Into Suez by Stevie Davies

Having sat on my wish list, after a review in Planet, for some time I read this book on the plane out to Canada back in May.  Your encounter with a novel is always, I think, more intense when you get the opportunity to spend 9 straight hours reading it.

This is a bitter sweet story, based are a kind of “who do you think you are?” journey.  It is full of all the richness that was so sadly lacking in Barry Unsworth’s Lands of Marvels, while both centre on the lives of a group of “white” British within a hinterland of an indigenous population, that unease about the characterisation that plagued Land of Marvels is thankfully absence here.  Perhaps it is because the key dynamic of this story is the class tensions between the “white” characters, it is a tale of the birth pangs of the social and sexual revolution that would come in the following decade (the 1960s). 

It is also a tale, fundamentally, of lives lived in regret.  Freedom was momentarily grasped and then through tragedy (in the dramatic sense) revoked. The lead character Nia discovers that the small and sheltered life of her Mother was the consequence of that tragedy, and perhaps the only route to survival after it.

This is one of those tales that is haunting, and it lingers (in the best possible way), despite being a fiction the pain is so vivid that it demands your continuing attention.

The Drama of Scripture by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen

This is the latest book to be handed out by the Bishop of Winchester, and is the homework before a Diocesan conference in September. 

The premise of the book is simple – that there is a single over arching [meta] narrative to the Bible.  It is not enough to read parts of the Bible in isolation without at least a sense of the context of the whole “story”.  This is hardly a radical idea, although (as with last year’s book by Tom Wright) the authors seem convinced that this will rock our world…

Having set out this approach the bulk of the book is a retelling of the Bible with a focus on its unifying story.  There is nothing wrong with this – there are one or two points when there is a particular theological interpretation I might question – but in general it is a solid account.  I think that this would be of value to those considering confirmation (or equivalent step) – that is someone who is not completely fresh to Christianity, someone looking to deepen and consolidate their understanding. 

However call me an evangelical if you must, but I do always have a nagging feeling that in the vast majority of cases people would still be better off reading the Bible rather than reading a book about the Bible.

What is the purpose of this book in the context of our Diocesan Conference?  I think it is to encourage a different approach to outreach – for must of the 20^th Century mission has been about imparting the truth of the Christian faith (the search for the Historical Jesus and all that).  However the 21^st Century “post-moderns” have only limited interest in hearing the “facts” about Christianity and an accumulation of facts win never add up to a decisive argument – what matters to them is whether the “story” make sense, and make sense of the world.  The book does make that point – however personally I didn’t need to read this book to arrive at that conviction!

Alongside this we were also given “Hope – the heartbeat of mission” which is a source book of ideas for mission.  It labours its own “radical” notion, that social action and mission are a single activity rather than mutually exclusive.  It identifies three steps, One – connecting with your community, Two – sharing the Gospel in words, Three – giving opportunities to respond.  This is all well and good, and it has lots of great ideas for steps One and Two.  However all it offers under step Three is running an Alpha course (ok that is unfair – it does suggest as an alternative if you want to do something “different” running a Christianity Explored course!).  Really? Is Alpha the only format they could think of for response – and what does it say that Alpha is the third and seemingly final step?

Rites surrounding Death: The Palermo Statement of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation 2007 Edited by Trevor Lloyd

You might be able to guess from the title that this is a recent edition of  Joint Liturgical Studies! And as I have said before (and no doubt will say again) the value of these is that they place before you material that you would not otherwise encounter. 

The International Anglican Liturgical Consultation is one of a number of fora for the production of “normative statements”, either ecumenically or, as in this case, for a particular denomination.   Their relationship to the general thinking of the members of a denomination or the pronouncements of a denomination’s Synods (or equivalent bodies) is often loose or strained.  A clear example of this difficulty was the ARCIC report on the place of Virgin Mary which a large part of the Anglican Church denounced.

Here we have “The Palermo Statement; Rites surrounding Death” along side a commentary by Trevor Lloyd.  The commentary is mostly made up of examples from different Anglican Liturgies of the themes encountered in the Statement.

While of interest neither the Statement nor the commentary had anything particularly earth shattering to say. 

However as someone with no love for Common Worship I need raise an audible cheer when reading the Statement saying,

“We affirm that the liturgy is owned by the Christian community as well as by the minister or clergy leading the rites.  Where church members own a service book in their homes, and also a hymn book, they are more likely to feel they own the liturgy with the clergy.”

This is one of my key critiques of Common Worship – it has fundamentally removed the liturgy from the hands of the people.  The Prayer Book, and even the ASB, gave a sense of a liturgical whole while Common Worship allows only for the encounter of isolated liturgical events.  Also the people saw and knew the rubrics in both the Prayer Book and ASB - allowing at least some small insight into why things were happening – in Common Worship these are hidden from sight encouraging the people to be passive recipients of worship done by the clergy and other leaders.

On similar ground the Statement later says:

“No set of texts or rubrics, however comprehensive or permissive, can do all this without the mediation of pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy.”

From this I would read that the search for the perfect text (which the endless variation of Common Worship encourages) is flawed.  A decent text placed within an appropriate context of pastoral and liturgical action is powerful enough.  And the search for “pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy” is somewhat less fruitful than the search for hen’s teeth!

Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth

I read this on the plane home from Canada and maybe reading in the hours when by rights I should have been sleeping resulted in me missing some essential quality of the novel.

The cover proudly proclaims that Barry Unsworth is a Booker Prize winner and in is within the context of this claim that I found the novel lacking.  The story is fairly engaging and appealed to the bit of me that enjoys reading Agatha Christie but is that enough to place it in Booker Prize territory?

The cast of characters was made up of clichés, many of them paper thin clichés at that – there were few that were in anyway rounded and none that were insightful.  There was a worry that these stereotypes of the Western and the “Arab” were in fact supporting racist assumptions – you can give Agatha Christie some degree of flexibility as she was writing in different era, and so we can hold a critical distance to some of the less enlightened depictions of non-Western characters, but for Barry Unsworth, publishing in 2009, to be deploying the simpleton chai wallah as the basis of his non-Western characters is unsatisfactory.

 

If you have a few hours that need filling with light reading this book “would do” but to be honest my recommendation is to avoid it. 

Mimosa by Susan Wilkinson

The Mimosa was the ship which carried the first Welsh colonists to Patagonia.  Patagonia is the only significant Welsh-speaking community overseas and therefore there is a special affection for it, especially because the life of the early colony was far from easy and on more than one occasion it found itself at the point of collapse.

This book takes perhaps an eccentric approach of chronicling the “life and times” of the Mimosa, such that while the voyage to Patagonia does get special attention it does not dominate the book - and the life of the colony after Mimosa departed is only mentioned incidentally (there are of course plenty of other sources for the story of the colony).

The Mimosa was built in the middle of the 19^th Century in a period of unbelievable change, change which was in part driven by developments in shipping and in part driving the development of shipping.  Therefore the account of this ship’s working life is an excellent key to unlock the period. 

There were little facts that fascinated me as someone working with shipping – for example I knew that ships have to be registered in 64 equal shares, I knew this was an antiquated practice, but I didn’t know that it dates all the way back to the merchants of ancient Rhodes!

In giving the wider story of Mimosa you gain a greater context to the voyage to Patagonia for those first colonists.  We tend to focus our current attention on the negative aspects of British Imperialism (and there are undeniably many such negative aspects).  The “colonists” of Patagonia do not fit into that narrative – they left in order to save there language in the face of ever increasing Anglicisation – as the “Modern” world was born monoglot welsh-speaking life was under threat.  This small poor group of new “Patagonians” are perhaps the anthesis of the arrogantly striding Empire Builder in his pith helmet…

The Radical Disciple by John Stott

This is the final book of an undeniable giant within the English speaking Christian world but it was for me something of a disappointment. 

Having had it on my Amazon Wishlist since its publication (and so before John Stott’s death) I only recently ordered it and read it sat on the beach last weekend. 

I think the disappointment comes from your reference point with the word “Radical” in the title.  Stott divides the book into 8 themes within discipleship which he feels are often overlooked.  Shining a spotlight on them is the essence of his claim to radicalism but I struggle to recognise a Christianity that could continue while overlooking these issues.  Is it that within the depths “Orthodox” Evangelicalism, which is the mainstay of Stott’s audience, Biblical Legalism has allowed them to drift so far from the spirit of the Gospel?

For example one of the themes is “Simplicity” – I read it wondering to what extent it really needed pointing out that wealth is problematic to the Christian.  Perhaps this is written as a challenge to “Health and Wealth” ministries (indeed another of the themes is “Death”).

I don’t want to give this book too much of a hard time, I am not within its target audience.  It is not that I had a problem with what Stott is saying here, just that it left me muttering “No S**T Sherlock…”. If there are people claiming to be Christian for whom this book is “news” then it is a great thing that someone with the authority of John Stott has offered them a wake up call.  

Kicking the Black Mamba - Life, Alcohol & Death By Robert Anthony Welch

The Church Times review signalled the intense power of this book and it certainly lived up to this. 

It is the story of a father (Robert Anthony Welch) and his alcoholic son (Egan).  It is a tragedy, not in the glib way that the media apply the word to each and every death they report, but in the literary sense.

It was not an easy book to read, not easy for anyone, but more so as my own relationship with drink has at times been complex.  For example, I found myself trying to read it on a train journey, with a can of Stella on the go, and I just could not turn the pages, for there were tears in my eyes.

It feels as those Egan and his alcoholism had a symbiotic relationship, there is the refrain within the book – taken from a suicide note written by Egan – “it is not alcohol that killed me. It’s something else.” It is clear that it was not in a straightforward way simply that Egan was drunk that he came to the place where he died. And the wrestling of the book is Robert wrestling with the search for what that something else was.

I think the times when my parents (a Vicar and his wife) have been most truly Christ-like has been in there care of the various alcoholics that crossed their path.  The stash of tins under the stairs, to be dispensed two an evening, for the one who was told by their Doctor not to go cold turkey was one of the very few times I have seen the Church of England living out Biblical principles of manna from heaven…

There is the incredible honesty of Robert, he admits the deep annoyance that not only did he have to cope with Egan’s behaviour, but because they couldn’t have drink in the house so as to protect Egan, he couldn’t have his customary evening glass of wine to take the edge off life - at times when life was such that it really needed the edge taking off. 

We like to live in a tidy world, but drink is untidy, I sometimes call it “the chaos monster”.  There have been many times when I have had a few drinks, and a lovely evening, and I think “I’ll go to the bar, get a refreshing lemonade, perhaps a tea...” and then find myself returning from the bar with a massive glass of wine or a double vodka.  And the end of the evening was rarely as “lovely” as I would have hoped.

Or I call to mind the different reactions there can be to the ring of the last orders bell, I never got used to the fact the most of the students who went to the bar (and they themselves were a minority) at Bishop Grosseteste would on hearing the bell finish their drink and head to bed, while I, as was I’m sure the norm in Durham, heard the bell and got a couple of drinks from the bar to tide me over till chucking out time…

There is a lot in the book about the “Irish” identity and how that predisposes you if not to drink then at least to the “something else” Egan thought had killed him.  I am not sure how that sits with me.  There is a lot of poetry and folklore, which chimed in well – as Christians there is too much wisdom which we dismiss – we need a bigger understanding of what truth is.

It is a book that I really want people to read, but I am worried that people will read it and not get it.