Mr Vogel by Lloyd Jones

Mr Vogel

I was given this as a must read by my Mother, normally a fairly trust worthy source of literary recommedations - but I am afraid for me this is a book that failed to launch.  Mum admitted in discussion after a told her I had abandoned it that she had read it twice before she got it, but with a bookshelf overflowing with unread tomes I feel live might be too short for a second attempt.

On reflection I think I failed to engage with this for many of the same reasons why I failed with Lord of the Rings.  Both have diversions, Lord of the Rings its songs and Mr Vogel rambling accounts of events in parallel to the narrative from characters real and imagined.  Both are tales of journeys yet both have the narrative pace to be overtaken by an elderly snail.

 

How God Became King by Tom Wright

How God Became King - Getting to the heart of the Gospels

This book is been given out widely in Winchester Diocese as part of the Bishop's plan to inspire a collective vision of mission and the future of the Church.  I am not sure whether this is the book that I would have chosen on which to built this house - particularly as I am not sure how it really relates to the main substance of the Bishop's vision as I have heard the Bishop talk about it. But enough of the scene setting.

Tom Wright is a man, so he tells us, who for many long years had the feeling that something wasn't right with the Church (in fact with the whole of Christian civilisation - at least this side of Byzantium - for the last millennia and a half) and finally he has realised what it is.  Such is the revelation that his 250 pages are left busting at the seams with the vigour and passion of his exposition of this grave error.

What, you may ask, can this new truth be?  Well - it boils down to the fact that the Church hasn't and doesn't pay enough attention to Jesus.  This error is expressed in two main forms, first there are those who focus solely on the Cross, Jesus has no being other than his death and resurrection, and second there are those who focus solely on his life and teaching, Jesus is a wise moral teacher but implicitly or explicitly his divinity is denied.

Now I am not saying Tom is wrong but it is a bit hard to take that the great theologian bishop has taken 64 years to work this one out - this is not news Tom! And what I really found difficult about this book was having spent so long labouring the point about the past and present errors of the Church I found little of substances about how we go about re-ordering our lives in proper relationship to an integrated vision of Jesus.

If you do want a read I suggest that the Charity shops of Hampshire will have a glut of copies in the coming months...
  

Come Emmanuel by Ann Lewin

Come Emmanuel: Approaching Advent, Living with Christmas

I guess I should begin by saying that I have the pleasure of being part of the same Parish as Ann in Southampton.  What Ann brings in person to the life of our Parish she shares through this book with a wider audience.

This is a gentle but thought provoking collection, bringing some of her poems together with particular thoughts on the season of Advent and then on to Christmas.  There are many books out there that try to make the "Advent - not Christmas" point, but often this come through a rage against the capitalist/consumerist society. Ann takes a slightly different approach, rather than rage against it with the futility of Canute she suggests we pray through it, let each early carol or plastic reindeer but a cause to stop and explore the mysteries of the season.

Her reflection for Epiphany was for me particularly welcome, a moment to refresh the joy of Christ coming into the world when the default reaction of Twelfth night is to sigh and say "thank God that's over for another year..."   

A little gem of a book that is well worth seeking out. 

The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton

The innocence of Father Brown

This is book is a collection of short chapters, each a self contained mystery.  This means we move very rapidly from murder to resolution in each chapter with a certain degree of repetition and so despite being just 250 pages long this benefits from being dipped into for a chapter or two rather than taken in a single sitting.  I found them excellent for reading on the bus.

In general you come to see Father Brown as a caring and charming figure however there are moments when one is confronted with attitudes, even from the enlightened Fr Brown, which suck you violently from the 21st Century.  This mostly occurs when foreigners enter the stories, and is especially true of The Wrong Shape where an Indian has a significant role.

 In noting this I am not wanting to condemn either Chesterton or Fr Brown from reflecting the general social melee of their time (this book is now over 100 years old) but nor can I escape the sensation of unease in encountering such attitudes.  They did become a flaw in my enjoyment of the book but on balance not a fatal flaw.
 

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Warning: contains spoilers

The film version of this book is one of my favourite pieces of cinema, it is dark and it is deeply uncomfortable to watch as the characters are all so flawed and yet so ordinary.  The scene in the boat is one of the most vivid moments I have every seen on screen and it is etched into my memory.  So I came to the book with a rich memory of the film and the story and for the most part I found the book didn't quite live up to the film.

The pacing felt different, in my recollection the boat in the mid point of the film and the a dramatic pivot, but in the book we get there much more quickly.  Dickie in the book doesn't seem to get much of a chance to get under your skin in the way that Jude Law's performance is so brilliantly charismatic and yet vile.  Also in the book Tom seems to have turned on Dickie well before they get to the boat where as I remember it as something of a bolt out the blue. (I am being careful to see "I remember" as it is some years since I last saw the film, but it is one that has played over in my mind a few times and so there is plenty of room for my memory to be whole different version than the actual film).

But in the film everything after the boat was for me a bit flat while in the book the intensity just builds and builds from that moment. You get drawn deeper and deeper into Tom's mind, ever more guilty that you are willing him to get away with it.  This is one of the great thing about this story, at least for me, what drives Tom is an encounter with the world that is all too familiar - it is exemplified by the feeling of being ineffectual at parties and so as someone who finds small talk painful and retreats to the corner to drown myself in red wine I feel there is very little distance between myself and Tom Ripley.  Also the lust for and the hatred of Dickie are familiar - down the years I have known a string of people who could fill his shoes with ease, who are everything us Tom Ripleys can never be.  This is perhaps why such a big part of me is willing Tom to get away with it - but is there any real victory in him getting away, the unwritten chapter of Tom's life after the book ends would hold the answer, does the great impersonator manage to be "someone else" while being Tom Ripley or does being Tom Ripley continue to limit him even when he has newly enhanced economic resources.

The film seemed much more homo-erotic than the book, but this might just be the effect of casting Jude Law and Matt Damon.  The film seems to leave no doubt the Tom is gay and Dickie isn't  - the book felt less conclusive on either side.  With regards to Dickie we get to know him much less in the book and so naturally the answer can not be so definitive, while with Tom the attraction to Dickie is much more multifaceted and so if there was a sexual attraction it was only one force among many and not actually the primary one.  Also the flip side which is Tom's dislike for Marge is not taken as a universal dislike of women. In the film Marge is person equal in attractive qualities (personality and physicality) as Dickie, but in the book she is more needy and parasitical.  It is much more reasonable in the book to understand the attraction to Dickie and repulsion to Marge on a purely personal level rather that the diagnostic to an underlining sexuality. 

In the end I still think the film is stronger than the book, but the book is more complex and I think it will leave me puzzling even longer and deeper about Tom Ripley.  

The Cross in the Closet by Timothy Kurek

The Cross in the Closet

There was a lot of traffic on Facebook about this book a few months back with positive feedback from a lot of friends however the whole premise gave me the creeps so I felt I had to take a look and see if Facebook’s positivity was all hype or if there was actually some worthwhile substance behind it all.

The premise, that Tim Kurek a fundamentalist Southern Baptist spent a year living as a gay man in order to “walk in their shoes” just seems, at best, a bit naf while running the risk of so many clichés that it makes my skin crawl even imagining.

But thank God the book really is not that bad, I will go on to a number of things that were, for me, less than perfect but I feel it is important up front to say that my fears were unfounded – it is a book of great sensitivity, and I think Tim is a really sincere guy who has done a great service to a great many.

The first gap you have to bridge is that the context Tim starts in, the America Conservative Christian “South” which has no real mirror here in the UK, yes we have fundamentalist Christians but they are very much in the minority.  We simply do not have the “Christian” schools and universities that would allow kids it grow up so completely in the bubble of fundamentalist Christianity, as Tim clearly did.  Those who do create that kind of bubble in the UK have to do so in a very conscious counter-cultural way but for Tim and almost everyone he knew growing up the bubble was just normal.  The second gap is that the gay world he stepped into, it’s not like any I have encountered in the UK, it is perhaps a mythical “Gay Community” of the past, and perhaps in Nashville the gay community has by necessity a retro feel.  Walking into a gay bar and finding that everyone wants to talk, wants to know your story and buy you a drink, that there is a gay bar, restaurant, book store and café all on the one street at the centre of a vibrant cultural scene of artists and poets, I don’t know Nashville but I have been a gay man in both “small town” and “big city” UK and I have never come across any where that had this kind of haven on offer. 

But we must put these two gaps to one side, they are the context but not the substance – the substance it turns out has very little to do with being gay and an awful lot to do with being Christian.  The new Bishop of Winchester is busy seeking a vision for our diocese and is in the process championing Tom Wright’s book How God became King – from all that I have heard about it Bishop Tom is on the same lines as our Tim – perhaps he should give living as a gay man a go and see how it strengthens his vision (or perhaps not…).  The point of both books is that the Church loves labels, love the them and us divide, love being right and pointing out to everyone else that they are wrong, and at the end of the day when you add it all up the Church loves hate.  To admit this is to acknowledge that the Church this has very very little to do with an authentic witness and encounter with Jesus.  Jesus in not a “them and us” kind of a guy – Jesus loves only one thing - love itself.  To be authentically Christian is to delight in humanity, in all its weird and wonderful guises.  It is to celebrate the fact that we see in a glass darkly, and others may be seeing something else just as well in their own glass – the very second that we start to think we have all the answers the truth has departed from us.

One really interesting part of the book is after Tim has got over his homophobia and loves his new Gay friends he finds he has a major problem with the Church and with Christians. He comes to see he has exchanged one set of prejudice for another, and so then has to journey on to a place where, while still disagreeing with those Christians would are anti-Gay, he is able to love them.  He radically underlines this point by visiting the Westboro Baptist Church - he challenges us that until with can see that God loves the Phelps and we need to love them too we haven't understood the love of God.  However much we dislike someone’s attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviour there is no get out clause to love.  As the Church of England come to the final round of debates on Women Bishops this challenge to love across the divide has not been lived up to.  I struggle to engage with the organisations which are promoting the places of women and gay people within the Church because I have increasingly seen them as being unable to love across the divide.  The demonising of Forward in Faith, the joyful celebrations when some of our brothers and sisters left for the Ordinariate – none of this spoke of love.  To often these groups have turned to the dark arts of political lobbying rather than the honest declaration of truth to move their position forward – it is never enough to claim that ends justify means - it is not enough to pay lip service to love we must act like we love people to.

This is a powerful book despite itself, it is heavy on dialogue but much of it is clunky – maybe people talk clunkily in Nashville I don’t know – but there are times when it is a struggle to continue to suspend disbelief.  It could also have done with a better proof reading (but who am I to talk…).

That going to Church is such a part of normality is another gap, Tim is writing in a Church going society where as that great Ecumemist of our time, Dolly Parton, said in Steel Magnolias “God doesn’t mind what Church you go to, so long as ya turn up”.

Here in the UK, however much it might disappoint me to admit it, Church going is just not normal – it is not even normal among self defining Christians let alone the population at large.  This means that the denial of a place for Gay people within Church is a much bigger social issue there than is actually is for us – if “society” goes to Church and if you are not welcome in Church then, inter alia, you are not welcome in society while for us Church going is marginal and so the denial of a place for gay people is to denial them a seat at the margins, and seat nobody can really understand why we have a real desire for anyway. 

This is an important book, but I doubt many of the people for whom it could be so important will read it – it will end up (to use an American phrase) preaching to the choir. Part of the reason it won’t be read be the right people is because it is positive about being Gay – in a way I wish it was able to talk about all the important stuff about how Christians don’t have a monopoly of truth and how their calling is to Love not hate and condemn without it being about being Gay and therefore being beyond the pale for those who most need it – but sadly this is always the way.

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

Perelandra (Cosmic Trilogy)

This is the second of the Cosmic trilogy and it has a much more clearly and straight forwardly allegorical tale based Genesis.  This might appear to be a limitation however the power of the telling is such that this gives a greater depth of feeling for Eden and for Eve. 

The beauty and innocence of Perelandra/Venus means the idea that it will be spoilt by the action of a human (even a human taken over completely by an evil force) becomes genuinely painful, the loss of The Fall became much more real than it had ever felt before for me. 

The persistence of Weston, the tempter, gave me new sympathy for Eve. While Genesis appears to say Eve weakly ate the Apple as soon as it was offered to her the tale of Perelandra makes it easy to imagine that there was in fact a much longer encounter between Eve and the Serpent.  This chimes with our own experience of temptation, often after an extended period that we find ourselves doing that which in the first instance we knew was wrong.

Ransom’s role is perhaps more difficult to resolve because the evil one is defeated by force, the fight is violent and vividly told in a way that is hypnotic – hard to watch and yet impossible to look away.  How this fits into the overall framework of Love that Lewis gives to the story is not clear.

After the fight there is a chase and from this point on my engagement declined. At conclusion of the narrative the King and Queen, figures of Adam and Eve, meet with Ransom.  The King has been absence up until this point and suddenly placing the planet into the hands of a “man”, while dynamic figure of the Queen we have journeyed with seems to play at best second fiddle, jars just a touch. At the very end there is a long pseudo dialogue which is full of great sentiments and ideas, but while it is rich stuff I found myself skimming over this – unlike Ransom I really did feel like they where talking for a year.

Overall I found this a more enriching narrative than that of the first story, “Out of the Silent Planet”, which was a good read but did not really push me to any new levels of thought.