Our Sound is Our Wound by Lucy Winkett

Our Sound is Our Wound: Contemplative Listening to a Noisy World - The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2010

I heard Lucy Winkett at Greenbelt earlier in the year giving a talk based on this book and the it was good to follow that up by reading the book and allowing some of the ideas to be explained in greater depth and to have the time to reflect on them more fully.

The major insight of the book is that we live in a noisy world and that sound is never neutral - there is always a meaning being imparted along with it.  Given that the sounds of our contemporary world are mostly encountered involuntarily it is of even greater importance for us to be attentive to the meaning that are being forced upon us.


Within this umbrella of an idea the book is wide ranging and eclectic and is best understood as a series loosely related essays rather than a single developed thesis, but that is no bad thing.  The book is littered with powerful illustrative examples and the force of the argument that Lucy is putting forward is really driven by these examples - its truthfulness is encountered by having life those experiences yourself.

The chapter on the Sound of the Angels was for me the most interesting - and the idea that it is more important to love Angels than to believe in them seem to be a profoundly important message to our Post-Modern world - and one that it equally applicable to God as to Angels.

I would definitely recommend this book as it is highly readable and yet still manages to prompt lots of 'big' questions.

In The Dark by Beryl Stafford Williams

In the Dark

Another book read following a review in Planet 

To echo the Planet review it would be a mistake to assume that because the protagonists of this story are children that the book is in anyway childish.  The story is really captivating, and while the basic plot is straight out of the Famous Five, even this Blyton fan will admit that there is a really powerful depth of characterization here that is absence in the one dimensional thrills of Blyton’s work.

One of the strengths of the book is that you are transported into the Second World War atmosphere in which “careless talk costs lives” and so it is completely believable that the lead character 60 years on has only a partial understanding of the events that unfolded around her – and then even the space of decades does not allow every question to be answered – in fact in the final pages of the book new questions enter the frame just where you expected there to be a tying up of the loose ends.

The back drop of the drama is the evacuation of the National Gallery to a quarry in the mountains of Wales – this was an evocative symbol of the British war effort, a token perhaps to prove that we the British were fighting for civilization in the face of the brutal and inhumane Nazis. The book nods in the direction of these grand themes but thankfully avoids getting bogged down in them – it would have been an easy trap to fall into by inserting a long and clunky essay on the state of the humanity into the mouth of one of the rural teenagers.  

Sold as a Slave by Olaudah Equiano

Sold as a Slave (Penguin Great Journeys)

Part of the Penguin Great Journeys series this was an interesting read giving a rare view of slavery from the inside.  What is most telling is the way in which we can see that the system of slavery, particularly as it was found in the West Indies, allowed otherwise normal and 'civilised' people to carry out acts of immense cruelty without a second thought - the parallels to the Holocaust are self evident.  But what makes the life story of Olaudah Equiano most shocking and so powerful an indictment against slavery is the fact that isn't an unrelenting tale of woe. Alongside the moments of gross inhumanity there are moments of joy born out of humanity at its best - and these serve to make the cruelty all the more real.

The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

 I was prompted to read this due the numerous references to it in Billy Bragg's Progressive Patriot in particularly as he pointed out that this is the source of the "old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning" which is such a vivid and oft used image that I was keen to see it in its original context.

It is always really interesting to read a piece of writing that is of its moment, and this is one such text, written early in the Second World War in the midst of the dark days of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, days that have been commemorated all over our TVs in the last few weeks. Orwell is writing here with a very explicit political agenda and the skill he displays here made his argument a persuasive one.

But rather than go on and on about how wonderful Orwell was as a writer, as I am a big fan, I think what is more interesting is to search for what this work might say to us today.

In many ways we can see the establishment of the Welfare State, the wave of nationalisations, and the dismantlement of the Empire, after the War as the fulfilment of  Orwell's vision yet since 1979 we have, as a nation, turned our back on that vision.  But now the Thatcherite and Blairite projects are over, does the current financial crisis merit a reassessment of Orwell's socialist future?.

The first thing to acknowledge is Orwell's method, he is very clear in making the first part of the book, "England Your England", a review of the current situation because to talk about the future you need to understand the present - and we are not in the England of 1940 and so we need to be careful because the answer to the problem that Orwell saw in 1940 is unlikely to be the same as the answer we need today (although it might perhaps be similar).

The second thing to acknowledge is that Orwell clearly sees that the radical change he is advocating was only becoming possible because the threat posed by Hitler was psychologically so massive that it had a unifying effect on the country and allowed vested interests to be cast aside in favour of the common good.  However, for better or worse, the current crisis is not (or not yet) of the psychological magnitude to have the required galvanising effect to allow radical change.  That said if we look at Climate Change I think that we can begin to see signs of that kind of movement. 

And so, a little disappointedly, I find my self concluding (unlike Billy Bragg) that it probably doesn't have that much to say directly to our present times. That does not devalue it, it is still fascinating to read, bittersweet at those moments we see that Orwell is right that England will always be England - with the good and bad points of national character that he holds up just as strong today, and it can form an inspiration and a template to those trying to formulate a better future for us all.

Non-return by Dai Vaughan

Non-Return

I read this book following a review in Planet  "The International Magazine for Wales" which is a major source of my reading alongside the book reviews in the Church Times (these two plus Amazon do a lot of damage to my bank balance!).

The structure of the book adds to the interest - with every other chapter breaking away from the main narrative and being at one level a short story in itself and at another overlaping with some aspect of the that main narrative.  These chapters' alternative voices give relief to the otherwise rather self absorbed emotional drama of the main narrator (relief both in the sense of as a rest from it and also by adding depth to it).  

The narrator begins as an apprentice draughtsman in the 50s and the descriptions of the drawing office leave you, even a child of the 80s like me, with a vivid sense of nostalgia for a lost and dimly remembered analogue age, when he muses that "that's always to a degree the magic of railway travel where... you can't be reached on the telephone" you could almost be tempted to weep for what we have losted even in the 'quiet' coach (and, yes, I do see the irony in blogging nostalgically about the analogue past!).

He begins wrestling with the youthful search for identity and yet, as we journey with him through the decades, we discover that the search goes on and at the end of the book, in retirement, we find that he is still wrestling with that same search for identity.  This could be disheartening and yet here it is somehow life affirming - it give us all permission to go on searching - and it avoids the trap of offering a tidy ending.  Another interesting aspect of his journey comes when his wife joins the Greenham Women's Camp, and how he negoiates a relationship with that cause (the content of the cause is not important - it could be any deeply held conviction of a partner).  He is always going to be an outsider from that part of her life and yet he searches for ways to be a part of it, to show support and yet reconciling himself to the role of an outsider as it becomes clear that it is only from this position that you can genuinely share in someone's passion without trampling on it and making it yours not their. This all makes for a very absorbing and enjoyable read.