Caín by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Portuguese Midrash

Saramago’s Cain is a traditional Midrash, a meditative, speculative commentary on the Torah, the first five books of the Jewish and Christian bibles. Despite its often comedic, mostly polemic assessment of the God of the Torah, conventionally ascribed to Moses, Saramago isn’t the first or the most strident critic to take seriously the personality of Yahweh and what it might imply for humanity and the rest of creation.

The most remarkable aspect of the work isn’t its content but its use of a time-travelling Cain who can peek in on various biblical episodes from Abraham’s preparation to murder his son Isaac, to the annihilation of the residents, children included, of Sodom and Gomorrah, to Joshua’s divinely sanctioned genocide of the Midianites and their neighbours, to the pointless torture of Job, to all of the gore and dispossession in between. Cain therefore has a sort of synoptic view, to anticipate the New Testament term, from which he reports the violence, irritability, irrationality, ruthlessness, injustice and simply arbitrary imposition of misery on the world by the Lord.

The character of the God of the Torah has been problematic since at least the time of Christ. For Christians, because the intellectual and moral chasm between the perpetually vengeful Yahweh and the perpetually loving Father of Jesus appears to be unbridgeable. For Jews, because by the time of Christ the rabbinate was preaching a sermon of love and forgiveness almost indistinguishable from the gospels of Jesus.

From time to time, theologians have attempted to square this divine circle by claiming mitigating circumstances - the distinctly illiberal caste of ancient cultures, for example, or the possible inability of human minds to deal with the full monty of revelation all at once. None of these rationalisations work out terribly well, mostly they just open the way for a free for all interpretation of ‘inerrant’ scripture and further heresy; or they promote the equally worrisome idea of ‘continuing revelation’ which neither dogmatic Jews or Christians - with the exception of the Mormons - can tolerate.

The second century heretic Marcion took some understandable action - not long after the publication of the love-imbued (and anti-semitic) Gospel of John - by simply rejecting the Jewish scriptures in their entirety. The Protestant reformer, John Calvin, took the opposite tack and preached the justified vengeance of a wilful and arbitrary God on a sin-infected, unworthy creation.

The only time the controversy subsides is when believers simply choose to ignore the all too obvious contradictions. Catholics do this as a matter of principle, accepting both divine love and vengeance as a ‘mystery’, thus putting the problem beyond recognition much less discussion. Liberal rabbis generally grab for the nearest shibboleth on the inscrutability of the divine mind.

And this equivocation is something Saramago will not tolerate. The God of the Torah is clearly insane. This would be only a dogmatic issue of sectarian importance if it weren’t for the fact that this God has been a perennial role model of leadership from Joshua to Donald Trump - you’re with me or against me; there is no qualified loyalty; nothing stands in the way of achieving one’s personal objectives; ruthless persistence at any cost is a virtue, etc. This is a God who justifies violence and deceit and patent injustice as a matter of divine right. Cain summarises the situation:

“Burning sodom and gomorrah to the ground had evidently not been enough for the lord, for here, at the foot of mt sinai, was clear, irrefutable proof of his wickedness, three thousand men killed simply because he was angered by the creation of a supposed rival in the form of a golden calf. I killed one brother and the lord punished me, who, I would like to know, is going to punish the lord for all these deaths, thought cain, lucifer was quite right when he rebelled against god, and those who say he did so out of envy are wrong, he simply recognised god's evil nature.”

This is the God of War and very little else. Saramago wants us to remember this.


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The Implacable Order of Things by José Luís Peixoto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Suffering - An Insider’s Report

To live in utter, grinding poverty is certainly to suffer. "All my days will forever be the summer roasting me like a torturer with red hot irons," says one of Peixoto's female characters. But she knows that this, as any other, is an inadequate description of the existential pain involved: "There's no way to explain all that we're saying when we say suffering." The reader comes to understand that poverty is about more than simple economics or even relative wealth.

The suffering in The Implacable Order of Things is indescribable because it takes place in a world that is surreal, a different world from that in which those who are not so impoverished exist. Peixoto's genius is his ability to allow one inside this surreal reality, not as a description but as a lived experience through the voices of those who are trapped by it, looking out to us, the rest of the world.

From this perspective, the world of poverty is inhabited largely by grotesqueries. But no matter how handicapped, disabled or inadequate, these odd people are unremarkable by local standards within their world. The illiterate shepherd beaten almost to death by a giant, but with no recourse; the young woman raped and ostracised by the pious ladies of the town, whom the shepherd marries for no clear reason; these two, living in the place of maximum suffering, the Mount of Olives, married but unable to communicate through lack of any suitable vocabulary; the Siamese twins connected only by one finger, one of whom marries in his seventies; his bride and a new mother of seventy who communicates largely through the food she cooks; the blind prostitute, blind because she genetically lacks eyes entirely, accepted by the community because she has no other way of making a living; the writer in a room without windows who scribbles throughout the night; the carpenter with only a left side that functions; the centenarian who can testify that nothing has ever been any differen, all these are normal, or at least unexceptionable in the world Peixoto creates.

What these characters perceive as real is not what folk from the other, outer, purportedly more civilised world would notice much less accept as commonplace: The local church has statues of saints but no one knows their names; the gentry, owners of everything, are never present but exert their power invisibly; meat cooked for the masters but uneaten must never be consumed by servants but given to the dogs; the priest is also the devil who taunts and tempts; a voice in a trunk recites epic poetry; unborn babies cry out from the womb; whitewashed cottages speak; the living undergo death and yet remain alive; animals act en bloc in the interests of human beings. These perceptions are not to be questioned but simply accepted as...implacable, the results of rules and traditions whose origins are permanently mysterious.

This is a world in which chance, that is an essential randomness in life, not science or superstition or religious belief of any kind, is the only plausible explanation for circumstances. The running theme is explicit: “...perhaps suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.” There is no way out of this cosmic lottery; the middle-class myth of self-improvement has been crushed by the power of what is solidly there. In despair, the protagonist, Jose, knows the pointlessness of his life, its futility, “I believed”, he says, “…that just by wanting, by trying hard, by working, we'd have what we longed for.” But this belief is just another source of punishment without the possibility of redemption. He knows through experience "the sad despair of having lost all certainties.”

As in Kafka, if there is a logic to this world it is hidden to its inhabitants. This world functions but its purpose is completely opaque to those through whose efforts it functions. Its meaning is created elsewhere and imposed by means which no one can identify with certainty. The source of the most debilitating oppression in this world is not injustice, or consequent suffering, in itself, but the ultimate absence of reason. Absence of reason is a definition of insanity. This is an implacably insane, as well as hot, world.

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Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Male Liberation

A gem in so many dimensions: King Lear with an extra daughter, a proto-feminist masterpiece, a profoundly moving documentary about the true cost of immigrant-assimilation, a charming remembrance of Yiddish-American dialect. It reads as fresh and possibly as scandalously as it did in 1925.

Most surprisingly, however, among its many surprises the book is also a charter for men's liberation long before the idea became a ‘thing’ in today's culture. Bread givers are husbands. Bread giving is what men not only do, it is their primary quality as human beings. It is what they should be valued for in the American culture as seen so accurately by those entering the culture from abroad. The way for a woman to get on is by identifying and capturing a reliable bread giver. The fact that this tactic most often ends in personal tragedy is not so much the fault of the (patently faulty) men involved but of the culture which seems to demand that this is their primary role.

Those most prone to the cultural myth of bread giving are of course men themselves, especially men steeped in the patriarchal culture of the Polish shtetl. And most particularly that man who dominates the lives of all females in his orbit, the rabbi-like paterfamilias of the piece, who has only studied Torah for his entire life and who has no skills with which to give any bread to anyone in his new world. The contradiction is obvious to everyone but himself so he ends up participating in the same tragedy which he has inflicted on his daughters by, as a widower, marrying a woman who expects nothing but … a bread giver.

American culture hasn’t changed much in the last 90 years or so, except to become a fair bit less direct in its expectations around marriage. Women are still considered second-class members of the human race by a large portion of the population, largely with biblical witness for support. Men are still considered for their economic achievement or their potential for achievement as ‘husband material’. The idea that a man could possibly waste his life in spiritual activity which, somehow, his family should fund is incomprehensible except in those orthodox Jewish communities that still seek to emulate the shtetl in America. The fact that Yezierska never has her protagonist, Sara, condemn this central aspiration/need/calling of her father is perhaps the most scandalous theme of the book to modern sensibilities, just as it undoubtedly was in 1925.

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Hystopia by David Means
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Back to the Womb

The effect of this novel isn't one of a narrative opened and closed. It is more one of the creation and sustaining of a single feeling of cold vulnerability to everything in the world - from its people to the natural environment. The reader as well as the characters search constantly for some reassuring meaning. The pervasive drug-induced haze distorts everything, however, inducing the perception one has in the midst of a severe hangover of being one or two nano-seconds behind reality.

There is pregnant malice and real danger everywhere, in every human encounter, in the pollution and changeable weather of the Great Lakes, in the governmental forces of law and order, in the suppressed memories buried, by choice or through so-called 'enfolding therapy', in one's own psyche. The artistic skill necessary to maintain this 'story truth' as opposed to 'happening truth', to follow Tim O'Brien (perhaps Means's closest stylistic antecedent), is considerable; And it works. Means is undoubtedly a pro, but perhaps insidiously so.

What is, if any, the underlying theme that ties together the strands of war, horror, psychosis, self-delusion, 60's drug culture, fading industry, assassination, Northern boreal forests, indeed North itself as well as, one supposes, actual experience in this complicated work? Could it be the clue is in the title: Hystopia, from the Greek Hyster-Topos, the womb-place? A place which is beyond memory as well as before it, and yet determines so much of our response to the world; that watery place of existence before birth in which there is no time, no morality, no chance of independence, and no defence from invasion and imminent destruction except the uncertain goodwill society might provide.

Means makes much of the mitten-shape of the lower peninsula of Michigan (the left hand presumably), the place where Vietnam veterans who have failed, or avoided, the memory-erasure of enfoldment congregate. Is it coincidence that there is an anatomical abnormality, bicornuate uterus, that is frequently mitten-shaped and results in a variety of difficulties from miscarriage to foetal deformity? Not, in other words, a good place to find shelter much less in which to grow up. Hey, stranger things have happened in post-modernist lit.

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Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The God of Cosmic Debt

Payback is a literary anthropology, not of the concept or practice of debt but of the relationship between debtor and creditor from ancient Greece to modern Europe and North America. Consequently, it will have little interest to economists or lawyers or ethicists to the extent that any of these is looking for evidence or exposition of a theory of debt. The facts Atwood presents are attitudes and judgements found almost exclusively in fictional writing. On the face of it, the book has little relevance to either governmental policy or personal finance. Atwood’s rather disconnected final chapter simply states her view, unsupported by any other material in the book, that modern industrial /consumer society has created a worsening ecological debt which is owed to Nature and for which Nature is about to seek payback, that is punitive retribution for the failure to honour the purported terms of this debt. Her literary exegesis is interesting and stimulating. Her ecological conclusions are pedestrian and boring.

One of her literary observations I find particularly interesting however: the driving force of mid-19th C English literature – she cites George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray primarily – is debt, particularly its corrupting effect on the institutions of society. This is obvious once stated but having been stated it is an insight that changes one’s outlook profoundly. Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss for example becomes not a tale of familial love and loyalty lost and found but one of debts perceived and disputed in a search for an equilibrium between debits and credits. The only winner is Lawyer Wakem who survives with a mere beating. Everyone else dies. And of course ‘death wipes the slate clean’ in the manner of an unpaid bar tab.

Atwood recognises the connection between religious belief and attitudes toward debt. But she doesn’t develop that connection nearly far enough. For example, she somewhat facilely comments on the Protestant Reformation as breaking the traditional Christian taboo on lending at interest. This is misleading at best. More significantly it misses the real significance of her observation about the importance of debt in English fiction.

Christianity, following the lead of Judaism and in parallel with Islam, has consistently condemned usury, the lending of money at any interest at all, from the time of the 2nd and 3rd C Church Fathers and the early Councils. The last explicit prohibition was contained in the encyclical Vix Prevenit of 1745 to the Italian bishops and generalised to the entire Catholic Church by Pope Gregory XVI in 1836. Since that date there has been, well, utter silence on the subject by the Church, no encyclical, no apostolic exhortation, no informal greetings to either promote or retract the ancient ecclesial displeasure with any form of debt. And this at the same epochal moment that the ‘debt crisis’ of the Industrial Revolution was reaching its literary peak?

It is of course tempting to attribute this silence to a pragmatic acceptance by the Church of a fait accompli that had become a central aspect of modern society. But the Catholic Church hasn’t been known for its cultural sensibilities in other areas like politics and sex. Or it could have occurred to Church policy-makers that the various technical subterfuges – the so-called three contract solution for example which converted debt into an interest free loan with insurance premiums attached, or which treated money as land that could be ‘rented’ through payment up front, or the various ‘greening’ ploys of Islamic finance – made the matter a legal maze that they didn’t want to get lost in. But of course the Catholic Church has rarely demurred from simplifying other complex situations like marriage or sacramental access into unshakeable canon law. And the fact that a significant portion of the 19th C world, at least those who spoke and read English, had adopted an increasingly negative view of creditors, credit law, penalties connected with that law and the social impact of debt, was encouraging a stand by the Church that was a pillar of its tradition. Why then did the Church decline, as it were, the invitation, to engage the world on its own turf?

I offer a suggestion, the only evidence for which is the abrupt but apparently permanent silence of the Church on the matter. The reason could well be a logical one involving the recognition that the profoundest and most central doctrine of the Church – the Atonement by Christ for the sin as well as sins of the world – is in fact undermined by the arguments traditionally presented against debt. These arguments imply that God the Father is a usurer, that his calculation of the debt owed by creation to himself as the Creator is of a magnitude which cannot be paid back by his creatures. In fact, according to the doctrine first formulated by St. Anselm in the 11th C, developed by Aquinas in the 13thC and taught by the Church since, this debt is an infinite imbalance in the moral universe, that is the debt is far greater than the ‘credit’ created in the material universe. Therefore, only the sacrifice of an infinite being, Christ, can compensate or atone for this imbalance between debits and credits. The formulation from the 1928 encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor reads as follows: "The creature's love should be given in return for the love of the Creator, another thing follows from this at once, namely that to the same uncreated Love, if so be it has been neglected by forgetfulness or violated by offense, some sort of compensation must be rendered for the injury, and this debt is commonly called by the name of reparation"

It is this Substitution Theory of Atonement (as opposed to the previous prevailing Ransom Theory in which it is Satan who is paid to leave the world alone) that is directly attacked by the various medieval theories against lending at interest. Despite their disparate technicalities and arcane logics, all these theories are grounded in exactly the issue that Atwood identifies – not debt per se but the relationship created between debtor and creditor. This is a relation of power not simply obligation. Obligation is a moral force which free will (another central Christian doctrine) may choose to respond to or not. Power on the other hand is a material relationship of subjugation which by definition limits free will and implies coercion. Payback, revenge for failure to repay the debt according to the rules, is the purpose of Hell. Theories of usury were therefore implicit judgements of God the Father as usurious, as coercive in his demands of his creation.

It might be noted that in church-time Anselm’s doctrine is relatively recent; it takes centuries for dogmatic formulation to take place in the Catholic Church. The politics involved are at least as intense as in any other large organisation. Vix Prevenit and its 19thC re-statement might well be the last gasps of a faction intent on preserving the myth of un-changeability in Catholic doctrine if nothing else. Is it only coincidence that literature – liberal, politically independent literature – blossomed in a leading democratic society like Britain to adopt the stand historically taken by a now passive Church? And is it also possible that good theological reason for that passivity were being recognised, even if only intuitively by the denizens of the Church curia? Finally is it possible that Atwood has been so acculturated into the Atonement Theory of Anselm that she has applied it unwittingly to her ecological conclusion about Nature's impending revenge? Who knows, but I wish there were time in my life for another doctoral thesis.

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The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Caballeros del sabio púrpura

There's this federal law enforcement officer and his posse, which includes the officer’s roguish but good-hearted cousin as jovial side-kick, sent into the mountains to bring the benefits of white men’s justice to the natives of the region. There's this evil, scheming bigot who is in league with the big local land owner, both of whom for their own reasons want the natives blamed for murder and highway robbery. There's this beautiful young widow who is the object of lust and greed who, along with her trusted natives, need protection. Sound familiar?

What’s the inverse of a Spaghetti Western? Perhaps this book in which the frontier-plot that has been hashed out in dozens of films and countless television series is projected back from 19th century Texas to 16th century Spain. The hero is the honest representative of the King, but hardly differs from your average federal marshal. The bigot is a Dominican inquisitor rather than an arrogant white settler or Baptist Minister. The land owner an Aragonese noble rather than a mere land-baron. And the natives are Moriscos, that is Muslims who have been coerced into adopting Christianity (so-called New Christians), who substitute rather seamlessly for the Cheyennes of the Apaches in tales of the old American West.

The hero is of course thrown into a political tangle of which he is largely unaware, regardless of how apparent the situation is to any reader who has even heard of Zane Grey (Indeed The Riders of the Purple Sage could well be the crib for this book). Just as obvious is the source of the criminality in the local noble family which uses suspicion of the Moriscos to further their plan to acquire both the widow and her ‘spread’. There is no real moral content. As in any Western, Good and Evil are not difficult to distinguish from the start; the question is never what rightness might consist in but by what combination of fortune and true blue integrity will prevail when the mettle of the hero has been tested. The sub-plots of love affairs, hidden parentage and institutional corruption are equally banal and predictable.

The cultural and political background of 16th century Spain – which along with travel description of the Spanish countryside is spread liberally throughout the book - is mildly interesting but hardly worth the price of admission in terms of the time necessarily invested in 400 pages. One is perhaps surprised at the persistence of Moorish culture so long after the Muslim expulsion, or the prevelance of the culture and the Morisco population in Northern Aragon, right up to the Pyrenees, well into the late 16th century. But such things, for the amateur, would be much more easily gleaned from a quick consultation of Wikipedia.

There must be a reason why this sort of backwards-projection historical novel gets written, published, and read. Perhaps the sheer predictability of the story and its characters is comforting or reassuring. In any case, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly probably has greater literary merit.

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The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

American Obsession

In 1970 Jerzy Kosinski published his novel Being There, a sarcastic critique of the media culture of the West. Its protagonist is Chauncey Gardiner, described as “a man without qualities”. As a servant in a mansion in which he has spent his entire life, Chauncey has learned about social interactions primarily through television. Although no one is quite sure what he means, his responses appear sage and meaningful. He becomes a respected advisor to governments and business.

The point of Kosinski's piece is the danger posed by the media in creating not just individuals like Chauncey but whole societies that consider him to be normal and even intelligent. In a time of Donald Trump the message of Being There is clearly relevant. [It is also interesting to note that as this review is being written, Glen Newey of the London Review of Books has just described the recently resigned MP David Cameron as “a man with no qualities”.] Being There was made into a film starring Peter Sellers in 1979, thus assuring its place in cultural memory.

In the same year that Being There appeared, Stanley Elkin produced his novel The Dick Gibson Show. Also about the media and its effects, Elkin has a very different and, in light of its Trumpian relevance, a rather more prescient point to raise. Elkin doesn’t use sarcasm; he is far too empathetic an author to trash his characters. And his medium of interest is not television but that somewhat archaic technology of AM (medium wave) radio, a technology which was giving way when he wrote to FM and ultimately to the internet. What Elkin writes about, moreover, is not the effect of mass media on society but the effects of society on those involved in mass media – the corruption flows from the latter to the former. This makes for a rather more interesting tale of moral development.

Elkin is prescient in several ways. He anticipates first of all the transformation of AM radio into so-called talk-radio, one of the most important political forces in the US today – mostly right wing and often, like The Trump-boosting Brietbart, important electoral vehicles. In addition, the form of the Dick Gibson show that evolves during the book is a sort of emulation of the internet before anyone is likely to have even considered it as a possibility.

The Show is a telephone interaction between individual listeners and the eponymous Dick Gibson from midnight to dawn. There appear the now familiar proto-internet types - trolls and cranks, frauds, purveyors of pornography, and exhibitionists - calling into the show. But the main content of the calls Dick receives are expressions of misery, unhappiness, confusion, pain and a general inability to deal with life. In short, what anyone with an internet news feed receives daily. This, Dick considers, is a general malaise of obsessiveness that exists in American society and is revealed, not created, by the media. A rather different point than Kosinski’s

Much like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, the sheer weight of misery and obsession in human lives – his own as well as other people’s - drives Dick to contemplate murder. The fact that he doesn’t carry out the thought but finally takes responsibility for his own life provides a conclusion more satisfying than Kosinski’s if markedly less well known.

Could it be that Trump is really a victim rather than a manipulator of the media? It would explain much if he were. Like his apparent inability to discern reality yet still maintain some sort of 'connection' with those who think reality can be found on Fox and Brietbart.

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Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Borges Gone Haywire

Roberto Arlt meets Raymond Chandler in this noir-tale of shifting identities and uncertain motivations in exotic locations. Not until the final page is a possible reason for the reader's attention revealed. Well not quite. The reader discovers there may have never been a reason at all, no plot to be found, no sense in any of the events described, no point to the tale. So what justifies the time and energy devoted to the work (and it does take a great deal of both to keep the characters in place)? The prose, even in translation, is fluid and at times hypnotic. But the characters are clearly intended to have no depth or complexity in themselves; relationships are so thin as to be non-existent. Reasons for patently absurd actions have no real rationale. The story dissolves into itself without residue. The book's principle merit appears to lie in a certain cleverness which is meant to engage the reader through confusion rather than enchantment. So perhaps neither Arlt nor Chandler then, but a kind of Borgesian fable that has simply lost control of itself.

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