I was content in my ignorance; alas, no longer:

Somerset Maugham may be the most debauched man of the 20th century:

Somerset Maugham was well-placed to come up with his wonderful description of the French Riviera  –  ‘a sunny place for shady people’.

The most louche of all the expatriates who congregated on the beautiful stretch of coast between Nice and Monaco before World War II, the prolific writer held court at his fabulous mansion, the Villa Mauresque, in glamorous Cap Ferrat.

Nude bathing parties, drugs, lashings of champagne and nightly seductions of the local lads . . . Almost everyone who visited was shocked by his decadence.

Evelyn Waugh had three homosexual lovers at Oxford:

The novelist Evelyn Waugh had three gay lovers during an ‘acute homosexual phase’ while studying at Oxford, according to a biography.

Author Paula Byrne hails him as a ‘great bisexual’ writer and reveals that he cherished the ‘fully fledged’ affairs.

And William Golding was the Lord of Self Loathing:

When William Golding, the author of Lord Of The Flies, was congratulated by Lord Snowdon for having written The Lord Of The Rings, he failed to find the mistake funny, and that’s very revealing.

For here we have a man who categorically stated “of friends, I have practically none”, who lived in Cornwall “partly to avoid people”, and who, despite a CBE, a knighthood, the Nobel Prize, membership of the Athenaeum, honorary doctorates and a South Bank Show profile, still believed he was excluded from the Establishment. In  other words, he was insecure.

“I suppose that basically I despise myself,” Golding confessed, “and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled.”

Of course, it is well known that Tolstoy lived a debauched life until he was 40; then he married, fathered 13 children and subsequently refused to have sexual relations with his wife because he talked himself into believing he was called to asceticism. Perhaps inconsistency and debauchery are necessary attributes of an interesting writer – although they didn’t do much for Norman Mailer.

I’ve just finished reading The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. It comes with high recommendations from, among others, Eugene Peterson who compares it to Pilgrim’s Progress and from Dale Lang whose son was murdered in 1999; his wife, Diane – a model of grace and forgiveness – stayed with us a few years back when she spoke at a conference in Ontario.

Although the casting of God the Father and Holy Spirit as female and the folksy writing style conspired to put me off the book, in the end I wasn’t put off because the novel tackles difficult subjects with some imagination.

The main themes are coping with evil in this world, in particular the loss of a child, and the relationship between the persons of the Trinity and how that relationship extends to us. Theologically, Paul Young seems to teeter on the edge of universalism and I would like to have seen the devil make an appearance – as it is, humanity gets all the blame for the Fall.

The lachrymose may need a box of tissues since the theme of the novel is emotional and it is dealt with in an emotional way.

So is it a modern Pilgrim’s Progress? Maybe not, but it’s still worth a read.

Update: for another perspective, see John K’s thoughts here.

I’ve just finished reading God’s Undertaker – Has Science buried God? by John Lennox. Lennox is Reader in Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green College. He is also a Christian.

He has debated Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens a number of times and while the debates are always interesting, there is not enough time to meticulously cover the arguments presented in God’s Undertaker.

God’s Undertaker sets out to convince the reader that science, far from burying God, is dependant on his designing intelligence for the laws that make its methodology work. Using his knowledge of mathematics and science, Lennox makes a convincing case for the proposition that far from science and religion being at odds, science provides evidence for a Designer. What are really at war are two world views: the universe has a creator vs. the universe is all there is.

In his writing Lennox is rather like a scientist’s version of C. S. Lewis: complex ideas are explained with a lucidity that makes you think “I should have thought of that”. A very worthwhile read for Christians, agnostics and atheists.