The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recovering From the Love of Women

The eponymous Henry is, not to put too fine a point on it, a sissy, a mama'a boy, a wuss (or perhaps in North Manchester a wuzz). Not effeminate or gay, but born into, raised, protected and launched, if that isn't too active a verb, by a bevy of women who adored him. The result was predictable, and indeed predicted by Henry's father: he, Henry, became a girl. That is to say, he had no interest in auto mechanics, an incapacity with tools, little desire for male mate-ship, and a lifelong preference for older women, even when they were younger than he.

I share Henry's debilitating pedigree: a beautiful mother, two devoted grandmothers, a married aunt without children, a maiden aunt who thought I could be the Messiah, and even a clutch of great-aunts, known even in their dotage, like Henry’s entourage, as The Girls. My identification with Henry is intense. So I can feel his dismay and confusion about adult life, not because the world at large is more brutal or unsympathetic than the warm nest created and maintained by loving women, but because, as Jacobson says bluntly, "Women died." The only thing a man brought up by adoring women can do when they die is pine in a resentful, clumsy, perpetually childish way: “Without a woman in his life, Henry was like the world before God created it. Nothing but flying fragments...Trouble was - order was death. Chaos life, order death.”

Recovery from the loss of loving women can take some time, perhaps a life-time. There is, in short, no free lunch. The Making of Henry is a story of how payment can be made - told with wit, humour and sensitivity that is accessible universally, not just within Jacobson’s Mancunian Jewish oeuvre.

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The Book of Evidence by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Hangover with a Vengeance

Is it possible to explain a crime without rationalising and therefore justifying it; that is, understanding it as reasonable while recognising it as immoral? This is the issue posed in The Book of Evidence. And it is an important issue in criminal law not just in moral theory. There is probably no living writer in the English language who could better find the words to explore this question. Banville's particular skill in two domains, alcohol poisoning and the subtleties of Irish snobbery, provides the framework for exploration.

Drink and drunkenness play a big role in Banville's Quirke mysteries, but in Evidence he really does turn alcoholism into a literary event. I stopped drinking 40 years ago, but could feel the pull of the beast forcefully in his acute descriptions of the man desperate for relief from his life through more or less continuous self-medication. The fact that this man doesn't really know what he wants release from is captured just as concisely in his 'Castle Catholic' disdain for most people everywhere and for all people rural and Catholic in post WW II Ireland. "This is a wonderful country," the protagonist says, "A man with a decent accent can do almost anything."

Colm Toibin's introduction in my edition, however, seems somewhat off the mark. Toibin thinks that the key to the story is a sort of dual identity in the protagonist, in the manner of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I can't see it. Yes, Frederick Montgomery's actions are inexplicable to himself after the fact; he even compares himself to Dr. Jekyll while waiting for his arrest. And he is certainly a different person after his crime, both psychologically and existentially. But this difference in in the manner of Kafka or Dostoevsky not Stevenson. The 'selves' involved appear to be the quite normal acting self and reflecting self, not two separate personalities.

When Frederick attempts to analyse himself, he sounds much more like St. Paul than Dr. Jekyll: "It's hard to describe. I felt that I was utterly unlike myself. That is to say... it was as if I - the real, thinking, sentient I - had somehow got myself trapped inside a body not my own, ...the person that was inside me was also strange to me." Given his Catholic/Calvinist bloodline, his confusion is more likely to be down to his religious background rather than anything more demonic.

By his own admission Frederick has 'drifted' into his situation. He does not believe he is insane. Nor does he perceive himself or the human species as inherently evil given the acts of gratuitous kindness he has given as well as received. But the accumulated effects of otherwise insignificant choices have been a fatal if 'slow subsidence'.

Whatever remnant of his Christian upbringing there is, it is also not sufficient to provide an explanation. Original sin just isn't a satisfying theory: "I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that there is nothing there?" His crime has provoked a crisis in the self that would not occurred without it: an existential emptiness that is even more frightening than religious evil.

When we, we as civilised persons as well as we of civilisation, can't find the words for a thing, this emptiness has terrifying substance. Could this be the punishment that obviates the need for explanation? The very lack of explanation is excruciating for Frederick. The peace that passeth all understanding eludes him. It is "...hangover time with a vengeance." And he gets to share it with precisely the class of folk he has despised all of his life. Could this be hell?

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Jerusalém by Gonçalo M. Tavares
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whose War? What Rationality?

In modern ethical theory, the medieval idea of Just War is still considered a thing worthy of serious consideration. The theory is that the decisions to go to war as well as how to conduct it are subject to rational criteria which can be applied coherently to past and future national conflict.

But of course Just War theory is entirely fatuous for the simple reason that there has never been nor never will be a war that isn't justified by its participants. This is obvious to all but the ethical theorists, who presume that the criteria of rationality they specify might somehow prevent or motivate action. On the contrary, the criteria provided in the theory are used to justify whatever action is taken, giving the framework of argument, as it were, in public debate. As one of Tavares's characters muses, "...every crime is perfectly justifiable when inspired by being sad."

Rationality in other words, that Jerusalem (the reference is to the 137th Psalm) where the human mind is worshipped, is a rather more slippery idea than many of us want to admit. And it is this theme of the fluid, often contradictory character of what we glibly call the rational that is the theme of Tavares's book. Tavares teaches (or taught) epistemology at university. It's not surprising therefore that he uses a technique not dissimilar from that used by Iris Murdoch in her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, in which characters represent Heideggerian existentialist categories. Tavares personalises philosophical theories of rationality and then watches them collide.

The main character, Theodor, is a prototypical medieval rationalist who believes that there is a coherent order to the universe that is prior to an understanding by human beings. This leads him to a necessary belief in an ordering God, but also into some rather problematic positions.

Theodore is obsessed with both the Holocaust and mental illness as chapters in the long 'history of horror' that is the world. He is aware however that his presumption that these things are rational, that is they lead to an ultimate good, are either blasphemous or indicative of an inherent evil in the universe. He also knows that presuming a rationality to phenomena like the Holocaust is a bad idea since by finding reasons for such a thing, one justifies it. This is the same problem as with Just War theory. The fact that so many otherwise ordinary people participated in the Holocaust proves that human rationality (and indeed God) is not something to be touted but to be feared.

Theodor's wife, Mylia, is a schizophrenic, who like the other patients in the local mental hospital (the physical location of Jerusalem), has her own unique and rather interesting theory of rationality, a Heraclitan theory of becoming which is neatly summarised with regard to eggs: "Eggs, all eggs, contained a kind of concrete, material altruism that Mylia couldn't find in anything else in the world. Eggs appear because they want to disappear. They appear because they want to reappear as something else." God is the cosmos finding itself.

Other characters have other ideas of rationality and divinity. Hinnerk, the war-damaged veteran believes there is no underlying rationality in the world and consequently lives in a state of fearful paranoia. For him words, as the foundation of rationality, are essentially meaningless; there is no God. Mylia's disabled son, Kaas, is unable to use words and therefore has no real idea of what rationality might be. For him God is a malevolent, vengeful mystery who is the source of his disability. Gompertz, the administrator of the mental hospital, is the vulgar pragmatist for whom rationality is merely conventional behaviour; God, we might say, is 'best practice'. Hanna, the prostitute, gives no thought whatsoever to rationality in her unexplainable, Christ-like devotion to the homicidal Hinnerk; she simply believes.

Each of these stances carries with it an associated ethic - moralistic, hedonistic, sacrificial, self-sacrificial, and so on. So ethical crises occur continuously as the characters interact during stressful events. The result is a sort of tour through the mind of Jorge Luis Borges or Henry James. The reader isn't sure whom to trust, with whom to empathise. And I think this is precisely Tavares's point. The rational ain't as rational as it's made out to be, not in war, not in life.

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Discovering Girard by Michael Kirwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading the Runes

Since as far back as historical records exist, there have been periodic crises and 'big issues' of national government: Are we doing it right? What's gone wrong? Do we need basic reform or a return to basics?

The experts called upon to suggest answers to these questions have varied. The Babylonian emperor consulted his resident astrologer for advice on propitious timing for action. The Roman Consuls preferred the entrails of birds, as interpreted by official priests, particularly the Pontifex Maximus, as the source for good government policy. Medieval European monarchs had their court theologians to suggest any divine inspiration that might have bypassed the royal direct line.

Heads of state during the Age of Enlightenment took more notice of philosophers than theologians in justifying governmental policy. With the triumph of representative democracy as the accepted gold standard for the organisation of political society, it seems that lawyers now dominate in the formulation of any response to questions involving issues like sovereignty and justice and equality.

Rene Girard has something different and original to say about the people who ought to be consulted about the effectiveness of our governmental and political institutions. He thinks that it should be readers, especially readers of great modern literature from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dostoevsky and Proust, who are consulted about what's wrong and what has to be done about democratic government. Given the recent election results in the United States, it seems justifiable to quote the winner in that election: "What have you got to lose?"

Girard's theory is not as crazy at it might first sound. Among other things most people, or at least more people by far, in modern society can read than are astrologers or priests or theologians or philosophers or (perhaps by a narrower margin) lawyers. So it's a theory compatible with an increasingly democratic ethos. And the writers with whom he is obsessed certainly have a claim to be carriers of the best of the Western cultural intellectual heritage. Their track record is at least as credible as the political scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists that Girard pits them against.

Second, the theory explains rather better than any other why democracy periodically leads to some certifiably dodgy outcomes, including the involvement of religion in politics. Girard's basic principle is that none of us really know what we want...until someone else tells us what it is. We are an empathetic species, or at least a species capable of empathetic imagination. For Girard, this is a miraculous not a natural characteristic. It is also, of course.also the fundamental principle of advertising, and difficult to argue against on purely empirical grounds.

If more proof is necessary, one could simply cite the behaviour of US Republicans in supporting a candidate few of them wanted but almost all of them accepted. Religion is not just a way that we 'vent' the violence inherent in wanting similar things, that is, of conformity; it is a means of dissipating the cognitive dissonance of our membership in a democratic society. No wonder the Evangelicals voted Trump!

But our empathetic streak also gets us into trouble. America, for example, may be one of the most egalitarian places on the planet; but it is also one of the most conformist. On the one hand conformity breeds identity, but on the other hand it creates enormous resentment (with an emphasis on the feeling of being cheated that is part of the French word) which is always ready to erupt into some sort of protest. Conforming means wanting the same things, and therefore competing over a limited supply of those things. This situation creates a sort of background enmity which fundamentally threatens the very social cohesion it spawns.

Girard's ideas point to some important priorities in the improvement in democratic processes, namely the ability of democratic institutions to absorb the level of social as well as political violence which is inherent in democracy. This is in contradiction to the Fukuyama school of history that views democracy as a sort of stable political plateau for an ever-improving civilisation. According to Girard, violence will increase in intensity as democracy becomes...well more democratic. Given that this is exactly what has been happening in democracies from the US to Egypt over the last two decades, Girard has at least a modicum of street cred.

Girard’s theory is that conformist social tension is relieved by the creation of a political safety valve - a scapegoat. The scapegoat is made the focus of an otherwise diffuse violence. This mechanism permits the society to tolerate its inherent competitiveness and mistrust by allowing it to vent its resentful anger on the scapegoat. In Trump’s America, the scapegoat has been identified as immigrants, particularly Mexicans and Muslims. Score another point for Girard’s insight.

Finally, I think Girard provides not a small comfort to those who have been traumatised, not so much by recent political events themselves, as by the apparent lack of rationality in these events. That there might be a hidden but discoverable logic in what is going on in today's political world is no small contribution to the psychic health of millions...particularly if they read. One presumes that requirement means that no one in the Trump administration will therefore ever benefit from Girard.

Nonetheless, the rest of us might. Many of the classics demonstrate the persistence of Girard’s scapegoat mechanism throughout literary history. Familiarity with the tactics and tropes of scapegoating seems an essential political skill to be developed by reading. Who knows, reading may also be beneficial in disrupting the conformity of desires which necessitates the scapegoat in the first place. The fate of democracy may indeed lie in its libraries.

For a complementary literary example of Girard’s theory, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Beyond Sleep 
by 

Willem Frederik Hermans

 

BlackOxford's review 

Nov 22, 2016  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: dutch-flemish 

Gezellig om thuis te blijven

Beyond Sleep is a novel of the Dutchman Abroad, a genre not without charm but perhaps an acquired taste. Its moral is typical of the genre: Gezellig om thuis te blijven, It's probably best not to leave the front garden. It was written in 1966 but remained untranslated into English for forty years. This delay makes it even more of a period piece, expressing some of the most important self-criticisms of Dutch society of the time at an effective and safe distance. 

Beyond Sleep was written at an important juncture in Dutch history - less than a generation after collaboration with the Nazis as well as the brutal suppression of the Indonesian independence movement; and during a period of growing unrest about immigration from another soon-to-be former colony, the South American country of Suriname. National guilt and a residual Calvinistic moral sensitivity had reached a high point. Simultaneously a growing nationalism and racism were threatening the live-and-let-live equilibrium of a traditionally highly diverse society. What better literary way to relieve some of the tension while addressing the situation than to place a story in an even smaller country than The Netherlands, namely Norway at a third its population, and to play Dutch conditions against a nationalism and racism of the East Norwegians with regard to the West Norwegians (a standard Dutch joke) as well as the Lapps of the North? The implication is clear: Holland is not at all a bad place to be despite contemporary problems.

Unfortunately, the running in-jokes about Dutch provincialism, practical ineptitude, and lack of worldly wisdom are unlikely to be recognised as such by those unfamiliar with Dutch culture. They are probably too dated even for the Dutch, especially the younger generations. Not that Hermans isn't a competent writer, he is first rate, as is Ina Rilke's translation. Nevertheless, unless the alternating dry and slapstick wit of The Netherlands of mid-twentieth century are your nieuwe haring, you may not want to invest the time.

The Inquisitors' Manual by António Lobo Antunes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sic transit horror mundi

The misery that was fascist and colonial Portugal. Not just the documented political and economic misery of the New State dictatorship but the social and emotional degradation which is impossible to establish on any metric. And not just the misery of the regime, but the misery of the revolution that overthrew it, including its aftermath.

Revolutions, violent or not, never have predictable consequences. Just as America has recently taken a crap-shoot with Donald Trump so Portugal rolled the dice in the Carnation Revolution of 1974 that overthrew the remnants of Oliveira Salazar’s corporatist, Catholic totalitarianism and dismantled the Portuguese empire in African and East Timor. And just as Trump will find that the undoing of international trade arrangements causes as much disruption as their creation, so Portugal found that the undoing of Salazar’s legacy was in many ways more painful than its continuation. Sadly, apart from anything else, revolution releases greed, envy and retribution far more readily than it does justice, equality and respect, particularly if you're a woman. As a consequence the net revolutionary effect on the human condition approaches zero, and does nothing to avoid the inevitability of human death. Sic transit...

Lobo Antunes has developed a unique way of telling a uniquely Portuguese story. Neither straightforward narrative nor stream of consciousness, his prose is what might be called multi-temporal; it jumps back and forth within the same paragraph, sometimes within a single sentence, over a forty or fifty year period, recalling events, emotions, and sensations into a coherent present, and punctuating that present with repetition of its most important phrase. It is also all recounted in the first person, but by at least a dozen persons, each with his own voice (and vice), whose narratives inter-weave.

It sounds complicated but, amazingly, the technique is not at all difficult to follow. In fact it is an extremely effective way to tell this complex cultural story. Lobo Antunes’s construction of individual histories is never too laboured. And his sequencing of narratives is perfectly timed. For my money The Inquisitors Manual is as good as the best of Jose Saramago. And because of a geographic realism that rivals that of Saramago, one can readily enter Lobo Antunes world South of the Tagus via Google Earth as an additional treat.

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Shroud by John Banville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Proper Names

The smoothest prose in the business. One does not so much read Banville as float luxuriously in his velvet sentences. And he shows himself in Shroud as a master at the slow reveal. It's like hearing Bolero or Nina Simone in Little Girl Blue, ever so gradually approaching a climax that you do and don't want to arrive. Every detail and slight reversal coming at just the right moment so the beat is never missed even as it becomes more forceful and impulsive. A story of the complex, long-term effects of survivor-guilt. A man tries to escape his identity and finds it in a woman who has no knowable identity at all, but is merely a collection of historical anecdotes. With the usual handful of handy new theological, medical and culinary additions to one’s vocabulary: estaminet, crepitant, pococurantish, blastula, and gallimaufry among them. Banville at his best.

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The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1) 
by 

Ken Follett (Goodreads Author)

 

Without Foundation

I don't think I'm a lit-snob. I like a good yarn, well told as well as pieces with complex symbolism and subtle style. But I couldn't get past the first 100 of the almost 1100 pages of Follett's fictional 'masterpiece' about medieval cathedral building. This is the length it takes him to introduce his protagonist, a stonemason who has a rather 20th century view of his importance in the world and an architectural obsession not unlike that of Howard, Ayn Rand’s hero of the Fountainhead. 

Yet the reader knows nothing more about his character after 100 pages than she does after the first 10 pages. Lots of detail about the brutality of life in the 12th century, and several repetitious summaries of the plot are provided along the way, just in case the anthropological overload obscures the story-line. But other than his sexual fantasies at the most inopportune moment - just after the death of his wife in childbirth and the disappearance of his new son - the central character remains a somewhat vague performer of the role of overburdened paterfamilias who has made one hell of a bad career choice long before the novel starts. 

What the reader can guess, unfortunately, is where the story will go from moment to moment, so even plot dies a wordy death. The young woman met in the forest in the beginning of the chapter is of course going to be his saviour and ally by the end for example. The tension is not about what will happen but when we're finally to get to it. My inner pleas of "Please don't let it be so" were as about as effectual as similar entreaties to the divine concerning Donald Trump's election. 

In short, if all I need on a rainy autumn evening is readable prose with no obvious merit, I'd go for Mills & Boone. As far as medieval cathedral stories go, I recollect that Golding's The Spire had something going for it. Maybe I can dig it out.

Miracles: God's Presence and Power in Creation by Luke Timothy Johnson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Changing Water Into Steam

Luke Timothy Johnson is hardly a silly man. But he has written a very silly book in which he tries to demonstrate the validity and relevance of the Christian belief in miracles by redefining them as imaginative breakthroughs in human understanding about the world. For Johnson, suspicion of both biblical miracle stories and their more modern counterparts is merely a result of a lack of imagination. Alas, it is difficult for me to imagine him as other than an educated crackpot trying desperately to find a way to intellectually justify some very serious delusions.

There is actually very little written about the theology of miracles.* This is more than surprising given that, as Johnson says “...the question of miracles pervades the entire structure of Christian identity.” Miracles of course are the principle verifying events in the Hebrew Bible and its Christian additions. Miracles are meant to attest to the existence and power of God and to the involvement of the divine in material affairs. For Christians, of course, the apex of miracles, as it were, is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. One might expect therefore a substantial theological literature on miracles. But such hope would be vain.

Johnson points to some important reasons - both ancient and modern - for this reticence about miracles. Many religions claim miracles; to allow comparison with the Christian variety would open a dangerous Pandora’s box of competition. Further, historically miracles are associated with evil demons as much as they are with divine intervention; discerning the beneficent from the malignant is problematic. And miracles have an unsavory connection to magic and other superstitions; prayer is not all that easy to distinguish from incantation. The gospels of Matthew and Mark attest to the reality of demonically-sourced miracles. Moses and Aaron engaged in a sort 0f magic rap session with Pharoah’s lads in the Hebrew bible. Mention need hardly be made of Circe and other infamous witches and sorcerers of both sexes who performed many equally verified miracles in Ancient Greek tales. Finally, and theologically more fundamental, miracles pose some tough moral questions to religious believers - like the arbitrary injustice of the Divine Will, the rationale for spiritual obsequiousness in miracle-begging prayer, and the frequently vengeful character of miracles involving war and male competition.

But Johnson believes he has a way round these difficulties. First he subtly redefines what miracles are as “experiences that could not be ascribed to merely human agency.” (By whom? one asks, and using which criterion?). ‘Experiences’ have only a very tenuous connection with ‘events’ of course. His definition removes the topic entirely from the possibility, much less the need, for verification. Experience has its own laws which are not those of science or logic. Unfortunately Johnson has nothing to say about how Christian experience might be distinguished from pagan delusion, except by simply defining it as a distinct and superior category.

He then uses two intellectual moves. The first is the adoption of an early 19th century subjectivist theological epistemology - the principle of which is that what counts is personal religious experience, inner feeling, not religious doctrine. Perhaps the most well-known exponent of this sort of theology is that of Frederich Schleiermacher, the founder of what would eventually evolve into liberal Protestantism (and against which the Fundamentalists would react vigorously a century later). Schleiermacher’s theology, like Johnson’s, was a protest against the Enlightenment. By locating God ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’ Schleiermacher, also like Johnson, wanted to insulate the divine from the threats of rational thinking.

Johnson’s second move is to insert post-modernist philosophy, without attribution, into his argument. In his hands, post-modernism becomes a sort of radical romanticism. Reality is not just the cumulative narratives we have about the world, it is our imaginative capacity itself. This capacity is uniquely human and connects us with the divine. It is the source or conduit of divine revelation. Johnson uses post-modernism as a sort of fundamental anthropology, another story to be sure but one that he wants us to believe is definitive.

Johnson then establishes a composite straw man based primarily on the empiricist philosophies of David Hume and Epicurus. He is careful to reject what they thought of as miracles, namely: “the breaking of the established laws of nature by divine agency.” This is obviously in order to remove them from the realm of any kind of ‘objective’ analysis. Miracles, he would like us to believe, are not exceptional but routine. Why he believes such routine events would be considered significant by either the original evangelists or modern evangelicals is something of a mystery. But, he claims, only by re-entering this sort of primitive psychological frame can we comprehend what the gospels are about.

He then argues in a way that makes it difficult to know whether he is trying to justify post-modernist philosophy or Christianity. One gets the impression he in fact equates the two. In modern epistemology, he says, “What stems from fantasy and the imagination belong to the realm of the ‘not real’ and therefore the ‘not serious’... The greatest deficiency of the secular construction of reality, in fact, is its refusal to recognize that it is in fact an imaginative construct rather than a straightforward perception of ‘how things are.’” Secularism, that is, is merely a variety of modernism. Are there any modernists left? The only ones I know are fundamentalist Christians. Are these Johnson’s undesignated opponents? Much of his other writing suggests that they are.

And indeed, Johnson makes it clear that his mission is to convert the converted. He doesn’t like what he calls double-mindedness among believers, that is their own world of experience and the world of experience reported in the gospels. “Christians,” he exhorts, “need a conversion of the imagination.” What he means by this are several things that would be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous if they hadn’t been asserted by an eminent theologian.

First, he says, we have to get rid of this highly questionable idea of ‘laws of nature’. Science, he claims, is insufficiently imaginative for the religious mind and therefore must be put in its place. Rational thought in its entirety is an outdated concept. The fact that he has problem with imaginative biblical exegesis which demonstrates the implausibility of many biblical readings is something he doesn’t dwell on of course. Apparently it is his imagination which is to be given priority. Thus he falls into the fundamentalist habit of telling the rest of us what true religion consists of.

Second, Johnson wants us to get beyond our literalism when it comes to miracles. He implausibly blames our tendency to take the words of the Bible as they stand as another consequence of modernism: “Enlightenment thinkers cultivated a literalistic reading of texts.” And we all thought that it was the church authorities and the evangelical fundamentalists who insisted on biblical literalism. Thank goodness for that clarification! It was really down to Hume and Rousseau.

The residual problem of course is that if the words can’t be taken literally and if there is no legitimate authority to specify their figurative meaning, do they have anything resembling meaning at all? Post-modernism does have a tendency to disappear up its own backside when it comes to questions like this.

So it is not surprising at all that for Johnson, “Revelation is a process of interpretation.” Imagination is the still small voice which can show the truth of biblical myths as they were meant to be understood, including of course the various miracle stories. Forget about the factuality of these stories, he says. What is relevant is their liberating power to show an alternative imaginative (not to say imaginary) world: “The language of heaven and earth enables readers to ‘see’ a world that does not offer itself easily to immediate comprehension.”

There are a number of defined mental illnesses which offer similar refuge for the soul. And there are an infinite number of imaginary worlds one might choose to inhabit. A glance at the internet and its conspiracy theorists, science-deniers, cultural warriors, and racial bigots is enough to make the point. If the only option to religious dogmatism is California Dreamin’, I’d be hard pressed to make a choice. Agnosticism is a sane alternative.

Apparently, therefore, Johnson wants us to consider religious talk as a sort of poetry. Fair enough. I can understand such an idea. In fact it makes sense to me that fiction - narrative construction of reality - is as close as we come to the sacred. But his co-religionists will no doubt smell the scent of several ancient heresies in this assertion. In any case, a poetic interpretation of miracles doesn’t do very much for the credibility of either traditional Christianity or for Johnson’s insistence on their importance other than as edifying fantasy.

What he’s admitting of course is that the purportedly miraculous events never actually happened the way they are reported; or if they did happen, they were the consequence of human skill that hadn’t been recognized at the time, or just random luck. The miracle stories are making a point not recounting events. Whether these stories are lies or imaginative embellishment is a matter of faith, or lack of it. He urges us to imagine creation itself as the fundamental miracle which we all can experience. So much for the resurrection of Jesus and the other gospel-propaganda then. Changing water into steam, not wine, is the real miracle.

Or perhaps the real miracle is that things like this are published. No merely human agent would bother.

*Subsequent to writing this I discovered a rather complete treatment of miracles from an unexpected source: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript: For an interesting fictional treatment of miracles, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fifteen Minutes in the Dark

The best science fiction looks backwards into the past as well as speculating forward into the future, linking things we think (or thought) we’re sure of with things that don’t exist. Comparing the two can be sobering as well as enlightening.

Asimov writes just this kind of inter-temporal story in Nightfall. On the one hand it anticipates things like the debates about climate change and dark matter that wouldn’t emerge more articulately for decades. On the other, it contains historical echoes of philosophical and theological issues from Pascale’s Wager to Galileo’s condemnation by the Church, to the impact of Kantian categories of perception. The story then mixes the anticipatory and the completed into a sort of a theory of Mind and explores the delicate dependency of Mind upon expectations as well as memory - specifically the dependency on light among a species unfamiliar with darkness.

As one of Asimov’s characters says, “Your brain wasn’t built for the conception [of total darkness] any more than it was built for the conception of infinity or of eternity. You can only talk about it. A fraction of the reality upsets you, and when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented with the phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension.” A very interesting premise. What then?

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Caught by Henry Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Poetry Of Chaos

Henry Green in Caught is not for the faint-hearted or those with limited leisure. Here are two examples from the main theme about life in the Auxiliary London Fire Service which tended to bomb damage while the bombs were still falling during the war:

His father had regrets. He wished it had all been less, as a man can search to find he knows not what behind a netted brilliant skin, the eyes of a veiled face, as he can also go with his young son parted from him by the years that are between, from her, by the web of love, or from the remembered country by the weather, in the sadness of not finding.

This is a typically enigmatic sentence by Green. The structure is purposely awkward. What does the first comma signify in a place that calls for a full stop? What are the pronominal references for 'it', ‘her’? What is this absence that eludes the finding and presumably creates the sadness? Are we to expect something explanatory latter in the text? Do the netted skin and veiled eyes refer to his wife, the son's mother? Are the net and veil analogues of time? And if so is the web of love meant to imply a displacement of memory from the person to the emotion? Meaning doesn't float, it hides in Green.

Here is another:

At the station they used to pitch the escape and climb up that sharply narrowing, rattling ladder, red, but it would by now be too dark to see, up to the head painted white for work at night with, in this dusk, a voice from the sea bellowing advice below, all of them getting out of breath, fumbling, some telling themselves, and even each other, not to look down. After the first few times they were handy at it, but in the beginning, and most of all before they had been sent up, he would get wet in the seat of his trousers as he walked past the half seen tower at six o’clock, unlike by more than the time of day that other under which, on sun-laden evenings, the windows for seven hundred years had stained the flags, as it might be with coward’s blood.

Even more purposely complex grammar than in the first example, with its subordinate clauses and repeated interruption of the line of thought. There is the strange adjectival placement (‘red’); and the ambiguity of the references is challenging (escape and climb? Now?) The reader is forced to re-read, not just to comprehend the structure but to identify and understand the relevance of what might be called external facts (‘the sea’, ‘wet in the seat of the trousers’, ‘coward’s blood’) that are left loose as indicators without a definite object and no prior context. The paragraphs are arranged in a similar way. Each new paragraph is often an element in a sequence that shifts chaotically among physical locations, persons, and time.

This is writing that does not flow but jerks along as if over rapids and falls. There are eddies and somewhat peaceful backwaters where understanding is helped by straightforward subject-object links but these only emphasise the generally rough ride. This is very dense prose poetry. It takes patient attention to master. Not as difficult, one must admit, as Finnegans Wake, but it rates for sure.

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Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Success of Failure

Babbitt is perhaps the first comic novel of mid-life crisis. It shows Lewis at his most Dickens-like, creating prototypical American characters that live on in cultural mythology.

The issue is this: How does an imperfect male human being, knowing his flaws only too well, make his way in an equally flawed society - without sacrificing either his own integrity or his ability to participate in that society? Lewis answer: Essentially he can't. Everything is irrational compromise.

Plato's Socrates came to the same conclusion in the Republic. It is also the inevitability posed by Camus in his letters. It was the third century Christian theologian Tertullian who came up with the most precise formulation: Credo quia absurdum est, I believe in it because it is absurd.

Babbitt's middle class American life is an absurdity. That he comes to terms with this absurdity is his, and our, only hope. Highly recommended as literary therapy during the reign of Donald Trump... or to understand where Philip Roth finds much of his inspiration.

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My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Lost Tribe Loses the Plot

A moving story, as so often the case, of Jews dispossessed and exiled. In this instance from the remote region of Kurdish Iraq. There is no question that this story of personal travail is worth telling and worth reading. Among other things, it is a story which provides essential background for the recent rise of Islamic State and its persecution of Kurdish Christians in a re-play of what the Iraqi government did to the Kurdish Jews almost seven decades ago.

But Sabar’s main theme isn’t personal, despite his use of his own family on which to paint a picture of what he himself refers to as one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. His primary point is a cultural one. The book is a sort of a conciliatory homage to his father who, removed from the ancestral home of the Kurdistan Jews as a child, is one of a disappearing remnant of this ancient fragment of the Jewish Dispersion directed by the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE. His father is, understandably, obsessed by his heritage: “My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything.” For him, the lost culture of Kurdistani Judaism has an intensely emotional and sentimental import: “The past felt safe, like a hiding place.” He devotes his life to the documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialect that was all but lost in the mass emigration. Again, from a personal perspective, this is a not unreasonable response to traumatic dislocation. But the subject of the book isn’t his father, it is the culture in which this arcane dialect persisted and to which his father has devoted his adult life to remembering.

What kind of culture was this? Certainly beyond primitive, beyond simple patriarchy. It was a savage, uneducated, feudal culture of subsistence, not one of arts or technology or social graces or even modest civilisation. It was a culture in which not only was a boy-child valued infinitely over a girl (despite a long-term decline in population), but one in which an infant was given away to a nomadic wet-nurse whom no one knew, and who was not pursued when she didn’t return the child as per agreement merely because her father was not so inclined to postpone pressing business engagements. Subsequently he cavalierly risked his sons in his smuggling operations. This was apparently a culture based not on personal, family, tribal, or religious loyalty, but solely on the prospects for trade, both legal and illegal. Its brutality, necessitated in part by the severe physical environment in which it existed, was made an order of magnitude more brutal by the reduction of human relationships to their functional usefulness in maintaining the dominance of males. Think of the poverty of Dickensian London overlaid with the social barbarity of the barrios of Sao Paulo, and the Maoist destruction of family feeling in the Cultural Revolution. This is the world of Kurdish Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s as portrayed by Sabar - verging itself on tragedy in its very existence.

Why then should one be tempted to mourn the passage of such a culture? Sabar’s sentimental quest for his roots as a mode of reconciliation with his father is understandable. But remarkable as is the survival of a remote Jewish enclave for 2700 years, its voluntary assimilation into the modern world, principally the modern world of Israeli Judaism, is hardly a profound tragedy. The life of a Kurdish Jew was no idyll. Viewed as an historical relic, the loss of this remnant of the Assyrian-ordered diaspora and its oral traditions is perhaps of somewhat less significance than the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha of Bamiyan. Much of the oral tradition could at least be recorded for posterity unlike the ancient statue which is irrecoverable. Viewed as the rescue of a group of impoverished, disadvantaged, illiterate, and hopelessly dying human beings, this same loss can only be viewed as a successful and fortunate work of mercy.

There was however one major characteristic of this culture worth saving: its religious tolerance. The isolation of the Kurdish region insulated local Jews, Muslims, Christians and others from the religious ideologies promoted elsewhere - from pan Arab Islam to Zionist Judaism to Evangelical Christianity. Whatever the level of patriarchal brutality existing in any of the Kurdish religious groups, they all had a remarkable degree of mutual respect for tradition and custom according to Sabar. Muslims, for example, routinely carried out sabbath-day tasks forbidden to Jews while Jews refrained from smoking during Ramadan. He describes a sort of equivalent to the Iberian Golden Age of tolerance and civil assistance, without of course the intellectual component. This amicability was destroyed not by Dominican religious agitprop of course but simply by improvement in communications with the ideologically enmeshed world. Having been touched by religious and nationalist propaganda and by the increased political interest in that part of the globe, there was no way inter-religious relations could remain stable after the Second World War.

Nevertheless, despite this apparently accidental, and perhaps incidental, religious tolerance, it is difficult to conceive of the conditions in which Kurdish Jews existed to be, as the title suggests, in any way paradise-like. Paradise as a sentimental conceit certainly but not as any ground-truth. No, as a memoir of personal displacement and courageous re-establishment, the book works. As a memorial to a lost culture whose contribution to the world will be missed, it is an inevitable failure.

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Kepler by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Science As Pyschotherapy

Unlike his introduction of Nicolaus Copernicus in his first volume of his Revolutions trilogy, John Banville gives a very clear key to his interpretation of Johannes Kepler’s life in the second: “…disorder had been the condition of his life from the beginning.” Not only does he set off a much more distinctive character for Kepler than for Copernicus, but Banville also pursues the interaction of that character with the intellectual and social context of the time in a much more interesting way.

Kepler’s neurotic condition - a longing for assurance about the ultimate rationality of the world - is described by Banville in all its stages: the initial trauma created by a chaotic midden of an early family life; subsequently confirmed through a young Lutheran adulthood in an increasingly oppressive Catholic country; and routinised in the shambolic Benatky castle-circus of Tycho Brahe. It Is hardly surprising that the need for an underlying order in the universe would be a response upon which Banville could build a narrative. Science, or more generally thought itself, as psychotherapy.

And this psychotherapeutic narrative, never overdone but muted and hinted at continuously, does provide a convincing coherence to Kepler’s life. His ‘passion’ for astronomy is a sort of self-medication in Banville's story. Kepler’s work is a reflection and projection of his deepest fears of meaninglessness and purposelessness. His but-this-will-interrupt-my-work attitude to politics, religion, and family relations is a persistent part of his character until late in life. Even the death of his second child is primarily an inconvenience rather than a tragedy. A complete indifference to the suffering of his wife is a clear symptom of neurosis not diligence. It only gets to be called genius in history, not because of what it produced but because of where it leads. Neurotic doesn't imply destructive. However when the therapy, carried on as a slavish routine, becomes a solution, an end in itself, it doesn't lead anywhere but to the hell it is trying to avoid.

Is this purely a personal story therefore? Well not really. It is likely that we all get trapped by neurosis of some sort given that every child develops at best a partial, and at worst a distorted take on reality which is then imported into adult life. If the result is success by prevailing standards, this largely unconscious condition is called a life-passion or driving force. If the results are by conventional norms unsuccessful, these same conditions are obsessions, or addictions. Doesn’t a career as a scientist, and not only a scientist, begin with a presumption of an underlying order awaiting discovery? And what would provoke anyone to presume such order and then to embark on a hopeful life of such discovery, if not an absence of order of one sort or another in one’s formative years? And there always is an absence of one sort or another.

In Kepler’s case the therapy was intellectual; in others’ it might be political; in my case it was, in the first instance monastic, and then military. Only late in life did I recognise my own drive to exist in, by creating it, an orderly world as a consistent theme of my life. I too, like Kepler, ultimately chose an intellectual therapy, corporate finance (a discipline just about as solidly based in reason as astrology). Not because I was particularly gifted in either business deal-making or mathematics but because, also like Kepler, I had found a way to survive economically while pursuing the itch for order in an apparently chaotic world. And I too mistook the therapy for a destination. Your garden variety ends-means confusion. Banville has Kepler recognise his error in a letter of 1611 to his step-daughter (I don't know if the letter is authentic). The recognition is traumatic. Recovery is excruciatingly slow. I'm still recovering.

So thank you John Banville for providing a bit of life-affirmation for me. And thank you as well for the typically Banvillian additions to my vocabulary like caparisoned, utraquist, widow's weeds, pavonian and scolopendrine. I love it when the spellchecker gets snookered. Now, old pal, how about an historical biography of Freud and how psychoanalysis went off the rails?

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In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Archetypal Exploration

There are two fundamental principles in Jungian psychology: 1) The unconscious part of the mind is indistinguishable from reality, and 2) The self, composed of the conscious and unconscious mind, is indistinguishable from God. As a self-confessed Jungian, Margaret Atwood, undoubtedly unconsciously, employs these two principles wonderfully in her commentary on Science Fiction, In Other Worlds.

Science fiction as a genre is of course a Jungian playground in which primitive archetypes from ancient myths to childhood fears can be given free rein. The constraints of existing technology, social conventions, time, and even fundamental physics can be done away with to form an alternative world which, as long as it is consistent within itself, can be a satisfying experience.

For me, and I think perhaps for Atwood as well, the best alternative sci-fi worlds don’t necessarily have a dystopian or utopian edge, even if they communicate a political or social message. They just are. And what makes them interesting is how a sensory, reflective entity (not necessarily a human being) makes its way in some fundamentally altered set of conditions. The archetypes bend and twist to accommodate these conditions, but ultimately, since they are at the limits of our imagination, they remain identifiable; hence we are able to comprehend and even empathise with otherwise alien creatures from other planets, other times, other eruptions of the multiverse.

So in a sense sci-fi is therapy, a non-threatening exploration of the things crawling around at the very bottom of our collective unconscious, the existence of which is of course confirmed by the worldwide success of works like Star Wars and Harry Potter, not to mention Frankenstein and Superman. The technique is simple: we allow Jungian principle 1 to operate without any of the usual epistemological worries that we carry around with us as a matter of course; then we perform an act of imaginative blasphemy by employing principle 2 - not to make too fine a point, we play God and re-create creation.

Why? I suppose the best answer, and the answer implied by Atwood, is because we can. No, that's too passive: because we must. We are, as social as well as conscious beings, programmed to explore the alternative arrangements of relationships in creation that are contained in sci-fi. Perhaps our myths of origin in sacred scriptures, as ancient as history allows us to recall, are expressions of the same facts of human existence as the superheroes of Marvel comics. (Such a comparison isn’t intended to be disrespectful. In fact, it might be a key to re-invigorating interest in a sacred literature that appears simply incomprehensible to most people).

Atwood’s identification and sifting of the sci-fi archetypes is masterful. She takes the reader from Inanna, the life and sex goddess of Mesopotamia, through the Greek messenger-god Hermes and Shakespeare's Puck to the Wizard of Oz and Plastic Man of the 1940's. And that's just on the topic of flying.

For Atwood the classic Beowulf has a clear association with that truly terrible 1958 British film, The Creeping Eye, aka The Trollenberg Terror. This is an association which, once made, is burned into one's literary psyche - to the benefit of both works I think. Similarly, it's not an enormous leap in imagination from the talking trees of the film Avatar, to the Burning Bush of Genesis. Every connection enhances appreciation of the things connected. This might well be the primary spiritual function of literature, of any sort but particularly that in which the tropes used point beyond themselves in the manner of Russian Orthodox icons. In other words, sci-fi.

Atwood's case for sci-fi as the modern continuation of Renaissance humanistic thinking is interesting. Works like Bladerunner, The Island of Dr Moreau, and Star Trek force a consideration of what it means to be human. As does any purported change in technology or even fundamental physics, as in The Matrix.

The theological import of much sci-fi needs hardly be argued. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Perelandra are popular enough examples to make the point. Less obviously, theology also pervades books like Atwood's own The Handmaid's Tale, not least by exposing the inherent sexism and rationalisation of power by the powerful in much of what passes for talk about God.*

There's no doubt that Atwood does both Jung and Sci-Fi proud in this little book of almost throw-away, thought-provoking thoughts. After all, what else can you do, if you've read virtually everything important ever written, but connect it, probably involuntarily, to everything else? She does it with such ease.

*See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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That Man Heine by Lewis Browne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Shtetl, But...

The image I've always had of the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine is of a mildly dissolute, foppish, politically inept friend of Karl Marx. A Byronesque figure who inspired Schumann and Schubert to some really dreadful German Lieder of the sort that provokes hideous festivals among university arts students. Clearly I am a philistine since every 20 years or so someone does see the need for a new biography of a great artist, and even more frequently for a re-interpretation of his lyric poetry. At the suggestion of an acquaintance I plunged into a personal reconsideration of Heine, not through a recent biography but the 1927 work by Lewis Browne and Elsa Weihl. I'm glad I did.

Heine has a big role in recent historical analysis of the so-called Jewish Emancipation of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the progressive cultural assimilation of German Jews into European Christian society. Since the Holocaust, this movement and its motives have become problematic and tend to dominate any interpretation of an individual life. That Man Heine was of course written at a time of 'normal' levels of anti-Semitism - that is routine prejudice without much overt violence - in Europe and North America. So Browne's concern with Heine's representativeness as a modern, less religious, more cosmopolitan Jew, doesn't include the possibility in a self-destructive act of clinging to a culture that will ultimately abhor him.

Also, Browne was a rabbi, at least he was until he chose writing as a full-time career in the year he was researching Heine. He therefore has not only a sensitivity to the issues of Heine's Judaism but also an agenda: to explain those issues to Jews and non-Jews. He is clearly hopeful in the text that the progress made in the cultural acceptance of Jews by Christians during the 19th century will continue toward the creation of a 'better' culture. I don't read naïveté at any point but there is an obvious misplaced optimism in his project when viewed from any perspective ten years on from the book's publication.

Because of the time in which he wrote, and the man he was, I think Browne gives a picture of Heine that he probably didn't intend and perhaps is only visible at all from a considerable distance. This picture is not one of Heinrich Heine as a prototype of the emancipated Jewish artist, fighting not just the dominant culture but his own family for a place in the pantheon of German literature. It is one of Harry (named for an English supplier to his parent's shop in Düsseldorf), the apple of his mother's eye, carrying the burden of the social burden of the family name, spoilt to the extent family finances allow, encouraged in his infantile wilfulness and self-righteousness well past infancy. So far, so assimilation beckons.

But take away the institutional designations of his future life and what we're left with is not a cosmopolitan resident of a new Europe but a yeshiva boy who could be living in the shtetl. After a time acting as a brat in kindergarten and Hebrew school, the young Harry is placed with the Franciscans, in a school which is functionally equivalent to a cheder, in which the rituals of Catholicism and Latin Grammar are substituted for the Torah and Talmud. From his teenage years, Harry then sequentially eschews finance, trade, and the law in favour of a continuing life of study in a series of (for him) disappointing universities. And this at his impoverished family's expense.

Such a pattern of life might be considered as less than entirely moral or merely justifiable, except of course in the traditional patriarchal society of 'pre-emancipated' Orthodoxy. In that society it was, and still is, expected that a young man called to study will be supported by his family. They will find the resources necessary so that the young man does not have to work, only to study. Harry clearly considered this level of family support, and sacrifice, his due, not to study Talmud but to indulge his passion for poetry.

I can't help but see the displaced yeshiva boy, the child who is father to the man, taking advantage of a traditional cultural male privilege in the rest of Heine's life. His sarcastic response to the most trivial perceived slights seem to me not so much created by cultural dissonance in an assimilated but suspicious Jew, but by frustration at not being treated as an established rabbi of the poetic arts. A general attitude of ironic disillusion is his protection, not against anti-Semitism (he formally converts to Protestantism) but against alternatives to his interpretive judgements. His move to Paris is psychologically the appointment to a much bigger, and more liberally orthodox (yes, yes, the oxymoron is intentional) synagogue as Chief Rabbi of his own cult of Napoleonic revolution. And so on.

Whether my interpretation of Browne's Heine has any merit I can't say. But it's what I'm left with. So in some sense at least, it could be what he meant.

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