Category: Books

This book is sub-titled “The Refusal to Cease Suffering”. That is a stunning concept. When you compare it to the book I reviewed earlier this morning, that saw suffering as something to be avoided, it becomes evident that there are very different approaches to theology and wealth. Bell is writing from the underside of the history that Francis Fukuyama declared finished in 1990. Tanner is writing as a Yale professor. Bell’s book is written in deep and attentive dialogue with the liberation theologians of South America. Tanner’s book is written in thrall to technology and the power of capital.

I have read few books as invigorating as this one. And what is depressing is that it put shape on the set of ideas I thought I would research in my doctorate. But what is encouraging is that I can stand on the shoulders of giants like Bell and maybe contribute something towards a liberation theology for Ireland. This is the amazing paragraph that I most sincerely appreciated:

Therefore, only a more substantive ecclesiology, one that begins by collapsing the distinction between the theological and the social, between religion and politics, stands a chance of resisting capitalist discipline. This ecclesiology must reclaim the theological as a material, that is, as a fully social, political and economic reality. This ecclesiology will recognize the practice of faith as intrinsically – instead of derivatively – social, political, economic. It will begin by conceiving of Christianity not as the apolitical custodian of abstract moral values like “love” that have to be translated into politics but, rather, as a social, political, economic formation (an ensemble of technologies of desire) vying with other formations (technologies of desire) on a single field of lived experience. It will start with the recognition that the Christian mythos finds its political correlate, not in the state – even one ordered toward the common good – but in the Church as the exemplary form of human community. This is to say, it begins with the recovery of the Augustinian insight that politics as statecraft is but a secular parody of the true politics that is the fellowship of the saints.

– Daniel M. Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, p. 72.

In the next two weeks, Daniel Bell will be publishing what I suppose might be a sort of sequel, which further interrogates the way our desires are shaped and formed by capitalism. I look forward to it almost as much as I look forward to Justin Cronin’s second book in the Passage series.

A simply outstanding book.

Your Correspondent, Is “about the work of liberating desire from the clutches of capitalism”

Man I wanted to love this book. I wanted to adore this book. I wanted to buy extra copies of this book and give them away to everyone who ever made eye contact with me again. I read the opening chapter and basically cursed God that this Spufford chap can write so well when all I can do is Powerpoint presentations that don’t need bullet point lists. But at the same time I thanked God for this Spufford chap because he wrestled words into a shape that looked like experiences I knew were true from my life. Yay Spufford!

And there is a chapter in there where he recapitulates the whole story of Jesus in such a way that actually made me cry, sitting at the breakfast table, right before I had to go to lectures. It is beautiful.

And throughout the book the prose has that kind of flowing cleverness that is enjoyable to simply sit with.

And! His tone is conversational without being glib. This is the way to talk about Christianity. He doesn’t pretend that he is walking to Vespers with C.S. Lewis. He writes like he sounds, by which I mean he sounds like an actual human man from 2012.

And there are many other things that can be endorsed in this book; the conviction at its heart is that reality is in some senses merciful, and that is a deep idea. His robust defence of original sin, cast as HPtFtU, is compelling. But fundamentally it failed to impress me. Perhaps by writing out why, I can figure out if my reaction is just a manky, biased response or whether it has merit.

I realise that every brief introduction to the faith is going to have to cut corners. But the edges that are polished off to describe what it means to follow Jesus really matter. The Jesus that is drawn here didn’t seem Jewish. He launches an audacious effort to set human depravity at the centre of the emotional satisfaction of Christianity but he fails to give Genesis 3 all that much credit.

He misrepresents C.S Lewis. Lewis’ Trilemma, from Mere Christianity, which has become a topic of fun in the contemporary world of letters. It is not a rock-solid argument but it isn’t meant to be either. In context, the Trilemma is a lovely illustration. But Spufford critiques it as a dilemma. This is unfair. And me and Jack will slag Francis over it in heaven.

But Francis seems a bit ashamed of heaven. And he seems positively dismissive of hell. And while he appears to believe in Catholic unity, “we’re all, collectively, the ecclesia, ‘the gathering together'”, that Catholicity of spirit isn’t extended to the apparently small group of old-fashioned conservatives within the church still believe in hell. Also, the same small group make a big deal of sexual ethics when there allegedly isn’t a Biblical support for their stances. Also, there is little love shared for Christians in Nigeria, Uganda or those wrong kind of Christians in the USA. Christian sexual ethics, by the way, are just liberal political free choice.

And then he seems to not realise that Christianity is non-violent. And he actively supports the establishment of the Church of England. And on and on my disagreements could go. It’s a phenomenally well written book but in the end, while it may account for the emotional satisfaction of Christianity as Spufford has experienced it, it is not an introduction to the strange particularity that the faith represents for all the people who aren’t Spufford.

Plus he never mentions Barth.

Still, let me end with a quote about the so-called Gnostic Gospels that is hilarious and which shows that this book has massive plus points standing in its credit:

The Jesus of the orthodox story treats people with deep attention even when angry. Their Jesus zaps people with his divine superpowers if they irritate him. Orthodox Jesus says that everyone needs the love of God, and God loves everyone. Their Jesus has an inner circle you can be admitted to if you collect enough crisp packets. Orthodox Jesus likes wine, parties, and grilled fish for breakfast. Their Jesus thinks that human flesh and its appetites are icky. Orthodox Jesus is disconcertingly unbothered about sexuality, and conducts his own sexual life, if he has one, off the page. Their Jesus can generate women to have sex with out of his own ribs, in a way that suggests the author had trouble talking to girls.

– Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p. 155-156.

Maybe it is just that I am so immersed in studying theology right now that I can’t get out of the pedant’s stance of the know-nothing-who-has-learned-a-little?

Your Correspondent, Will not stand for a world free of sexual and religious intolerance

This is the kind of book that makes one glad to be an evangelical. I don’t think it could be written from within any other Christian tradition. It is a gracious, deeply thoughtful and surprising account of what the Bible has to say about wealth and possessions. The whole Bible. And inter-testamental literature. It takes it chunk by chunk, bit by bit, spending more time in places that need it (Luke, Proverbs) and a little less where it isn’t as relevant (Numbers, 2 John).

It admirably locks down its analysis in suggested application and I know from having met and spent time with the man that Blomberg walks the walk that he talks about.

If you read it, you will be surprised by how radical it is.

… so long as prosperity is yielded to devotion. Although it is premature to speak of summarizing pervasive patterns throughout both Testaments, one of the theses of this volume is that the avoidance of extremes of wealth and poverty is a consistent, recurring biblical mandate. Of course, before we too readily label this a ‘middle-class’ ideal and content ourselves that we fall within this range, we must remember two things: first, polls consistently suggest that more than 80% of Westerners consider themselves middle-class, thus largely evacuating the term of any meaning; and second, the nature of the ‘middle-class’ ideal of Proverbs 30:8 is defined by the clause, ‘give me only my daily bread’, a far lower standard of living than that to which most people calling themselves middle-class today aspire.

– Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches, p. 68.

Your Correspondent, Founder of the Pre-Marital Sextet

Next time someone (like me) tells you we don’t have atheists as interesting as generations past enjoyed, slap them (even me) around the head and remind them of St. Kurt; a divine comedian, a prose-angel and a heavenly atheist:

I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.

I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.

I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!

– Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake, p. 211.

This book is many things. It is partly a memoir, in that wandering, almost bloggy way of late Vonnegut. It is partly a novel in that post modern high sci-fi way we grew to love. It is also, I could be wrong here, a narrative musing on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. It’s saved from disintegration by the clarity of prose and moral vision. That those things go together is no coincidence and even if we had to relive a hundred years, it’d be worth it.

Your Correspondent, God forbid but he suggest that Kurt is up in heaven now

One of my clearest moments of pure childhood surprise was the evening my aunt called to our front door with a cycling cap signed by the inestimably great Sean Kelly himself. It was a gift for me. I dared to not wear it. I showed it to my friends on the road I grew up on but otherwise it stayed in my bedroom. It was a relic. It was a sacred totem. I owned a bright orange Super de Luxe bike that I inherited from my older siblings. Everyone else had a BMX. I didn’t even have brakes. It pushed the pedals backwards to stop. In retrospect, the bike I grew up with was an awesome piece of classic design but I couldn’t see that at the age of 8.

I still won all the impromptu races we’d run during the Tour de France, in that era when Kelly and Stephen Roche were the greatest riders in the world.

I don’t know where the bike or the cap went. I wish I still had them both.

I knew of another Irish professional cyclist, Martin Earley and distinctly remember him winning a stage of the Tour in 1989. That was the summer I fell in love with soccer and forgot my dreams of being a cyclist. But reading Paul Kimmage’s classic memoir of his years as a pro cyclist, my boyhood adulation of these heroes came rushing back to me. Kimmage was the one Irish professional I was not aware of as a child. I knew him as a journalist in the Sunday Independent. I came to read the soccer news religiously and so his name was just one of those bylines I didn’t really care to pay attention to because it was rare that he would be interviewing Alan Kernaghan or Andy Townsend.

Rough Ride is now firmly canonical within the pantheon of great sporting books. It tells of Kimmage’s passion for the sport, growing up as the son of an Irish amateur champion, with a brother who was a gifted rider as well and with a circle of friends that included Roche and Earley. It tells of his rise through the amateur ranks to eventually make it as a pro in France in his early twenties. And then it tells with crushing and compelling momentum of his heart-breaking realisation that the sport he has sacrificed his youth for is plagued by drug abuse. He quit after four years, his spirit broken by the realisation that to even continue to compete, nevermind to win, he would have to start doping.

It was published in 1990 and won prominent awards but it was met with scepticism. There was a culture within the sport of deriding those who “spat in the soup” by trying to lift the lid on steroid usage. Kimmage was dismissed as a bitter failure who was driven to explain the mediocrity of his results by exaggerating the scale of corruption. The massive drug scandals that destroyed the Tour de France in 1998 were the most stunning vindication of Kimmage’s long-held claims.

That a cyclist would then suffer cancer, go through chemotherapy, lose a testicle and go on to win an unprecedented seven Tours in a row and still not be seriously suspected of doping is remarkable. Lance Armstrong’s recent, final, long awaited exposure as a fraud prompted me to read this book. But what Kimmage’s book revealed to me was that my easy characterisation of Armstrong as a cheat is simply not accurate enough. Armstrong and Kimmage and every cyclist since the late 1980s has been caught in a system where competition was skewed by doping. The doctors, therapists, team directors, race organisers, sponsors, sporting administration bodies and journalists were all complicit in a complex drive to assure results at any cost. A more keen follower of sport might be able to argue that the problems facing cycling flow inevitably from the professionalisation of sport. Having read this book, any scepticism I might have held about doping culture in other sports has reduced to a minimum. Innocence is hard to protect when the drugs exist and the TV money is on offer.

My favourite part of the book is a paragraph in the middle detailing an especially hard climb on a fiendishly hot day up an Alpine slope in the Tour de France. The Prodigal Son echoes through the memory Kimmage shares:

The only regret I had was for my parents. They came over from Ireland on two weeks’ holiday to see the race with my youngest brother Christopher. My only bad day of the race was on the first mountain stage to Mondane. It was a scorching hot day and I cracked early on the Col de Glandon. I knew my parents were waiting for me at the top. I dreaded passing them so far down the field, and in my frustration I composed a speech that explained my role of domestique. On seeing them at the side of the road I planned to stop and say, ‘Da, I’m sorry. Look at me. This is the reality. This is what I am. I’m not a star and never will be. I am a water carrier, a domestique, a nothing.’ I never got to say the prepared words. He was standing two kilometres from the top, with a bottle of water. I smiled, pulled in and filled my bidon. He said I was doing fine, and pushed me off, encouraging me further. His enthusiasm lightened my heart and my speech was cancelled.

 

– Paul Kimmage, Rough Ride, pp. 110-11.

Your Correspondent, Needs a tagline like a fish needs a bicycle

This book is an acclaimed masterpiece of comedy, a Pulitzer prize winner and according to my friend Leanie, whose judgment I trust in all things artistic, the funniest book she has ever read. It simply didn’t capture me at all.

Ignatius J. Reilly is a dirty, obese, lazy, scowling serial masturbater who holds the world and everyone in it with utter contempt. That is a hard character to build a novel around. And according to what we might call the David Brent Rule for antiheroes, if you’re gonna chart a story around someone so repugnant, there must be a kernel to them which can be truly loved. Maybe I missed it, or maybe the scene around the burial of Rex was meant to evoke it in me but at no point did Kennedy Toole make me like or even understand Reilly. As his mother says of him, he isn’t only crazy, he’s mean too.

And I can see that the novel is charted out like The Consolations of Philosophy, which is Reilly’s favourite book. There are plenty of memorable and amusing set-pieces (“Attacked by a bird,” Mrs. Reilly wept. “That hadda happen to you, Ignatius. Nobody ever gets attacked by a bird.”). I can appreciate that there is a vivid description of New Orleans. But the problem isn’t just that the lead character is such a gickbag. Everyone is awful. His mother is weak and aggressive, the Levy couple are awful to each other and dreadful on their own, Mancuso is inexplicable in his incompetence- there is no one in this novel you can even hope to like.

Which makes it hard to finish the novel and say, “Gee, that was a book I liked!”

Your Correspondent, Needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency.

I was inordinately pleased when I heard this week that Zadie Smith reported that the most “impassioned” book recommendation David Foster Wallace ever gave her was for Brian Moore’s little novella, Catholics.

I know Brian Moore was friends with Joan Didion and he won lots of prizes but I always feel like he is the most neglected of all of Ireland’s great literary talents. There is no Irish author more eminently readable than Moore and his treatment of Irish religion, even living in exile in Canada and California, was unparalleled.

Apart from Aidan Mathews of course. If Moore is neglected, Mathews seems forgotten. Yet his short story collection from 1988, Adventures In A Bathyscope blew my mind as a young teenager. Re-reading it as an adult was the rarest of pleasures- I got to think fondly of my adolescent self for being so exhilarated by such fine art. Lipstick On The Host is his second collection of short stories. It is magnificent. The title story comes last and tells of an English teacher, aged 41, alone with nothing but the considerable compensation of her wonderful integrity and wit.

And then most unexpectedly, she falls in love. It is touching and tragic and lovely and heavy. It alone is worth the price of the second hand book procured through some digital mastery via a warehouse in Texas. Yet it is joined by tales where Mathews inhabits the lives of housewives, little boys and 1st Century camels.

And in his depiction of characters who have faith he excels far beyond Moore and basically is the finest writer of fiction who ends up penning theology I have yet encountered. I rate it higher than Dostoevsky. I would though, cos Fyodor is from 1890’s Russia whereas Matthews was writing about the Ireland I grew up in. Where Moore describes faith in such a way that it actually is realistic and believable, it remains the description of a church from the outside. He discerns much from the glow through the stained glass windows. Matthews knows what the faith feels like from the inside. He thus never falls into telling you that religion is a lifestyle choice that motivates the peculiar actions of a character. It is much deeper than that. Much realer than that. Much more alive than that.

I had a great session with the fifth years and Milton. We talked about the paradox of him being a Puritan who adored the city of Rome; we talked about the paradox of a Christian scripting mighty fine speeches for Satan, and then we talked for a time about The Exorcist, because they wanted to. Mind you, I always thought The Exorcist was an over-eighteen. They all agreed the best scene was where the head turns round and she vomits everywhere. That was when I tried to get them back to Milton and how his use of lovely, long Latin words is a compensation for no sex. It is, actually, a kind of cunnilingus.

Should I have said that? Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. You can show them pictures of the electric chair or a baby eating blue-bottles in a back-street in Bangladesh, but you can’t tell them that people receive each other like Holy Communion.

– Aidan Mathews, “Lipstick on the Host” in Lipstick on the Host, p. 248-249.

I loved this book.

Your Correspondent, He’s as bright as his hair is dark

This is a long, uneven but ultimately worthwhile novel. It is Franzen’s second work and as thematically all over the map as 27th City, Corrections and Freedom. It deals with induced seismicity, the influence of evangelical Christianity on American politics, the nature of environmental discourse, the moral conundrum that is abortion, the curse that inheritance can be and many other issues besides. It also is notable for once again being like his first novel, a book that features major protagonists who are not very likeable. But what is going to linger for me is probably the very realistic depiction of a charismatic young anti-abortion campaigner:

He nodded. “Persecution, sure, that’s your line on it. But not deportation and murder. See, I think what’s bothering you about these videos is they’re so effective. They affect you. But there’s even more effective ads on TV for buying jeans or buying beer. Ads that use sex, which is the most powerful and dishonest thing of all. You know, like if I drink Bud Light I’ll get my own hot little beach girl to mess around with. You talk about dishonest and manipulative and harmful. And if you’re up against a pernicious thing like that, you need some powerful images yourself. And the fact is, there is something beautiful about a mother and her baby, and there is something ugly about abortions. All I want’s an equal shot at the market. And the thing is I can’t get one.”

– Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion, p. 326.

Your Correspondent, Religions can’t have shots at the market without being subject to hostile takeovers

I realised while reading this very enjoyable and interesting little novel why I still have a problem with sci-fi or as they like to call it to make it more respectable, “speculative fiction”. It can be very well written, it is almost always diverting in its initial premise. Both of these things apply to Roberts’ New Model Army that fascinatingly posits the rise of mercenary militias in the not-too-distant future. They are deeply connected by computer networks and this disposes of the hierarchies that have ordered armies for millennia. These “new model armies” raise havoc where they emerge and Roberts produces excellent thought-provoking scenarios about the very radical idea that is pure democracy.

It also manages to do this without what I call “Zeeing“, which is when a novelist ruins the narrative with technical descriptions of the imagined worlds he had built.

The niggling problem I still have however is how the sci-fi novelist slips so easily into something that isn’t quite lecturing but certainly is a self-indulgent digression from the story that the author worked so hard to get me interested about. In sci-fi novels, passages like this are tolerated almost without notice:

This is Homo sapiens, on the small scale, from the earliest times: eating and sleeping; fucking and fighting. Under ‘eating’ we can bracket all the activities associated with fetching food, all the hunting and the gathering. Under ‘sleeping’ we can bracket all forms of resting, lounging in the sun, starting at the trees, or the walls of our cave. Otherwise what we do, as monkeys, or hominids, or Neanderthals, or early man, in the savannahs or forests, is fuck and fight. Two things that have more in common than just alliteration. The big change is not fire, or the wheel, or language. The big change is play. Play grows into something new. Because, of course, most animals play a little, from time to time. But what makes human beings human is the way we filter everything we do through play. Fucking, inflected via play, parses not only into more elaborate and all-year-round fucking and role-play fucking and all that: it parses into dancing, and music; into art and culture and science. Fighting inflected via play parses into sport, and into politics, and religion. And soon enough we reach a time when it is impossible to simply fuck, or fight – impossible, even, simply to eat or sleep. Play, in its spiralling recherché, rococo forms, shapes everything we do. We are always playing; whether we are talking about work or leisure, about being alone or being with others, we are addicted to play,play is our complete horizon. What have I been doing, if not playing at soldiers? Playing at killing and breaking? Why else would I have enjoyed it so much, if there had been no play involved? The mistake we make, I suppose, is in thinking that playful is in some sense opposed to serious. Play owns seriousness, wholly.

There’s nothing more serious than play.

– Adam Roberts, New Model Army, p. 263-264.

If that was true, discipline in how you tell stories would be a very important measure by which to assess the success of novels.

Your Correspondent, Always wanted to see a mailbox shoot a boy