Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh

I read this book as a spin off from reading The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane, while MacFarlane walks in many locations Shehadeh's account is about walking in the “same” landscape over time – across times of great change.

This is a strongly political account because Shehadeh is a Palestinian walking in the West Bank, land occupied by Israel since 1967, and about which all discourse is politically charged.

Before the foundation of the State of Israel there was already a tension between the Palestinian experience of the land and the various colonizers narratives about it. The life of the Palestinians was often negated by these narratives about the land as a barren wilderness. At one level the Israel settlement of the West Bank is an extension of that colonial narrative of development of the wilderness (which has marginalised native populations across the global).

The Jewish identification with the land of the Biblical Israel, especially as articulated by Zionists, adds additional layers of complexity, of passion, and of pain to that standard dynamic.

One of the most depressing aspects of the book is Shehadeh's assessment of the Oslo Accords, which many of us took as the only real opportunity for peace there has been, and yet he felt they were a betrayal of the grass roots Palestinians and a guarantor of continuing violence. Sadly his assessment increasingly seems to have been accurate.

It is clear that there is mutual dehumanizing of the Palestinian and Israeli populations. The current separation, which is only going to be further entrenched by construction of the Israeli wall, allows both sides to ignore the humanity of the other and while that continues there is little chance of peace. Hope of a kind, albeit still very small, comes in the penultimate comes when Shedadeh encounters an Isreali Settler on one of his walks, it is a humanizing encounter for them both. (For while Shedadeh is a good man up until this point he had viewer the Settlers as a category rather than as people).

Once you acknowledge the humanity of the actors on both sides of a conflict simplistic divisions between the “good” and the “bad” have to be refused – but while resolution then appears more complex it is only be addressing that true complexity that meaningful and lasting resolutions are possible at all.

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

NB – Contains Spoilers

This is the third part of C. S. Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy but, after trips to Mars and Venus, this time we remain earth bound.

Published in 1945 this feels somewhat more political than the two pre-war parts and there is a definite Orwellian overtone to the N.I.C.E.

I found the antics of the N.I.C.E. (the Nation Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments rather than the latter day National Institute for Clinical Excellence) more engaging that the mysticism centred around the space travelling Ransom.

This was especially the case for N.I.C.E.'s Deputy Director, Wither, with his unfailing ability to speak without ever saying anything. He must have been a hero to Sir Humphrey and possibly civil servants everywhere. Wither takes “plausible deniable” (the holy grail for a successful political career) and elevates it to an art form.

That the University Don C. S. Lewis casts a “technocratic” Institute as the instrument of evil is revealing if not terribly surprising. During the first couple decades after the World War Two Britain embraced the technocrat in a way it had never done before, and mostly has not since. It was an era of great “Plans”, epitomised by the New Towns, and so it is interesting that at one level “That Hideous Strength” is a pre-emptive back-lash.

The allegorical quality of this novel is less evident than in the previous part, Perelandra, but the Christianity of those drawn around Ransom, even of Merlin, is firmly stated. The demise of the N.I.C.E. in a blood bath it perhaps an honest outcome but if you were hopeful of redemption... that seems lacking.

The couple at the centre of the novel, Mark and Jane, are neither of them particularly likeable. I guess one should be drawn to Jane as she is at least on the right side of the conflict, but really I found her pathetic and insipid. In one respect this is a token of the quality of the storytelling, it remains engaging whilst being devoid of any truly sympathetic characters.

To the extent that it is Orwellian it is to me a pessimistic vision. The power of N.I.C.E. is only broken by supernatural intervention and the novel clearly states that humanity, left on its own, would have succumb. Of course N.I.C.E. had its own supernatural backers too, so if you concede that supernatural “good” is needed to counter supernatural “evil”, perhaps you can hold on to the hope that ordinary human goodness has the power to overcome ordinary human evil.

Chronicles of Ancient Darkness by Michelle Paver (Spirit Walker, Soul Eater, Outcast, & Oath Breaker)

Spirit Walker is the second of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, after Wolf Brother which I read over Christmas.

I don't have a lot to add to what I said about Wolf Brother - I think I read this one even more quickly and I found it equally enjoyable.

This time they end up with an island people.  The accounts of sea trips in small canoes were vividly told and I felt I had a clear vision of the scenes in which the drama was unfolding.

Soul Eater is the third installment and once again I enjoyed the book - although this time there was a greater development of the ritual/religion of the Soul Eaters which I did not find quite as engaging as that aspect of the story did not carry the same sense of people and of place.

Outcast once again moves deeper into the world of the Soul Eaters and the challenges are more to do with the social constructs of Taboo than the "ordinary" life of early hunters. It is still powerful, and there are some big choices to be made as our young heroes find that doing what is "right" is not always the same as doing what is "permitted".

Oath Breaker, I don't know if it is because it is a little while since I read Outcast therefore I might be "fresh", but I found this much stronger than the last couple.  Paver once again confronts the reader with the death of a major character within the first chapter.  It also felt like Torak, Renn, and Wolf were all growing up, head strong teenagers being forced into wisdom of years, that the arc of the wider narrative was becoming visible. 

So it is now on to the next (and last) one...

Medicine & Health Care in Early Christianity by Gary B. Ferngren

While this might appear to be a rather niche topic there is in fact a wider application.  It becomes clear that the root of the “Science versus Religion” debate comes from the assertion that Christianity rejected the proto-scientific medical practice of the Greco-Roman world in favour of a reliance on “faith” healing.  This idea has then been extrapolated out to a belief that Christianity is fundamentally anti-scientific.  Ferngren by showing that there is no evidence for the Christian rejection of contemporary medical practice also acts to undermine the wider argument that science and Christianity are incompatible.

This is most definitely an academic work – for example while the main body is just 150 pages long it is followed by 90 pages of notes and bibliographic references etc, which seems a pretty high ratio to me.  It also reads like a PhD thesis and a large part of content is a commentary on other writers, both ancient and modern, of whose ideas the reader is assumed to have a working knowledge (and which I mostly didn’t – this left me having to take a lot of Ferngren’s arguments on face value but thankfully it didn’t render those arguments unintelligible).

Ferngren’s main argument is that the interpretation of Scriptural and other Early Christian writings are flawed.  The usual assumption is that the predominance of “faith” healings of one kind or another within these writings is indicative of the same predominance within the Christian Communities.  But Ferngren’s suggests that such writings are instead capturing the exception occurrences and are largely silent on the normative practice which as a common place was not seen as worthy of comment.  To support this, through the examination of accounts of healing in the Christian writings, Ferngren identifies evidence to show that generally it was only after the recourse to ordinary medicine had failed to achieve healing that some form of “faith” healing was sort. 

The other challenge that the Ferngren provides is to the assumption that the normal explanation for illness was either divine punishment or the action of demons – this is shown simply by offering an unbiased reading which looks only at the early writings rather than reading the beliefs of the high Middle Ages backwards.

One of the most interesting aspects is the way Ferngren’s argues that charity as we understand it was a particular idea of the Jewish people and unknown in the Greco-Roman world until it was spread by the growth of Christianity.  This is interesting because it seems that charity is at one level hard wired into our society and yet at another that it is becoming an increasingly contested idea – private charity might continue to be encouraged but the idea that the state should act with charity towards either citizens or not-citizen residents is being rapidly diminished.