Category: Book Reviews

Novels, and the pleasures of other people’s worlds

In the bookshop in St Andrews on Saturday.

Had a book token and a gift token.

Bought four novels and paid 74 pence.

Decided not to take a historical novel about Elizabethan martyrs – the blurb said, "enjoyable, bloody and brutish".

Decided I don't need any more novels about murder, mayhem and maggots.

Tried to buy a children's book, Klimt and His Cat – I do also read children's books though they have to be a bot different – this one is.

Did buy an Alexander McCall Smith for Sheila who has become a fan of this undemanding though not unsophisticated writer who seems to think human nature isn't all bleakness, blackness and bloodletting. I happen to believe he is right.

The one I'm looking forward to reading over the next couple of days, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld – one of those social novels that explores human relationships, politics and how the two inevitably affect each other, for better, for worse and in ways not so easily categorised.

A favourite writer, Daniel Silva, writes about Israeli intelligence, the new Moscow underworld and the web of power, corrutpion and greed that provides fertile soil for terrorist activity.

And I've been a fan of Douglas Kennedy ever since I read The Big Picture, and discovered that he is always rewarding as a thoughtful, knowing and sympathetic teller of people's stories as they try to find their way out of whatever life throws at tem – as the blurb says,' he delivers the message that whatever hole you dig yourself into, you're probably not alone.'

So. Some good reading over the next few days, before the van delivers our stuff to our new house, and the priorities of making home take over from the pleasures of other people's worlds.

21 March 2010
Kay Carmichael – Social Reformer, Academic Teacher, Peace Activist – She looked humanely forth on human life

By the time I met Kay Carmichael in 1974 she was already a highly respected and influential leader in social policy. She had served on The Kilbrandon Committee in 1964, under whose Report recommendations the Scottish Children's Hearing System came into being under the Children's (Scotland) Act 1968. The introduction of Children's Panels not only decriminalised many of the actions of children normally taken before Juvenile Court, they moved thinking from punishment to help. The approach recognised that many childhood difficulties, including neglect, abuse, criminal activity and other situations that put children at risk, required to be addressed with support, understanding and actions taken "in the best interests of the child", and decided by trained members of the local community guided by a Children's Reporter, and in conversation with the responsible adults in the child's life. The philosophy underlying these policies was, and remains, creative, forward looking, and optimistic about the difference that can be made in young lives if good decisions and adequate resources can be put in place. The result is a way of viewing children and their families that is widely admired across the world; and one which successive Scottish Governments do well to maintain, develop and protect from those accountancy viruses that so destructively undermine in the interests of money the health of something almost unqualifiedly good.

Later in the 1970's Kay Carmichal was involved in the Lilybank project, working with those on benefits in the East End of Glasgow. Controversially she went incognito for three months, and was filmed living on the Benefit Level of £10.50 per week. She exposed the humiliation, the indignity, the sheer grinding inuhumanity, that so many people encounter in dealing with the State Welfare system. Again, what was being demonstrated and thought through was the revolutionary impact on social policy of respect for persons and humane social policy as default values in a political philosophy.

She began working with the most violent prisoners, trying to reconnect alienated people of violence to the community. It was experimental thinking like hers that would lead to the setting up of the Barlinnie Special Unit, once again encouraging at the level of policy-making, the search for understanding, relational co-operation, and how to harness the resources of the wider community in addressing social and human failings. Later in life she explored much more deeply the issues of sin and forgiveness, society's response to criminality and the deeper human questions of restorative justice and human rehabilitation. Kay Carmichael was my teacher, the best kind, who managed to combine impressive intellect, creative pragmatism and awareness of the significance of teaching young minds to look humanely forth on human life. There is therefore something deeply moving about the thought that she completed her PhD on Sin and Forgiveness at the age of 76, after a lifetime's professional, academic and political experience in the social implications of human failure and community response, sin and forgiveness.

More could be said – her lifelong anti-nuclear activism as a peace delinquent (her word), her work on behalf of those ensnared in prostitution, her instinctive resistance to all kinds of social discrimination, her support for schemes to give disabled people the right to as much independent living as they could manage, and her deep moral antipathy to poverty that in her view is not inevitable, if only we could develop a more humane politics and a less ruthless economics.

Social work is a hard place to be now. Seldom are those who work within the systems rewarded by public respect, moral support, and a wider awareness of just how hard it is to get everything right all of the time. And I do have a troubling suspicion that future Kay Carmichaels may be unable to break free of the current love affair in large service providers, with micro-managed constraints that discourage creative reflection, and avoid the risk of experiment. Which in turn suppresses (as by product or deliberate policy the result is the same) the expression in professional theory and practice of that social compassion, those imaginative ideas that are building blocks of vision.

For now I salute this woman whose articulate and passionate voice spoke for so many whose voices were seldom listened to. And time spent in her class was as important in the formation of my understanding of a truly pastoral and good news ministry as love for others, as any other course I took – including an intense theological training in our own College.

There is a fine Obituary in the Scotsman here. I haven't found an online photo of Kay. Her funeral service will take place in Glasgow later today. I greatly regret I won't be able to be there, so this post is intended as a modest acknowledgement of an immodest personal debt – by the way her funeral is to be followed by champagne and sausage rolls at a local hotel – how characteristic is that!

8 January 2010
State of Play, and Wolf Hall – two studies in the ruthlessness of the self

Over New Year we watched the six episodes of the TV version of State of Play – way much better than the Hollywood version. Whatever we think causes the moral malaise and public cynicism surrounding current politics and journalism, this drama tackles some of the underlying causes of that dangerous disillusion with the capacity of public figures to be trusted. It also explores the fankled mess of divided loyalty, blackmail, betrayal, the ruthlessness of the ambitious self, the ease with which relationships are peddled in the marketplace where power is brokered; and it does so against the background of corporate business, government, energy policy and those unprincipled decisions that shatter lives.

All in all, a satisfying confirmation that all have sinned, and that the insatiable appetite for power and self preservation drives human beings to deeds and dispositions that do indeed fall far short of the glory of God. And yet the series portrays human behaviour and its consequences as tragic, the broken lives and inflicted anguish as not in the end what was intended, but rather the consequences of actions which if they could have been foreseen…..

But of course foresight isn't in our gift as human beings; we can't foresee all the consequences of our compromises, betrayals, lies, power games. Not so. Foresight isn't a crystal ball we don't have access to; it is that creative process of moral imagination, awareness that actions have consequences for those near and distant to us. And foresight, in the ethical sense is to be responsible and responsive to that inner voice we call conscience, because when conscience is persistently shouted down by the claims of the strident self-determined ego, it is gradually silenced. But John Stuart Mill wasn't far wrong when he spoke of the conscience as that web of moral feeling which when violated is later encountered as remorse. And remorse is brilliantly portrayed by David Morrissey in this drama.

Running parallel with my viewing of State of Play, my reading of Hilary mantel's Wolf Hall. Take most of the above review of human cruelty and cynicism, and the description of the State and the individual in ruthless pursuit of power, and the parallels become fascinatingly close. Especially when it is very clear that power is not grasped and wielded for its own sake, but for the sake of the person who pursues it and cultivates it. Yet both State of Play and Wolf Hall have characters who act within a recognised code of honour; the journalist in pursuit of the story, protecting sources, upholding the public right to know; Thomas Cromwel's rise as advisor to Henry VIII, making and breaking lives as he orchestrates the court intrigue and lethal alliances of Tudor politics. In Wolf Hall the question of morally generated foresight and the slow reorientation of conscience to the service of the self is also explored in the relationships and conflicts between political expediency and moral consequence. Mantel's novel is a partial rehabilitation of Cromwell, a sympathetic portrayal of the English Machiavelli whose volume The Prince is Cromwell's textbook on political survival and required ruthlessness.

All in all, a few days of enjoyment – laced with reflections on how power, tragedy, human ambition and failure, love and betrayal, cruelty and compassion, manifest themselves differently in different historical periods. But it is the same tragedy, the same broken glory of the human being, lacking moral foresight yet culpably ignoring their best lights, human life unredeemed but not unredeemable. Because against the bleak sense of the inevitability of the tragic, and the contemporary loss of faith in the goodness of life, the Christian story is of God entering into the full tragic consequences of human sin. And not as Machiavellian Prince bent on violent re-ordering and manipulative exploitation of the world, but as Prince of Peace. As self-giving love the Prince of Peace contradicts the will to power, and in his death all that makes for implacable death is crucified; and as the life and love and light of God, hope is resurrected as He is risen with healing, embodying the promise of a new kind of humanity, signal of a renewed creation, the beginning of the reconciling of all things.

6 January 2010
A more hopeful attention to the future…

World Beyond

He stands by a window.

A flock of starlings

settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree.

Then, like black buds unfolding,

they open their wings;

black notes in music.

He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure:

that something almost extinct,

some small gesture towards the future,

is ready to welcome the spring;

in some spare, desperate way

he is looking forward to Easter,

the end of Lenten fasting,

the end of penitence.

There is a world beyond this black world.

There is a world of the possible…

He sees it; then he doesn't.

The moment is fleeting.

But insight cannot be taken back.

You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

…… …… ……

Actually not a poem. A beautifully written paragraph (which I've restructured) from Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's novel about Thomas Cromwell and the intrigues, betrayals and political shenanigans of the Tudor Court. It describes the inner change of worldview and self-determination in Thomas Cromwell, as he moves finally from grief at the death of his family from plague, to a much more hopeful attention to his own future. His star is on the ascendant and he begins to sense it without yet fully understanding it. He has discovered the world of the possible.

This is historical fiction of exceptional standard – recreating the early modern world, Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and the reverberations across Christendom of Henry the VIII's obsession with producing a male heir. Reading this one slowly.

2 January 2010
Short story writers and people who don’t get out much…..

Short stories are an acquired taste. Sheila enjoys them. I have to persevere.

Book reviews can be hacked out blurb, or carefully crafted appreciation which is neither gushing nor keen to put down.

Books and Culture is one of my favourite sources of advice and warning about what's what and what's good on the book front.

So if you go to Books and Culture here you'll find a carefully crafted appreciation of the most recent volume of The Best American Short Stories.

This
is a book review as it should be – makes me want to read the book.
Encourages me to go against the grain of what I usually like reading.
Invites me to persevere.

Wouldn't
you, once you are drawn in by the first few sentences of this review,
written by someone who clearly knows a thing or two about the
cruciality of story?

"Fiction writers, people who by definition have chosen
as their life's work to sit at home, alone—often in their jammies—and
make things up. The world, as seen by people who don't get out much.

But the facts are all there on the evening news (or
we'd like to think at least they once were). We are awash in
information. What we need is understanding, some way of puzzling the
whole thing out, deciding what to make of all the goings-on.

Enter the short story writer—in a bathrobe—with a cup
of coffee, a compass, a thermometer, a flashlight, a spyglass, a
decoder ring."

4 December 2009
Gordon Fee as Exegete: Giving Paul his due and the importance of word order

Two examples of Fee's no nonsense exegetical comments:

"R F Collins argues (unconvincingly) that Paul has here taken over an earlier formula and adapted it to his own purposes. While all things are possible, not all possible things are equally probable. Indeed, it is of considerable interest that the most creative theologian in the early church is seen as not capable of being creative at points like this, but must be assumed to be borrowing from others – and that without evidence."

……………………….

On Paul's use of charis and shalom in the greeting:

"Paul salutes his brothers and sisters in Christ with "grace to you – and peace." It is worth noting that this is the invariable order of Paul's words, not "grace and peace to you" as in most translations. Very likely there is significance to this order: the grace of God and Christ is what is given to God's people; peace is what results from such a gift. Hence "grace to you – and peace."…The sum total of God's activity towards his human creatures is found in the word "grace"; God has given himself to his people bountifully and mercifully in Christ. Nothing is deserved, nothing can be achieved. The sum total of those benefits as they are experienced by the recipients of God's grace is "peace", God's eschatological shalom, both now and to come."

………………….

If the task of the exegete is to enable later readers to hear as clearly as possible, the voice of the one speaking in the text, then these two brief quotations are good examples of why Gordon Fee is a trusted guide. For myself, I wholly concur with his pedantic care in translating Paul's greeting "grace to you – and peace". Allowing the brief pause between the two both distinguishes and connects them in a way that is profoundly theological.

On another note, the Scottish Baptist College Blog is being revived into a discussion forum for issues that we as part of the Scottish Baptist community want to explore in conversation. In particular we want to explore areas of theological education, ministry formation, discipleship in 21st Century Culture, and we will include occasional book reviews. It will also contain news and comment from our College community and have some guest posts from students and others now and again. You might want to go look – I'll occasionally flag it up here as new material is added.

6 November 2009
Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 – I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify – and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 – £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan – but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well – and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago – "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback – but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 – but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want – I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check – so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing – and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price – as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate – but only very slightly.

7 October 2009
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity. A five star volume *****

Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the finest ecclesiastical historians on the planet. Some years ago I placed his magnificent biography of Thomas Cranmer on my desk and slowly paced my way through one of the most accomplished biographies in print. The reviewers used words like massive, definitive, exhaustive, detailed, sympathetic, balanced – they're all true enough. But it was also hugely enjoyable, and written by someone who knows that however scholarly the research, and however secure the overall thesis, what makes a book persuasive is the quality of the writing and the shaping of the story. Macculloch is brilliant at the large scale literary masterpiece – and his portrayal of Cranmer the "hesitant hero" is simply that.

So three years ago the only book I took on a walking holiday in the Tyrol was the paperback version of Reformation. Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. I don't know a better survey of that century of revolutionary religion, radical politics, national re-alignments, political alliances and collisions, of superstition and faith, of lethal wars and fragile peace. I remember, for example, reading MacCulloch's account of Luther's oscillating relationships with the power brokers of his day, whether the Pope, Frederick of Saxony, Zwingli, the peasants, even God – and learning so much about a subject I thought I knew quite a lot about! The whole book is an education in historical nuance, depth of cultural awareness and imaginative analysis, helping us understand how the church has come to be what and where and who it is – and why it din't need to be like this.

So now his new book has landed on my desk with an almighty thump. Twelve hundred pages (well, I exaggerate – 1161), 160 of them notes and further reading. But 1000 pages of carefully organised story, the facts, the dates, the people, but also the movements, the social and cultural trends, the large patterns, the ebb and flow of power and influence as the church has evolved in a changing continuity. Starting from Galilean sect, to Jewish splinter group, to Mediterranean religion, and Roman state sponsored faith under Constantine. Moving on to medieval cultural hegemony in western europe, with alternative versions in the East, the Reformation split, the religious wars, and the European expansion to the new worlds. Followed by the destabilising and disruoptive intellectual energies of the Enlightenment, giving impetus to further reinvention, reaction and accomodation to the modern and now the postmodern and globalised world. And all of this in only 1000 pages. I have a friend who loves thin books – so do I. But everyone needs balance, and just now and again, it's important to pick up a book that requires careful handling to avoid later back problems.

So – there's probably a month's worth of early reading in this big beautiful book, sitting at my desk, a large mug of tea, just before 6.00 a.m., and with only Gizmo the cat for company. If it takes longer it won't matter – I'll be dead erudite when I've read it so I will.

2 October 2009
The importance of the muttered Amen when reading good stuff!

Now and then while reading this book I mutter an 'amen' with a strength of conviction to match the most passionate Calvinist, hearing a prayer of thanksgiving for God's sovereign electing grace and its fixity in the eternal decrees. Or with just as much conviction as Charles Wesley in 'Let Earth and heaven Agree', one of his less savagely satirical anti-calvinist hymns, in which he trumpets, "For all my Lord was crucified, For all, for all my Saviour died".

What provoked such occasional passionate responses in reading this book wasn't in fact these specifics and collision points of theology. It's the way the writers defend that without which all theology becomes a reiterated loop of propositional slogans – a teachable mind. By the way, time and again Calvin preached about the need to be teachable (memorably on Ephesians) – to cultivate a docility and receptiveness open to the truth of God. Not sure what Jean Calvin the pastor would make of the postmodern mindset, but I think he would have little quarrel with the defence of reasonable theologising that's commended in this book:

[The] challenge to one's deepest assumptions plays an important part for the renewal of the mind and for the training of the intelligent – indeed, wise – leaders for the coming generations.* Christian education is not faith-affirming if it merely confirms our cultural and denominational prejudices.* Only when our deepest assumptions are challenged will we be able to hold our faith with the kind of intelligent conviction that makes us credible witnesses of the new humanity instituted by Christ.**

Because God has given all of us reason as a gift integral to understanding the world asnd our purpose in it, thinking is a Christian calling.* In this calling the Christian has to recognise that reason is given to all and that all truth is God's truth…If Jesus is the incarnate Logos in whom we live, and move, and have our being, then all truth is part of him and leads to him.* This makes all truth about humanity and nature worthy of study. To think is not a luxury for the Christian but part of the essence of the Christian's religion.* A person's experience of freedom, including the freedom of intellectual enquiry, is absolutely fundamental to authentic Christian experience.** Thinking, with all its risks, is mandatory for the Christian."*

The Passionate Intellect. Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 196-7.

The italics for emphasis are in the original (including Wesley's), - the asterisks represent the aforementioned muttered 'Amens!' I use a well developed way of marking books I read – think I'll add to them an A*, symbolising 'intensely muttered convictonal Amen'.

1 October 2009
Terry Eagleton and the radical claims of the Gospel of Jesus

Now here's a long passage from Terry Eagleton, whose approach to Christian apologetics is rather novel. As a non theistic cultural critic not averse to strongly worded criticisms of Christian faith, he nevertheless insists (against Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest) that counter arguments should enage with real Christianity not ignoramus caricatures; and that hostile critics should tackle real Christianity which at every level including the rational, is a scandal.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" is a notoriously enigmatic injunction; but whatever it means, it is unlikely to mean that religion is one thing whereas politics is another, a peculiarly modern prejudice if ever there was one. Any devout Jew of jesus's time would have known the things that are God's include working for justice, welcoming the immigrants, and humbling the high and mighty. The whole cumbersome paraphernalia of religion is to be replaced by another kind of temple, that of the murdered, transfigured body of Jesus. To the outrage of the Zealots, the Pharisees, and right wing rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but are flamboyantly unrighteous – who either live in chronic trnasgression of the Mosaic law or, like the Gentiles, fall outside its sway altogether.

These men and women are not being asked to bargain their way into God's favour by sacrificing beasts, fussing about their diet, or being impeccably well behaved. Instead, the good news is that god loves them anyway, in all their moral squalor. Jesus's message is that God is on their side despite thier visciousness – that the source of the inexhaustibly self-delighting life he calls his Father is neither judge, patriarch, accuser or superego, but lover, friend, fellow accused, and counsel for the defense….Men and woman are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledge the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith. In fact, Jesus has very little to say about sin at all, unlike a great many of his censorious followers. His mission is to accept men and women's frailty, not to rub their noses in it."

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale, 2009), pp. 19-20.

Now one part of me wants to make this long apologia for the Gospel of Jesus the basis of an essay assignment on Contemporary Mission Strategy and the Gospel of Jesus, with the uncomplicated instruction – "Discuss".

Another part of me is left wondering why an agnostic who is resistant to Christianity makes a far better job of stating the core of the Gospel than many a Christian preacher and / or theologian.

In any case – the book is a tonic – not so much comforting as bracing, and not so much an apologia for Christian faith as an apology for the intellectual sloppiness of much new atheism dogma.

2 September 2009