Category Archives: Books

Game of Thrones

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From here:

In Game of Thrones we’re shown a world of medieval technology, accoutrement, and honorifics, but without chivalry (some lame pretense is made here and there, but it plays no part even in the life of the nobility, and the tale is told solely through their eyes) because there is no Christ to inspire it and no Church to encourage it. The denizens of the land claim a belief, of whatever sort, in “the gods,” who are never specified, whose mythology is never told, and of whom worship seems virtually nonexistent. The latter is the one significant breach with real-world paganism, which always involved true belief and often extravagant liturgics. There is also (as there was with Rome) a most implausible dearth of numinous awe for the natural world. One may have to pledge one’s son in marriage to the daughter of the castle-holder controlling a vital river crossing in order to get one’s army across, but of the necessity of offering a she-goat or woodcock to the river god himself in order to be granted safe passage there is nary a trace.

This is a significant oversight and makes the world a more modern one that the filmmakers should be comfortable with. Nevertheless, we are presented a generally accurate (for Hollywood) portrayal of what theologian David Bentley Hart calls the “glorious sadness” of ancient paganism in which life was short, or at least wildly precarious, and relatively meaningless while it lasted, and death both all too common and all too horrid to contemplate. Pleasures were to be grasped in whatever form they may be readily at hand, and whether they involved cruelty or kindness was a matter of relative taste. Joy may flit briefly by, but only in such a manner and measure as to enhance the agony of its loss and the poignancy of its ephemerality.

We in fact, live — and have lived — in a world significantly shorn of such things. Christ has come, hence the actual medieval world was very different from its portrayal in Game of Thrones. We do not fear death — or indeed life — as our pagan forbears did. We in the West have inhabited a world steeped in divine transcendence, with the clear moral order and attendant theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as the concomitant of God’s self-revelation and Christ’s sacrifice. Atheism in our day is seldom if ever properly Nietzschean — it’s more a form of cafeteria Christianity, the selections of which simply do not include God or Christ. The generally pathetic efforts to revive paganism are far too hopeful and, well, Christian, to be of any real account. (Not that the occult is benign: 1 Peter calls Satan a “ravening and roaring lion” against whose attacks we must vigilantly guard.).

Why should Christians watch Game of Thrones? There’s no necessity, and some will find the gratuitous sex and violence dangerous and damaging. It’s not for all. By God’s grace the world remains Christ-haunted; faith, hope, and love, when they are not subsumed into wastes of superstition, optimism, and sentimentality, still signify. And yet we live in another dark and superstitious time in which virtue increasingly lingers as a vestigial effluvium, while transcendence is ignored or positively rejected. Seeing the hopelessness and savagery of what this age threatens to become may serve to shake us from our torpor.

I have read the first three instalments of Game of Thrones and have watched the TV adaptation; perhaps it’s because I occasionally doze off in front of the TV, but I have no idea how someone viewing the series keeps track of everything without having read the books.

Fantasy and science fiction used to be mercifully devoid of the pornographic extravagances of other modern fiction; no longer, it seems. The Game of Thrones novels aren’t particularly well written so they can’t lay claim to the literary pretensions of, say, Henry Miller: nor can excursions into the titillative be a striving for realism – this is fantasy, after all. The reason is probably the usual one: an attempt to be different from what came before with the inevitable result of a monotonous conformity to the scribbling of the author’s contemporaries.

The novels do tell an interesting story, though, so I will probably find myself reading the fourth volume at some point.

The Church according to Tolstoy

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I first read War and Peace when I was around twenty during a week when I was confined to the house, sick; Tolstoy’s books became something of an addiction and I devoured all I could find. He had an unsurpassed ability to understand people better, seemingly, than they understand themselves – perhaps I was looking for inspiration on who on earth I was.

Tolstoy was a Christian in his own peculiar way and, consequently, had a rather dim view of organised religion.

Here, George Jonas quotes a character in War and Peace to enlighten us on the state of the church. As is often the case these days, a non-Christian demonstrates a better understanding of the church as embodied in mainline denominations than those who pretend to run it.

I periodically return to Helene Bezuhov, who plays a minor role in the novel War and Peace. Exquisitely drawn, like all of Tolstoy’s creations, once you make the Countess Bezuhov’s acquaintance, you can’t quite forget her.

[….]

“According to her understanding,” writes Tolstoy, describing Helene, “the whole point of any religion was merely to provide recognized forms of propriety as a background for the satisfaction of human desires.”

How better to describe the Anglican Church of Canada?

Later in War and Peace, Tolstoy merely hints at the debaucheries to which La Belle Hélène sinks – unlike today’s novelists who would be able to focus their dubious talents on little else. Her extravagant abandonment to obscure expressions of concupiscence would probably be enough to make a Catholic Bishop blush. Not an Anglican bishop, though.

Wuthering blanking Heights

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From here:

BBC Radio 3 is to broadcast an adaptation of Wuthering Heights containing a number of strong expletives, with Cathy and Heathcliff both using the f-word, Radio Times can disclose.

Adapted from Emily Brontë’s novel by playwright and theatre director Jonathan Holloway, the new 90-minute production – which airs at 8pm on Sunday (27 March) – will portray the much-loved characters as listeners have never heard them before.

Although Holloway admits the addition of swearing to his production may raise some eyebrows, he argues that an element of shock is integral to Brontë’s story of love on the Yorkshire moors.

What, I wonder, could be less shocking than the f-word on the BBC?

 

Jane Austen couldn’t write

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Apparently her polished prose was the result of another’s polishing. This is all very unsettling; what next? – Bach was tone deaf? Add an ImageD. H. Lawrence was literate? It’s all too much.
From here:

Yet Jane Austen couldn’t spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen’s handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author.

Page after page was written without paragraphs, including the sparkling dialogue for which Austen is known. The manuscript for Persuasion, the only one of her novels to survive in its unedited form, looks very different from the finished product.

“The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.

“This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book,” Prof Sutherland said.

The editor in question is believed to have been William Gifford, a poet and critic who worked for Austen’s second publisher, John Murray.

“Gifford was a classical scholar known for being quite a pedant. He took Austen’s English and turned it into something different – an almost Johnsonian, formal style,” Prof Sutherland said.

“Austen broke many of the rules for writing ‘good’ English. Her words were jumbled together and there was a level of eccentricity in her spelling – what we would call wrong.

“She has this reputation for clear and elegant English but her writing was actually more interesting than that. She was a more experimental writer than we give her credit for. Her exchanges between characters don’t separate out one speaker from another, but that can heighten the drama of a scene.

“It was closer to the style of Virginia Woolf. She was very much ahead of her time.”

Amongst Austen’s grammatical misdemeanours was an inability to master the ‘i before e’ rule. Her manuscripts are littered with distant ‘veiws’ and characters who ‘recieve’ guests.

Leo Tolstoy and the Last Station

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Leo Tolstoy has always fascinated me, largely, I suspect, because his entire life was riddled with contradictions. At the peak of his success as a novelist – War and Peace was one of the greatest novels of its time, perhaps of any time – he had to hide any rope that might be in his house for fear he might hang himself from despair. He was a count and wealthy landowner who believed simplicity was the secret to a happy life. He lived a dissolute life until he was 40, married, had 13 children and then tried to live as an ascetic: after having sex with his wife, he would pace around the bed tearing at his beard – not a recipe for a happy marriage. He was a consummate artist who eventually came to the conclusion, expounded in What is Art, that art should be simple and understandable by all; thus he had no use for any of Bach’s music other than the famous Air from the Orchestral Suites – he also had little use for his own earlier novels.

He and his wife, Sonya, were both avid diarists; he was always brutally honest in his diary – a tendency that led to more strife since both he and Sonya would surreptitiously read each other’s diaries.

At the end of his life he had collected a group of followers who came to be known as Tolstoyans. They attempted to live according to Jesus’ teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, were pacifists and drove Sonya up the wall. Tolstoy’s version of Christianity was practical, demystified and stripped of the transcendent. For the most part it didn’t work. Vladmir Chertkov was one of Tolstoy’s closest confidants but unfortunately he was rather dour and sanctimonious with little of Tolstoy’s insight – imagine Gordon Brown as a monk. Another prominent Tolstoyan was Valentin Bulgakov, an innocent youth hired to be Tolstoy’s secretary. The Doukhobors were very much influenced by Tolstoy; they ended up in Canada, but the Tolstoyans were all swallowed up in the violence of the revolution.

In the end Tolstoy fled from his wife and his Tolstoyans and their squabbles to die on a bench in a railway station; perhaps a fitting end, since he finally managed to discard the trappings of his wealth and position.

In my youth I devoured all his novels, essays and then biographies; the last one I remember reading was a biography of his wife, Sonya by Anne Edwards.

Now there is a film about Tolstoy’s last days: The Last Station. Helen Mirren plays Sonya; she says of the film that it is, “A serious comedy about love and relationships”. Not very promising, but I shall probably go and see it anyway:

HELEN Mirren says playing Tolstoy’s wife in a new film was like a home-coming. She spoke to James Rampton about love, literature and getting in touch with her Russian roots.

A run-down railway station in an unremarkable east German town is an unlikely place to meet Dame Helen Mirren.

The fact we’re surrounded by ragged hay bales, an abandoned hand-cart and a pile of battered suitcases makes the encounter with one of Britain’s most elegant actresses all the more surreal, but Helen seems thoroughly at home.

We’re on the set of her latest movie, The Last Station, a moving story about the turbulent relationship between the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (played by Christopher Plummer), and his spirited wife, Sofya (Helen).

The actress didn’t hesitate to take the part when she was sent the script, describing it as “one of the great women’s roles in film”. But another big draw was her Russian lineage.

As Tolstoy neared the end of his life, his wife fought tirelessly to hang on to his legacy for the sake of their children (some believed it should be bequeathed to the people of Russia) and as the film shows, it was a marriage born of passion, not placidity.

“She is a wonderfully tempestuous person and also very funny,” smiles Helen.

“She had given her life to Tolstoy’s work – she copied War and Peace out six times – think of the work! Sofya was simply fighting for what she is owed. It’s a fabulous role.”

And Helen isn’t the only one to think so. The Last Station has already won her the Best Actress Award at the Rome Film Festival and she recently received an Oscar nomination for the film.

Conversations with Kingsley Amis

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I arrived at Swansea University as a student a few years after Kingsley Amis left, which was a shame because I would like to have met him. I’ve never much cared for the output of his increasingly obnoxious son, Martin who seems to think euthanasia booths for the aged are a good idea. Considering Martin Amis is 60, one would think that the instinct for self-preservation would deter him from advertising such boorish ideas; he grew up in a less civilised time than his father, of course. Kingsley Amis showed little interest in his son’s work, apparently,

Kingsley Amis had a keen eye for the absurdity of the cherished ambitions of the elite, although in his personal life he was not averse to indulging them. His novel “Stanley and the Women” particularly appealed to me; by today’s standards it was rabidly misogynistic – it’s main proposition was that all women are mad, a notion that resonated with me greatly at the time. It must have been a phase I was going through. He didn’t much like Dylan Thomas, but I forgave him that.

I was thinking of plagiarising one of Amis’s bon mots for this blog: “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing”.

A new book, “Conversations with Kingsley Amis”  has just been published; I am looking forward to reading it (hint for birthday present).

Putting Fowler Back in Fowler's

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Oh happy day, there is a new edition of Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage coming out:

H.W. Fowler and David Crystal, ed. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford University Press. 832 Pages. $29.95

Henry Watson Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage is an unabashedly prescriptivist tome, which is to say that it doesn’t waffle in describing the right way, and the wrong way, to use English words. The archetypal usage manual, commonly called just “Fowler’s,” was initially published in 1926. It has undergone two revisions since, the product of the first of which, a book judiciously and lightly edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, was released in 1965. F.W. Bateson, the English literary scholar, reflected the general feeling when he wrote that Gowers was “remarkably successful . . . in retaining Fowler’s ipsissima verba while making the minor corrections and qualifications that time has made necessary.”

Similar approbation did not greet the second revision of Fowler’s, published in 1996 and helmed by the late lexicographer and linguist Robert W. Burchfield. John Simon, reviewing that book for the New Criterion, wrote that Burchfield — who before editing Fowler’s had edited both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge History of the English Language — had “made himself a true citizen of Oxbridge.” “But an ox bridge,” Simon quipped, “can be no better that a pons asinorum.”

The trouble, simply put, was that Burchfield had expunged Fowler from Fowler’s. Gone were some of the original author’s beloved subheadings (“Pairs and Snares” was pared, “Unequal Yokefellows” unyoked) and gone, too, was his jaunty, slightly mischievous, scything-while-grinning tone. Most objectionable was that Burchfield had changed Fowler’s from a prescriptive book to a descriptive one. Usage was no longer to be judged but understood. Entries that had earlier attacked ambiguity, castigated the careless, and lowered the boom on barbarism were suddenly more interested in explaining the origins and development of the English language’s scofflaws than in pointing them out and locking up. The warden had become the prison psychologist.

David Crystal, editor of the rereleased first edition, writes that Fowler “turns out to be far more sophisticated in his analysis of language than most people realize.” What’s more, “Several of his entries display a concern for descriptive accuracy which would do any modern linguist proud.”

Noddy was not good enough for the BBC

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I remember my mother reading Enid Blyton’s Noddy stories to me when I was very young. She taught me to read for myself quite soon after and fed me a regular diet of The Famous Five, The Adventurous Four and The Secret Seven seasoned with Worzel Gummidge and Just William for variety. As I grew a little older she introduced me to Wind in the Willows – a book that is never far from my affections – and then C. S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy, J. B. Priestly, C. P. Snow and others I’ve forgotten. All from the library, of course because she had no money to buy books. In my middle to late teens, in my obnoxious phase (some would say I am still in it), I turned my nose up at my mother’s tastes and started choosing my own authors: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Golding, Nikos Kazantzakis, Henry Miller, J. P. Donleavy, Mervyn Peake, Soren Kierkegaard, Norman Mailer, Victor Hugo and others now lost in the dusty recesses of my memory. There was no method to my choosing; I simply followed the trail of biscuit crumbs from one author to the next in the hope that he might say something more interesting than the last. I discussed many of the authors with my mother (not Henry Miller) and, returning the favour she did me when I was young, convinced her to read some of them.

Looking back, I realise that I owe my mother and Noddy an inestimable debt of gratitude for instilling in me the capacity to withdraw temporarily from this vale of tears by giving myself unreservedly to a book; there is nothing quite like it.

All of which makes this revelation from the BBC seem particularly stupid:

Children’s author Enid Blyton was banned from the BBC for nearly 30 years because her work was considered “small beer”, archive documents have revealed.

The best-selling writer unsuccessfully approached the corporation several times to get her material on the radio.

Executives considered the Famous Five and Noddy creator “second-rate” and lacking literary value, according to 18 newly released letters and memos.

She first pitched ideas in 1936 but did not appear on Woman’s Hour until 1963.

A memo about a short story stated: “Not strong enough. It really is odd to think that this woman is a best-seller. It is all such very small beer.”

Another simply said “reject”.

Head of the BBC schools department Jean Sutcliffe said in an internal memo dated 1938: “My impression of her stories is that they might do for Children’s Hour but certainly not for Schools Dept, they haven’t much literary value.

“There is rather a lot of the Pinky-winky-Doodle-doodle Dum-dumm type of name – and lots of pixies – in the original tales.”

She added that they were “competently written”

Harry Potter does not get a medal

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I’ve read all the Harry Potter books and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Their predominant theme is good vs. evil,  and yes, there is magic, sorcery and witchcraft – just as there is in Add an ImageJ.R.R. Tolkien. Although Rowling is not in the same league as C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, I think her books are an entertaining read and relatively harmless; not all agree:

Harry Potter author JK Rowling missed out on a top honour because some US politicians believed she “encouraged witchcraft”, it has been claimed.

Matt Latimer, former speech writer for President George W Bush, said that some members of his administration believed her books promoted sorcery.

As a result, she was never presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The claims appear in Latimer’s new book called Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor.

He wrote that “narrow thinking” led White House officials to object to giving Rowling the civilian honour.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is awarded for:

It recognizes those individuals whom have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

However much I enjoyed Harry Potter, outside Rowling’s fantasy world, I can’t see him contributing much to culture and nothing at all to world peace, whatever that is. Surely the reason Rowling was not given this award was because it has no relevance to her work. Still, I imagine she must be pretty upset as she ponders the slight on her way to depositing the next million in her local Barclays.