artistic glory of the capital was carted off to Venice, Spain, museums and places unknown. In addition many of the magnificently crafted Byzantine churches were converted into mosques under Islamic rule at various stages and many other fine churches were destroyed in wars of various periods. The standard procedure in converting churches to mosques was to cover up Christian artwork with white plaster. Repair and removal of the plaster, when possible, was difficult and resulted in much chipping of the original work.  Nevertheless much remains to be seen and studied today and this book contains 247 photographic plates, many in full colour. 

The result is an exciting journey through 1200 years of Christian artwork portraying the Christian story  in powerful and moving images of exceptional sophistication. The awesome figure of Christ the almighty staring down from beneath the vast dome of the Hagia Sophia of the cathedral in Cefalu Sicily is haunting and powerful, never to be forgotten. Equally entrancing are the personalities from the Christian story found in the midst of quite formal Byzantine artworks. These portray deep faith and an understanding of events happening to real people even in such a stylized art form. I found this accessible book deeply moving and spiritually encouraging. It is a Christian story that has been neglected.  5 stars.

Wayne Meeks: The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, p/b, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1983.   

C S Lewis wrote that for every new book you read, you should read two old ones. Meeks’ book is now 39 years old but he fact that it is still in print demonstrates the value and strength of his sociological and historical analysis of the “first urban Christians”.  From Jesus’ original  rural Galilean disciples and their converts, the Christian faith exploded mightily in the Roman towns and cities of Asia Minor. This explosion was largely due to the exploits, energy, argument and spiritual power of the Apostle Paul, converted by Jesus himself in a vision on the Emmaus Rd to Damascus, filled with a Jewish fire to destroy Christians!

Meeks has assembled a vast array of sociological tools to analyse how this amazing new religion flourished in the midst of and under the nose of the massive power of the Roman empire. Armed with a bibliography of well over 700 volumes of secondary research, the indefatigable Meeks has opened up for his readers, with exceptional care, science, Biblical analysis and historical data of all sorts, the world of First Century urban (Pauline) Christians. With impressive and not boring clarity (unusual in most sociological works I have studied!), Meeks uncovers topics such as :

• The urban environment in which Paul and his fellow workers evangelised; 
• The social level of the earliest Christian converts…wealth, security, employment etc;
• The formation of Christian “ekklesia” compared with equivalent Roman voluntary associations, philosophical and rhetorical schools and the Jewish synagogues;
• The peculiar language of “belonging” in the early churches eg  the elect, called to be saints, loved and known by God, beloved, children of God, adopted, believers, those ‘in Christ’, a family,  brothers and sisters, brotherly affection.
• Issues of Governance in the early urban churches…dealing with conflict, letters and visits, the confusion in Corinth including leadership challenges, relationships with fellow workers and warrants for authority.
• Rituals and how they developed especially baptism and The Lord’s Supper
• Patterns of belief including the notion of “One God, One Lord, One Body; the place of apocalyptic and managing innovation; the reality of the crucified Messiah and the notion of resurrection; the question of evil and its reversal.

Meeks concludes his work with a brief summary of correlations…the early Pauline Christians believed in one God, creator of the universe and ultimate judge of all human actions, attributing titles and functions to the crucified and resurrected Messiah Jesus titles and functions that in the Jewish tradition were attributed only to God. This one God of the Christians is personal and active, demanding a high level of commitment. The Pauline view is eschatological leading to the final judgement of both humans and cosmic powers. Pauline Christians believe in Jesus the Messiah, son of God, crucified but raised from the dead, and exalted to reign with God in heaven. These believers from all strata and status in Roman society met regularly together maintaining their rituals of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, stressing symbols of unity, equality and love. 

Reading this book gave me a strong sense of the purpose and clarity of meaning of Paul’s Epistles in the New Testament. It is a remarkable achievement well deserving of its continuing reprints.  5 stars

Thomas Mann: Death in Venice, Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter, Ringwood, Penguin/Martin Secker & Warburg, 1985 (1912)  

German novelist and Nobel Prizewinner for his book The Magic Mountain, wrote this short novel in 1912.  The key character, Gustave von Aschenbach, highly regarded and serious author breaks his normal holiday routine and travels to Venice for the summer instead of his usual mountain retreat.  He is nearing the end of his career and not in strong health.  In the dining room of his hotel on his first night he is stunned by the natural beauty and bearing of a young German boy, also holidaying in Venice with his mother, governess and four sisters. Gustave becomes obsessed with this boy to the eventually of manically following him around Venice

Gustave never speaks to the boy Tadzio but the lad is aware of his interest and does not discourage him. At the same time in the heat of the sirocco scorching summer wind, cholera grips the city and the vast majority of tourists leave Venice. Denying reason, Gustave’s passion keeps him in Venice and his illness and intense passion lead to his death.  The short novel is gripping in its intensity of description not just of his passion for Tadzio but also the lavish description of the best  and the worst of early C20th Venice. 

Thomas Mann himself, although happily married with five impressive children, was on his own admission deeply attracted to beautiful young men.  A significant feature is the way Mann describes the passion of Gustave through the ancient antics of the Greek gods and goddesses. The novelette builds to a very dramatic conclusion and is impossible not to finish.  4 stars.

Paul McHugh,   The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry, h/b,  Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 

Paul McHugh is an outstanding American psychiatrist of the C20th and early C21st. Now in the nineties he was for many years the Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and later the Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus.

Mc Hugh was a spirited defender of a psychiatric methodology based on epidemiology, genetics and neuro-pharmacology as against the C20th explosion of nonmedical, fashionable and over simplified ideas about psychiatry and mental illnesses promoted by the so-called antipsychiatrists (p.4) including Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, Erving Goffmann and Michel Foucalt amongst others. A measure of the explosion of under researched and purely theoretical psychiatric disorders can be traced by the growth of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the official tome of the American Psychiatric Association. What began in 1968 as a psychiatric disease identification of 119 pages  became an explosion of 886 pages in the latest edition. Many of these identifications based on  descriptive appearance of individual cases have little basis in medical evidence and some are purely the inventions of their proponents. (p.51) One dangerous motivation for this sudden explosion of new ailments  is the extravagant retainers from pharmaceutical companies plugging their medications and the healthy returns from some insurance companies! 

McHugh’s book is a series of essays based on a wide range of topics including the demise of early C20th Freudian ideas (including the Oedipal complex, castration anxiety, and penis envy); the important work of Dr. Jerome Frank in helping patients master problems in their present life rather than searching for problems in early life conflicts; misunderstandings about the nature of depression; the imprisonment of Dr Kevorkian for murder;  the development of overvalued ideas in society (someone who has taken up an idea shared by others in his or her milieu or culture and transformed it into a ruling passion or “monomania”);  the importance of the work of Karl Jaspers in opposing Freudian nihilism and his fight against eugenics, fascism and racism in medicine; the scandal of “repressed memories”; the over-reach and oversimplification of PSTD cases for a false motivation; Multiple Personality Disorder as a socially constructed artifact; the cultic character of psycho-analysis and its continuation until “the money runs out”; the de-institutionalisaton of the severely mentally ill; the failures of contemporary bioethics and its rush to become a culture of death; William Osler’s contribution to modern medicine; Shakespeare and psychiatry; the development of the distinction between sex and gender and the accompanying explosion and under determined value of sex-change surgery; the ethical use of embyronic cells and psychiatric insights into terrorism. 

Not all will agree with every idea in McHugh’s analysis of a better path for psychiatry. On the other hand McHugh’s logic, common sense, clinical expertise and scientific sophistication based on factual cases will provide significant food for thought for anyone interested in mental health issues and the best way forward in dealing with them successfully.  Five stars. 

James Joyce,   The Dubliners, [The corrected text with an Explanatory Note by Robert Scholes and Photography by Dr. J. J. Clarke of the period between 1897 and 1904], h/b,  London, Folio, 2003 (1914) 

A collection of fourteen short cameos and one extended narrative of the lives of ordinary Dubliners published in 1914. 

The first three are written in the first person and tell of (i) the death of a somewhat tiresome old man whose life and story had made a deep impact on a young boy. (ii) Two boys wagging school and being approached by a perverted old man (iii) a boy’s love for a girl in his street and his unsuccessful attempt to buy her a present at the market.

The other eleven stories are written in the third person and describe:

– a young woman torn between her love for family and town and a romance with a wandering sailor who wished to marry her.

– four well healed young men with a fast car and their escapades around town.

– a young man in a boarding house who gets the landlady’s daughter pregnant and is challenged by the mother as to his intentions.

` – a young man somewhat bored with his ordinary life catches up with an old friend who is single and has had good success in London as a journalist and is living the high life.

– a married man with children is in trouble at work and soothes his mind by pawning his watch and getting drunk with the boys. Coming home in a bad way,  his wife is at church and his tea is cold; he pays out on the children.

– a busy single matron takes her day off and goes to visit her married brother and his family.  – a lonely unmarried business man takes up a friendship with a married woman who is unhappy in her marriage.  When she wishes to go further he retreats and the woman turns to drink. 

– a group of political committee members get together for a drink after a hard day’s campaigning. 

–  a woman with a talented daughter is upset when her daughter is not paid appropriately for a series of concerts.

–  a group of faithful church goers try to rehabilitate a drunkard and try to sort out their religious differences in the process. 

The final somewhat longer narrative is entitled The Dead and describes a sumptuous annual dance and dinner but on my the Misses Morkans which they have hosted for over thirty years. The narrative focuses down on the thought processes of the regular speech maker, a deep thinking literary and caring man who sees their quiet world changing, key people dying and begins to ponder his own life and coming death. The narrative turns from trivial description of a host of characters to a powerful and deep private meditation.

Joyce had trouble publishing this work due to the strict moral standards of 1914 Britain.  A number of these characters reappear in his amazing Ulysses, the story of one day in the life of Dublin.   The Dubliners makes for thoughtful and entertaining reading. 5 stars. 

Colm Tóibín: The Magician:  p/b, Sydney, Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2021 

Exceptional biography of distinguished C20th German writer Thomas Mann (wrote Magic Mountain/Death in Venice/Tristan/ Tonio Kröger/Doctor Faustus) amongst other novels. Tóibín is an exceptional Irish writer who has also written biographies of Henry James and Mary the mother of Jesus along with The Master and Brooklyn. 

This is a deeply researched novel written in a fictionalised style by Tóibín which takes the reader deeply into Thomas Mann’s innermost thoughts as well as describing intimate family and other conversations in precise detail.  The reader is guaranteed a reasonable sense of Tóibín’s accuracy by the list of over fifty major works of analyses of Mann’s life during the rise and fall of Hitler and the rise of Stalin on p. 435 of this work. Married into the wealthy Jewish Pringsheim family Thomas and his impressive wife Katia had six children whose upbringing was largely Katia’s responsibility as Mann spent pretty well every morning of his life in his study writing and thinking.  His brother Heinrich was also a writer but much more to the left and their fraught relationship was a major tension in his life.

Thomas Mann felt strongly about the need for a restored Germany after the Great War and was very late to recognise the vast danger of German fascism. Equally he was so involved in the creation of his novel Magic Mountain (for which he won the Nobel prize), that he was caught unawares by the rapid rise of the Third Reich and in the end had to leave behind his house in Munich and flee to Switzerland, then southern France, finally becoming a citizen of the USA. His first son Klaus and first daughter Erika played significant roles in the fight against Nazism and his at times  strained relationship with them is a key component of his story. Mann was also completely blind to the horror of the Nazi genocidal program and the magnitude of this racial destruction had to be spelt out to him while he was living comfortably in the USA and when it was far too late for him to use his considerable wealth and contacts to help Jewish refugees.

Alongside his writing, his wife,  his six child family and his fame Mann did not hide his erotic interest in beautiful  young men and Tóbín delicately describes Katia’s negotiation of these two sides of Mann’s nature carefully and elegantly. 

Ironically Mann, who was a European heroic ally for talking up the need for America to join the war against Hitler, became himself an enemy of the American people after the war due to his equivocal approach to the rise of Stalin and the division of Germany. He and his family were effectively encouraged to leave the USA and returned to 

Europe spending their final years in Switzerland. 

This beautifully written biographical novel is an absolute masterpiece. 5 stars and rising.

Bev Aisbett:  Panic Attacks: A Survivor’s Guide to Panic Attacks, p/b, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1996

Bev Aisbett has written a very helpful introduction and overview to coping with and living with panic attacks, a phenomenon that makes simply living a misery for a vast number of sufferers around the world. Supported by Dr D Jeffries, Aisbett uses a helpful descriptive approach using clever line drawings and diagrams. Aisbett does not simplify or minimise the difficulty of dealing with panic attacks and underlines that professional help and often supportive medication is essential for full recovery.

 A strength of this book is a chapter on those living with sufferers of panic attacks. This chapter underlines the dangers of well-meaning advice such as “get over it” or “you look all right to me or simply  feelings of frustration, helplessness, or even anger. 

This is a positive and helpful book that will surprise and assist both sufferers and helpers.  5 stars. 

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, p/b, Camberwell, Penguin,  2011 

Late C16th/early C17th artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was quite late earning respect in the crowded art world of the C20th. A remarkable rehabilitation was achieved in 1951 with an extremely influential retrospective organised by the significant Italian art historian Roberto Longhi. In some respects Graham-Dixon notes, Caravaggio had to wait for fame for C20th film makers like   Pasolini and Scorsese to understand his startling vision of ordinary people in paintings. Especially in his religious paintings Caravaggio scandalized his Italian peers by using street people, whores and the poorest of the poor to as his models for some of the most momentous paintings of Biblical history. In addition his use of black backgrounds with only one source of light highlighting  just the central action, with no fluffy and irrelevant landscape behind in the painting was ground-breaking and radically altered painting styles from the C17th onwards.

Caravaggio’s life is breath-taking, scary, bitter-sweet, sad and enormously vibrant all at once. Although in Milan he was theoretically apprenticed to an artist to learn to paint, Caravaggio was effectively self-taught with a skill that at times seems miraculous and methodology unique in his age. Coming from relative poverty Caravaggio had to rely on wealthy supporters who had the contacts to gain him important commissions especially once he moved to Rome where churches like St Mary Maggiore hold some of his most famous paintings. 

But Caravaggio also had a quite separate life at night on the streets and in the bars and places of ill repute in Rome. Here his quick temper, pride and sense of his own right to be accepted resulted in many street battles with opponents equally talented with the sword and with dangerous friends.  The inevitable occurred and Caravaggio had to flee Rome after the death of an opponent in a street fight. His life then became one long attempt to restore his honour at the same time as escaping from would be enemies seeking revenge. Life on the run included a rural estate well away from Rome,  Naples,  Malta, Sicily and eventually an ill-fated attempt to return to Rome from Naples.  All this time Caravaggio continued to produce some of the most significant paintings in the whole of art history. 

So many myths have gathered around Caravaggio from the three C17th biographers Mancini, Baglioni and Bellori through to the ever-increasing array of modern writers who can see a best-selling story in this relatively brief but extraordinary life.  Graham-Dixon freely acknowledges his debts to writers ancient and modern but has the advantage of some recent careful research which for the first time has thrown light on the complex and until now hidden story of his life on the run.

This account is lavishly illustrated with all of Caravaggio’s major works and other folk of interest in his life. I found the book impossible to put down and feel a deep pang of sympathy and regret that a painter of such explosive talent should have his life cut down when who knows what else he could have produced.  5 stars and rising. 

Max Gawn,  Max Gawn Captain’s Diary,  with Konrad Marshall, p/b, Richmond, Hardie Grant  Books, 2021

This is a book that could only be enjoyed by long-suffering supporters of the Melbourne Australian Rules Football club who have been waiting 57 years for another Melbourne Demons Premiership Cup.

Max Gawn is an experienced and effective media personality who has many fans including from other clubs through his wise, accessible and thoughtful commentary on football and life in general.  This book includes a game by game analysis of the 2021 season which was remarkable for the complexity of match times and places forced upon the AFL by the nation wide impact of COVID 19.

Without unnecessary boring detail Gawn manages to highlight events, players, flight complexities, matches interrupted by lightning, players and and coaches interactions and the tensions mounting into the Finals series.   Gawn is honest about his own doubts and challenges as Captain and the pressure of the leadership role.  The book highlights the complexities of an elite professional  club life with all the ups and downs, the need for teamwork combined with the drama of game selections, the injuries and the talented players who miss out in a team studded with outstanding players at the peak of their careers. 

As a supporter who was beginning to think that another premiership would not happen in his lifetime, you can imagine that I devoured this book in record time!  4 stars.

William Gaunt,   The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, h/b, London, Folio Society, 2017 

C20th artist and art historian William Gaunt has produced an exceptionally thorough analysis of the C19th Pre-Raphaelite art movement. The movement commenced as an alternative to the Royal Academy for outstanding artists which this group regarded as out of touch, stuffy, upper class and too wedded to the “Grand manner’ of Italian art, of Raphael and the C16th and C17th. 

The original seven members of the “Brotherhood” were William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, his brother William Michael Rosetti, James Collinson, Frederick George Stephens and Thomas Woolner. Their ideal female model was a beautiful young girl of eighteen, Lizzie Siddal whom Rosetti eventually married.  Friends and unofficial associates of the brotherhood were Ford Madox Brown, Walter Deverell, Arthur Hughes and Charles Alston Collins.  

The ideals and ideas to which they were dedicated were complex and varied but centred on the Romantic Spirit of the past and a focus on unsophisticated nature. Gaunt notes it was linked with Romantic Poetry, with the Arthurian legend,  with the Gothic and religious Revival, with the reactions against the Industrial Revolution; with Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, Pugin and Pusey, the anti-Victorian thinkers Ruskin and Carlyle, though with the Italian masters of the later Middle Ages, who provided its name, it had very little to do. They were all lacking resources except Rosetti and were living on the edge. 

The Fellowship fell apart almost as soon as it was created. Hunt had a passion for the East and for Jerusalem and conversion of the masses to the Christian faith through art. He spent most of his time in Jerusalem. Woolner sailed off to Australia to join the gold rush. Mlllais dabbled with the Pre-Raphaelite spirit but quickly returned to where the safe money was and after several stops and starts became Britain’s favourite artist of the late C19th and eventually the President of the Royal Academy just prior to his death. Italian/British Rosetti was quixotic, dominating and outlandish, with new passions constantly forming and his outrageous life style was too much for some. 

The second revival of the “Brotherhood” was sparked by the complex and wealthy Oxford art critic and polymath John Ruskin who poured money and influence into the group and brought others in. Key figures in the second Pre-Raphaelite phase were Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and Ford Madox Brown. All of these remarkably able and talented artists and craftsmen were to have a vast and lasting influence on the English Anglican Gothic Revival, on design craftmanship and furniture making, on philosophy for the common man and freedom in art. 

The complex and ever-changing history of this group is elegantly told by Gaunt and becomes a picture of changing Britain in the second half of the C19th and the early C20th. Undoubtedly the key figures are Rosetti and William Morris whose beautiful  wife Jane maintained a ménage à trois with Rosetti for two years in their joint home at Kelmscott,  but Gaunt also manages to keep us informed of the activities of Hunt, Millais, Burn-Jones and many other acolytes.

Having spent considerable time in the UK tracking down Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Morris’s Red House in Kent and the little church and eccentric house and burial place of William and Jane Morris at Kelmscott, I could not put this book down. The Folio edition is of course beautifully illustrated with many lavish full page coloured productions of relevant works of art. Five stars. 

Carl Trueman: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern  Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution, Foreword, Rod Dreher, h/b, Wheaton, Crossway, 2020 (425pp.)

This is a demanding and challenging read covering some of the same ground as Charles Taylor, A Secular Age and Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Trueman’s  title uses the term expressive individualism and by this term Trueman means how we in the “West” have come to identify ourselves. He is referring to the chaos of identity politics (p25);and makes the point that ‘we are all expressive individuals now.’ Just as some choose to identify themselves by their sexual orientation, so the religious person chooses to be a Christian or a Muslim.. (or some other faith or orientation). 

Trueman describes the key ‘move’ of the modern self as, ‘…a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology –  we might even say ‘feelings’ or ‘intuitions’ – for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.’  (p. 23)

As we attempt to stay afloat in our cultural soup – potently seasoned with more than a pinch of ‘cultural amnesia,’ ladled with large dollops of ‘expressive Individualism’; and crowned with powerful aromas which have been infused by the ‘sexual revolution’ (so-called) – Trueman argues that each one of us is confronted with a question of vital philosophical, theological; and therefore ethical urgency:  ‘Is happiness found in directing oneself outward or inward?…The answer I give speaks eloquently of what I consider the purpose of life and the meaning of happiness. In sum it is indicative of how I think of my self.’ (p.23)

Regarding the ‘revolution’;  and in anticipation of his far-reaching historical survey; Trueman adds:  

‘ The sexual revolution did not cause the sexual revolution, nor did technology such as the pill or the internet. Those things may have facilitated it, but its causes lie much deeper, in the changes in what it meant to be an authentic, fulfilled human self. And those changes stretch back well before the Swinging Sixties.’(p.23) 

Outline in brief

The format of the book consists firstly of a historical account of how such a cultural revolution has occurred in the West using in particular the rather arcane writings of Philip Rieff and the more accessible work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.  In the simplest terms he suggests that Western civilization has advanced in four stages from practical man, through to religious man, economic man and into our current stage, psychological man (or, consumer/plastic man who can make or remake her personality at will.)

Trueman begins with three ruling ideas:

1. The vast and unstoppable advance of technological invention.
2. There is no golden age that was better than the present so stop pining for the past.
3. When critiquing opponents, give their argument full weight. There is no value in refuting a straw man. 

Following chapters on reimagining the Self and reimagining our culture, Trueman moves to a more detailed analysis of the key historical players in this story of the progession to psychological man. These helpful chapters adumbrate the major impact made by, in order, Jean-Jaques Rousseau; The Romantic poets especially Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake; Nietsche, Marx and Darwin; Sigmund Freud and finally The New Left and the Politicization ofSex with a nod to Foucault and his epigones and incomprehensible imitators. There are further chapters on The triumph of the Erotic, The triumph of the Therapeutic and The triumph of the T (Trans). The book finishes with a Concluding Unscientific Prologue with some suggestions for a way forward for Christian believers. 

This book creates an understandable pathway through the current labyrinth of our dominant Western culture.  It is well worth the effort (5 stars)

Trueman Glossary

Some key questions discussed in this book include (p.102): How is the self to be understood; how ethical discourse operates; how tradition and history are valued; and how cultural elites understand the culture and purpose of art. 

Key terminology to be mastered when reading the book includes:

The social imaginary…the way people think about the world enabling a widely shared sense of legitimacy. 

‘Deathworks’  (Rieff) …an all out assault on something vital to the established culture. (cf Freud: culture is constituted by those things that it forbids). A deathwork, by contrast, represents an attack on established cultural art forms in a manner designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society.

Mimesis …having a given meaning

Poiesis ….meaning is constructed by the individual

Emotivism: to say that something is good is in reality merely to express a personal emotive preference…this leads to moral relativism. (McIntyre), p121. (Emotivism proves that the other side is wrong). The agreed rational basis for debate is gone. All that is left is emotional preference. (p377)

Sittlichkeit: The moral obligations I have to be a member of an ongoing community of which I am a part. (p62)

Key ideas of Trueman’s work include:

* Why is it important that  identity be publicly acknowledged?

* The importance and nature of the self.

* Pejorative racial or sexual epithets are not a trivial matter. (p55)

* The fact that identity recognition has moved from tolerance to equality (mere toleration would cause psychological harm). (p54)

* The power of elites in Western politics. (p54 fn)

* Satisfaction,  meaning and authenticity are now found by an inward turn, and the culture must be reconfigured to this end….I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety  and make me inauthentic. Traditional moral terms are now seen to be part of the problem and become deemed as hate speech. (p54)

the emergence of chronological snobbery  (p88)

* There is no universal criterion by which competing moral claims can be compared or assessed. (p161)

* The legalisation of the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of human life. (p.303)

* The assumption that the basic categories of modern identity politics are undeniable (p332)

The deliberate destruction and erasure of the past, not only its artifacts but also its practices producing cultural amnesia. (p337)

* The technical ability to manipulate biological realities (p35)

* Woke capitalism…the economic significance of pornography sits at least at $6 billion annually for the US economy. (p271)

* Enlightenment individualism has ceased to be a tool of human emancipation and is displaying increasingly oppressive aspects. (p274)

• The goal of critical theory is to destabilize the dominant Western narrative of truth (p226) (eg.post-structuralism, post colonialism, critical race theory, the sexualisation of children, the politicising of sex.(p267). 
• *The expressive individual is now the sexually expressive individual. (p268)

* The assumption that the basic categories of modern identity politics are undeniable (p330)

* For campus protestors, free speech is simply a licence to oppress others with hateful language and arguments. (p337)

* The teaching of history is now dominated universities by advocates of critical theory and thus preoccupied with categories of power and marginalisation. (p332)

* Increasing government encroachment on the private sphere, both of the family and of the mind. (P.239)

• The notion that political freedom is sexual freedom and that shattering sexual norms is a vital part of transforming society are now intuitive cultural orthodoxies. (p249f)

Martin Boyd: The Cardboard Crown, Intro: Dorothy Green, [Part 1 of the Langton Quartet], 

p/b, Ringwood, Penguin, 1984 (1952)

Novelist Martin Boyd was a member of an early and distinguished Anglo-Australian family of artists, potters, musicians and architects and on his mother’s side, a long line of judges, barristers and Victoria’s first Chief Justice. He was born as a British citizen in Switzerland but at six months old was brought to Australia where he grew up and was educated at Trinity Grammar School in Kew Melbourne. He fought in the trenches in World War 1 as part of  the British army and later served as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps at a time when the British were losing fifty pilots in training a day. His disillusionment with the horrors of war lead him to be a ferocious critic in books and letters of political leaders including Lloyd George, Baldwin and Churchill as well as newspaper tycoons and archbishops. After the war he returned to Australia and lived for many years in Harkaway, near Berwick in south east Melbourne.   He spent the last thirty years of his life in Europe and died in Rome, aged 72. 

The Langton Quartet of novels is loosely based on the Boyd extended family history and told with whimsical humour, elegant aesthetics and fascinating glimpses of early Australian society especially in the pre-Gold rush era although these stories are not to be understood as literal truth in every detail. The ‘cardboard crown’ was a much fought over toy played with and highly valued by the extended family children and the narrative aptly describes the varying fortunes of the wearer of the crown, Hetty, in the narrative. The key figures in The Cardboard Crown are his grandmother Alice and grandfather Austin, loosely based on William Callander à Beckett, a barrister and member of The Legislative Council, an able and energetic man with some eccentricities and his wife Emma Mills, a very beautiful and accomplished woman who brought great wealth into the family.

The novel describes with sensitivity and humour the travails, adventures and passions of this couple as they peregrinated between England and Australia and their fortunes rose and fell with the foundation of the new colony.  The description of early Victorian expansion away from Melbourne is fascinating and the contrast with Boyd’s treatment of Alice’s aesthetic awakening in Paris, Rome, Florence and southern France is captivating aided by the frisson of romance. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel although piecing together the various family members was demanding. I now have a thirst to find the other three stories in the Langton Quartet. 5 stars.

 Beowulf,  Edited, Translated,  Introduction  and Notes,  Michael Swanton, p/b, Manchester & New York, Manchester University Press, 1994 (1978)  

Eighth century Anglo-Saxon poem concerning the feats of the Geatish champion Beowulf, otherwise unknown to history, who came to the aid of the ageing King of the Geats, Hrothgar whose dwelling was the hall of Heorot during the last decades of the fifth century. The kingdom of the Geats lay in the south of modern Sweden, just north of the Jutes, Angles and Danes that occupied what is now northern Denmark. The sole surviving text of Beowulf is found in a late C10th manuscript of the British Library. It was part of the collection of Sir Robert Cotton and the manuscript is part of a composite volume containing an additional three short prose works. Michael Swanton is Emeritus Professor in Medieval Studies at the University of Exeter.

Although there are clearly fantastic themes and images in this poem, many of the persons named are known to history through other sources. Beowulf and his group of mighty thanes came by boat to aid the ageing Hrothgar, king of the Geats. Hrothgar was in despair as his kingdom was being literally devoured by a powerful demon monster named Grendel, a notorious prowler of the borderlands, who held the the wastelands, swamp and fastness. (line 95, p.39). This creature came at night and devoured at will the sleeping men of the hall of Heorot. Beowulf won a major victory by defeating Grendel in mortal combat.

Beowulf followed this up with the further destruction of Grendel’s mother, a woman, a she monster (line 1255) who dwelt in a vast and deep swamp covered in slimy water. She also came to devour the men of Heorot and she also fell to the might of Beowulf after a further powerful struggle. Beowulf was crowned king after these feats following the death of Hrothgar and ruled the Geats valiantly and successfully for fifty years until a fire-breathing dragon appeared in the neighbourhood guarding a fabulous horde of golden jewels and partial to human flesh.

Once again Beowulf strove to battle and, with the aid of just one of his men, the brave Wiglaf, they managed to survive the fiery ordeal and slay the dragon. Nevertheless Beowulf sustained a mortal wound in the contest and died beside the weeping Wiglaf who berated his cowardly cohort who were afraid to enter the battle.  The poem finishes with the sorrowful burial of the mighty and beloved Beowulf. 

This fine edition with excellent introduction, maps, notes and a glossary of names makes for a relatively easy read although the various side stories that slip into the narrative can be confusing even with the helps.  The C8th Anglo-Saxon version sits side by side on each double page with a modern English translation so if one is keen enough a little Anglo-Saxon comes into the light with practice although I have to say it is a great deal more difficult than Chaucer’s English! 

Tolkien lovers will be fascinated by many of the themes emerging from Beowulf including the importance of the bestowal of rings of power, the importance of historic swords and blades,  the fearful fiends, dragons and monsters emerging from darkness as well as the commitment to Christian faith and trust in God which emerges in several places. 

Reading Beowulf we step back in time to a dark world in North Western Europe which suddenly springs to life and reality through the unknown poet’s skilful hand. Even in translation the power and tension emerges and excites the imagination. This is an exceptional gift that has come down to us saved from the ravages of time and obscurity.   5 stars

John O’Donohue: Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, h/b, London, Bantam,   1998

John O’Donohue was an Irish Catholic priest who renounced his priesthood just two days prior to his unexpected death while he slept in January 2008. He was a multi-lingual writer who could speak and write in Celtic, English and German languages and no doubt make himself understood in several others. His doctoral thesis, written in German, was based on the philosophy of Hegel. 

Anam Cara is the Celtic term for “soul friend” and his book of the same name has become a popular spiritual text for many people around the world.  The books consists of reflections by the author on various significant Celtic themes including the mystery of friendship, a spirituality of the senses, the luminous nature of solitude, the value of work as a “poetics of growth”, the spirituality of ageing, and reflections on death as well as life after death. 

O’Donohue includes a number of blessings in this text including some ancient Celtic blessings as well as a number of blessings of a Celtic character but written by himself. In addition to insights from Celtic spirituality O’Donohue also references quotations from a vast number of ancient and recent philosophers, musicians,  poets, artists and writers too numerous to mention. They vary from Heidegger and James Joyce to Pablo Neruda, Kathlene Raine, Rodin, R S Thomas, Haydn, Nietzsche, Yeats, Paul Murray and many others.

There is much that is thought provoking in this work. It is not a book to be read in a day or two but rather a set of thoughts to be contemplated, thought through, discussed with others, and then read again.  A number of discussion and spiritual growth groups have been created around the world with Anam Cara as the basic starting point. O’Donohue’s reflections on what happens after we die are very forthright and quite precise and leave the reader wondering “how does John O’Donohue know this?”

I had a mixed reaction to this book.  I have read a several reflections on Celtic spirituality including Esther de Waal’s Selections from the Carmina Gadelica and Ray Simpson’s Celtic Daily LIght: A Spiritual Journey through the Year,  which was a compilation of Celtic reflections on Scripture. I suppose I came to Anam Cara thinking it would be a similar experience. John O’Donohue’s writing is quite different. Although he references many Gaelic ideas and traditions his reach is far wider and as noted above he references a very broad range of theological, philosophical and spiritual ideas. Many of these are helpful, some are provocative and others are an excellent basis for meditation. This is a book to inspire but also to challenge and I suspect in some places, to disagree with. 4 stars.