The Aerodrome by Rex Warner and The End of Law by Thérèse Down

I happened to read these back to back but I am writing about them together as they speak to each other.

The Aerodrome was first published in 1941 – a time of national emergency in the UK when the military, the state was actually taking over whole villages in the interests of what officials had determined to be the greater good.

The Village seems to be a mix of Thomas Hardy and Cider with Rosie and at the time of writing rural England probably did have places that were still like that, but now few places in the UK are genuinely “rural”. The Air Force is technocratic and that model of rational progress was dominant in the UK not only in the 1940s but perhaps on into the later 1960s before it began to falter.

But there is a layer of the story about whose parents are who which to me confused matters, and the fact that the end point is the revelation that the Air Vice Marshall is “mad” perhaps softens the critique of the institutions.

The Aerodrome is a fiction the End of Law engages with the reality of the Holocaust.

There is real horror in the End of Law – as much as we pretend we don’t we forget the Holocaust, or some how within the big numbers become detached from the individuals that died – and Thérèse Down brings you back face to face with the individuals. I felt physically sick at times reading this.

She also shows how step by step ordinary, compassionate, reasonable people found themselves enacting the Holocaust – and that is the most scary thing. We can perhaps label Hitler himself as evil or crazy, and maybe a small number of others – but the industrial scale of the Holocaust could only happen when a vast number of ordinary people participated.

I worry that we think we would easily notice a new Hitler rising but what we really need to see is the low level but pervasive toxicity – that can creep up on you all too easily.

The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

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This is a complex novel but deeply touching.

It sits is a similar context to Armistead Maupin’s tales from the city, set mostly within the gay community of the west coast of the USA devastated by the first wave of AIDS.

There was also an echo of Ece Temelkuran’s Women Who Blow on Knots – with mysticism and fantasy, but also because Jacob as an Arab Christian and a non-White gay man has a status of a minority within a minority.

It is funny, on played for laughs and one-liners, but there is a humour in a recurring sense of ridiculous.

It is deeply painful, the way loss is written so clearly – love lost, love that maybe wasn’t so perfect in the first place – it perhaps asks the question does losing imperfect love actually hurt a little harder that losing a perfect love would?

Perfect Blemish Perffaith Nam by Menna Elfyn

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This is a bilingual edition, but its purpose is to provide Menna’s poems in English translations (the blurb on the back is in English only).

It brings together a number of collections, and each collection had a different translator. It is a frustration not having Welsh and so not being able to engage with the poems in their original form – I did try to read the Welsh to have a sense of the sounds and the form even if I didn’t have the meaning before turning to the English.

The range of topics covered by this collection is impressive, with an authentic and powerful voice.

Jochen Klepper 1903-1942 by J. W. Rogerson

Rogerson presents Klepper as someone with flaws, but placed in the horrific context of the Nazi regime that any light remained is a miracle.

It is also an insight in to the world that exists beyond the English language – I searched “Jochen Klepper” on a popular book selling website and of the 80 results this is the only one in English – if his works were available in English he would not be, from our parochially monoglot perspective, an esoteric figure.

Rogerson found Klepper because he used the Moravian Community’s “Die Losungen” daily readings and now I have begun to follow those readings, via the Moravian Community’s American cohorts and there is something particularly rich in that joining of dots.

Designs for Churches and Chapels by W. F. Pocock

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

This reprint of Pocock’s 1819 pattern book of Church designs is a window into the life of the Church of England before the Oxford Movement – it is a collection of preaching boxes, the key design consideration is to maximise the audibility of the preacher in their pulpit to a varying size of congregation (with a choice of neoclassical or gothick facades) – how far the Church as travelled in terms of liturgical practice, and even in terms of understanding of design and dynamics of space and place. .

On the way to the Holy Mountain by Arne E Sæther

Although this book is in English the website I had to order it was in Norwegian and seemed to resist Google’s attempts to translate it – so there was a definite sense of achievement when the book actually turned up!

It is an unusual format with a little under 400 A4 sized pages which have the feel of a scrap book – full of pictures, with inserts and text layered over the main image. But when you are addressing the use of space and liturgical fixtures and fittings the visual context is vital.

It feels at times like it is a guide of what not to do, and because much of the text is short annotations to pictures the critique can come across as blunt and lacking nuance, and while maybe agreeing with most of the conclusions I was at times nervous that we run the risk of dressing our particular understanding of “good taste” in fancy theological arguments?

But overall because of the range of material brought together it a valuable resource and it would be good if there was a UK based book seller.

A Month with… Edited by Rima Devereaux

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These 4 books, A Month with Julian of Norwich, St Augustine, St Teresa of Avila, and St Francis, follow the same simple format – providing a dozen or so lines from the writings of the relevant spiritual guide for each morning and evening of a month.

These are offered without comment – and that was perhaps one of the things I liked most, Rima Devereaux doesn’t give a gloss to the words or force a particular interpretation, there is space for the words to breath and your own response to form.

Of the 4, the last I read was St Francis and this was the one I didn’t engage with as much of it was medieval “Life of...” with some odd supernatural happenings rather than the spiritual reflections of the other collections.

If more follow I would definitely follow them.

British Rail The Nation’s Railway by Tanya Jackson

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Tanya Jackson provides an engaging overview of the organisational life of British Rail, it is an affectionate account – which makes the case that the 50 years interval of public ownership was the most golden of our railways’ various golden ages in their nigh on 200 year history.

As we bid farewell to two iconic BR legacies with the withdrawal this year of the HST and the Pacer, one beloved the other ridiculed but both in fact successful responses to BR’s rolling stock needs, nostalgia for BR in is fashion.

We can play “what if” imagining where BR would be today if it haven’t been broken up – passenger numbers have risen but we can debate whether that is because or in-spite of privatisation etc. Would the economies of scale of a single national organisation have been paying dividends, or inflated bureaucracy crippling innovation (because in BR’s history you can find plenty of examples of both).

We might suggest it all went wrong when BR was made to sell its ships and hotels – it went from providing an end to end logistic solution / customer experience to “just” running a railway – or maybe that was when it came into its own.

The current Williams Review is perhaps going to kick off another major reorganisation of the way our railways are run – it seems unlikely that the answer will be a triumphant return for BR but lets hope it doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2018

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According to Harry Baker there are two sorts of people when it comes to prizes for poetry; those who have won a prize, and those who believe poetry is an art form and not a competition (aka those who haven’t won).

But as someone that is trying to have more poetry in my life this sort of anthology is a god-send (in a similar way too the catalogue to the AOI World Illustrators Awards for art) – I don’t have time to read the bad stuff and this is the good stuff :-)

It is a strong collection but this poem stood out

Alan Buckley, Scum, 15/04/89

I lay on the turf, under a steely sky.

No one picked my pockets. No one pissed

on me. The copper who gave me the kiss

of life wasn’t beaten up. I died,

that’s the truth; and though I’d never known

such closeness, our bodies like beans in a can,

when the air was squeezed from me I died alone.

That’s all changed. The words we’d sund as fans

became our bond. We’ve walked, the ninety-six,

through parish halls, ,hushed stadiums, and courts.

Now we walk back through time. Something sticks

in our throats. You’re at your desk, lost in thought,

scanning a page of lies you’ll say is true.

What’s the headline that can trumpet this?

Look up. We’re standing right in front of you;

what burns in us is fierce as any sun.

That word you want to use. It’s on your lips.

Say it to our faces, one by one.