The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books by John Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For He Is an English Man

To be a master of a literature is not to pretend to dominate its content but to allow oneself to be dominated by its scope and subtlety; to recognise that one’s opinions are simply a marginal part of that content and not a judgment on the whole. This is the sense in which Carey is a master of English. The language has made him. And his book is a tribute to the force and skill of that language.

What English has made John Carey is a modest, witty, morally sensitive, interesting person with an ability to tell a story of his life that is both charming and profound. It is charming in its unassuming detail of what the title identifies as an entirely unexpected life. And it is profound for exactly the same reason. There are no great epiphanies, no quasi-religious conversions to the life of the mind, just the incremental inexorable drift of a human being toward a fate which is a surprise rather than a decision.

My grandmother was a Carey. So perhaps I’m prejudiced by the possibility of a genetic connection (I admit to feeling this sort of thing when I encountered the memorial in Winchester Cathedral to a certain seventeenth century Bishop Carey). Nevertheless I think any prejudice is justified by the way Carey does his literary criticism - with the precision but not the bluster of a Harold Bloom, with the conscience of a Terry Eagleton less the Marxist rhetoric, and echoing the devotion of a James Wood while accepting its subliminally religious character. Carey’s religion is literature but he doesn’t expect himself or anyone else to feel the need to be saved by it.

Carey’s self-revelations are typically tentative and hesitant not rationalising or self-assertive:

“I thought of the padre who had given me Tom Jones, and how much I had admired him, and it came to me that, though I thought of myself as an agnostic, I was really a Christian who just did not happen to believe in God. As a choirboy I had sung the Magnificat hundreds of times, praising God for putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away, and my belief that this was right, and that the mighty and the rich deserved to be humbled and to go hungry, had outlasted my belief in God.”

It’s difficult not to like the man, even if he isn’t a relative.

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