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October 23, 2006
Diwali and Me
Or, what I can learn about Christianity from my Hindu neighbors.
Saturday was the celebration of Diwali, which is the Hindu "New Year" after a fashion. And our local newspaper had a featured book by a local Hindu author about the HIndu pantheon. It had reviews by three Hindu teens, and what one of them said was provocative and interesting. I paraphrase, but the essence is interesting: "I wish the author had taken greater pains to point out that Hindu is not a polytheistic religion. All these faces of gods are the face of the One God."
I found that fascinating. So too a critique of Christianity from a Hindu perspective I read sometime back: The trinity was never a problem for Hindus to comprehend, merely the stinginess of a God who gave only one avatar.
God prepared us for the revelation of Himself in the truths that the Hindus grasped long ago. They great each other with "Namaste." a salute to the God within each person. Indeed, the Holy Spirit dwells within each person and Jesus makes His home with anyone who will invite Him in. The divine in the other is something that the HIndu know well and respect, respect for the most part better than most Christians.
So, a belated Happy Diwali to my Hindu neighbors. May the year be bright and prosperous and lead you all to a closer walk with the One God.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Beware of Karen Valentine
Karen Valentine writes a series of novels that supposedly play a Catholic Riff on the Jan Karon theme. Small town in some cold northern place with a Catholic Church and some wacky characters. Malheureusement I discovered too late that Ms. Valentine is more Episcopalian than Catholic, apparently culturally Catholic but buying in to all of the secular truths some kinds of Catholics hold dear. As I have a wide tolerance for diversity of opinion, I don't know why it bothered so much except that it resulted in the books not feeling particularly Catholic. Her Catholicity was essentially indistinguishable from liberal Episcopalianism at least on the matter of contraception, and perhaps other things as well and so it deprived me of a sense of what a Catholic Mitford might really be like. So I warn all potential buyers--beware--know what you are buying. Caveat emptor; caveat lector.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
By the Mingling of this Water. . .
The Eucharistic prayer and symbols are enormously powerful. When the priest mixes water into the wine and says the prayer over the mixed elements, we are to begin to understand a great mystery.
I thought about this while at Mass the other day. When we are in Christ, we are like the chalice of wine and water--a great majority of divinity with our small humanity enfolded within. However, we are a living water. Most of us prefer to stay in the vessel from which the water is poured. If a drop or two of wine should enter that water, so much the better, we wouldn't mind at all. But to become utterly transformed, utterly surrendered, utterly other--for most of us that is a terrifying prospect. We would pray that He would mingle a little divinity with our humanity, while devotion to Christ constantly reminds us that "I must decrease that He might increase." We abandon our preferences for the faults of humanity in assuming the divinity we are meant to be. In some mysterious way we participate in divinity--I can't explain it, but Tom at Disputations might be helpful in understanding this. I only know that it has been taught faithfully by the Church through the ages. In some way we are divinized in our surrender. IF we surrender.
(Note: Post has been changed to accommodate comments received that pointed out a serious error. Hopefully the change does not significantly interfere with lucidity; however, even if it does, it is better than promulgating error.)
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:24 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Sufficiency
Writing to a friend regarding the adage that "His grace is sufficient":
We have an insufficient understanding of the term "sufficient." Because the common usage has come to mean "just barely enough to cover it," we tend to look at "His grace is sufficient" as a kind of wary half-promise.
But the real meaning of "His grace is sufficient," says nothing about the amount of it nor its efficacy. What it says is that it is His grace alone--entirely and only. His grace is sufficient in that nothing need be added to it and we only need a kind of meta-desire for it to be effective. We need to want to want to want to want to cooperate, and His grace makes it possible step by step.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Road
The Road is a new book by Cormac McCarthy. Let's start with an understanding. This is the only Cormac McCarthy book I've been able to make it through. People talk about his stirring and poetic prose, and I see in it a kind of warped and arrogant Hemingway. I am put-off by his eccentric use of superposed punctuation (he refuses either quotation marks or apostrophes for the most part--although he does use them when contracting a personal pronoun and a verb--never when contracting a verb and a negative). I'm disinclined to force myself through long passages of dialogue that do not have any markers indicating speaker so that one must read them time and time and time again to make sense of them. This doesn't charm, nor is it innovative, or even really interesting. I have always interpreted it as the boorish imposition of an author who can't be bother with conventions because he thinks he stands above them. It's a childish form of rebellion.
Now that I've gotten through the truth in advertising preamble, we can get to the core. The Road is one of the most harrowing, profoundly moving, profoundly beautiful stories of the reality of being human that I've had privilege to read in many years. The prose contains all of those eccentricities I despise, and yes, they did occasionally make it very difficult to read; but the destination was worth the journey.
Don't get me wrong, while you can read it very fast, the journey is very, very difficult. The Road hasn't much of a plot. A nameless man and his nameless son are traveling south in late Autumn and early winter seeking the southern coast. Their journey is through a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland in which nothing grows, not trees, not grass, nothing. Marauding troops of cannibals patrol the roads capturing anyone unwary enough to be out and taking them away to by systematically hacked to pieces and eaten--a fate made more horrible by the fact that there is no refrigeration so the people must be kept alive to endure their fate and feed their captors.
This is the landscape of The Road. And what is most interesting about it is that the author doesn't even drop a hint of how this happened. It is utterly irrelevant to his point. And what is this point? That's a really good question. I won't claim that McCarthy is writing a Christian apologia, but there is an interpretation of this nameless man and nameless son that falls into a very Christian way of viewing things. Now, we must avoid the danger of allegory because this novel is far richer than the simple explanation I will offer. There are a great many things hidden in its depths, and I hope to go back and explore them once I have come out from under its spell. (I do have to say that I read this over the course of two days, reading late into the night one evening and finally setting the book aside. That night I had the most unsettling dreams of being part of the onset of this apocalyptic world.)
Here is one way I could read this novel. The road is about the saving power of love, of human love for one another which is a sign of divine love, and sometimes the only sign. The devastated wasteland is the world we wander through. For some it is stripped down to these basics--there are two kinds of people--"the good guys" who do not eat people, and those who do eat people. We night view the cannibals as people who have objectified the other. People are no longer people in their eyes. But they remain people in the eyes of the son of this man, a boy who witnesses many horrors, who prays before consuming food found in a deserted bunker,
from The Road
Cormac McCarthy (p. 123)Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we're sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you're safe in heaven with God.
The tenderness of this boy, who has every reason to abandon his humanity and to turn to serve himself is heartbreakingly beautiful, just as is the steadfast love and loyalty of his father.
The Road contains the desolate wasteland of life in which we are pounded down and pounded down and pounded down until nothing remains and it tests each person's humanity. You could read this as a story of a man nearing the end of life when everything is bleak and grey. All around are people who would eat him alive if it would further their cause, take everything and think nothing of it. And yet he has one person with him who keeps reminding him of the beauty of humanity. And the two of them are "each the other's world entire." And finally, all we can do is go as far as we can go and trust the ones we carry along to the hands of others and hope that they will continue along. And so this story goes.
The depth of the love and compassion expressed here are hard to express outside of the work itself. They stand in stark contrast to the world of the novel, and hence the necessity for this unexplained world, this bleakness without break--this eternal and abiding absence of hope except the hope the two have together because they are two and "each the other's world entire."
And do we want a Christian message?
from The Road
Cormac McCarthy p. 155-156There are other good guys. You said so.
Yes.
So where are they?
They're hiding.
Who are they hiding from?
From each other.
Are there lots of them?
We dont know.
But some.
Some. Yes.
Is that true?
Yes. That's true.
But it might not be true.
I think it's true.
Okay.
You dont believe me.
I believe you.
Okay.
I always believe you.
I dont think so.
Yes I do. I have to.
Childlike trust because there is no other choice. But more than that, the first part reminds me of Casting Crown's hit, "If We Are the Body." As Christians we hide from one another. How many Christians do you know in your office who proclaim their Christianity? How often do I proclaim it outside of places I know it will be accepted? We are the good guys, and we're hiding from one another because we are afraid of those who would use us--those who would consume us without a second thought--and so our light is hidden under the bushel basket.
Again, I know nothing of the spirituality of Cormac McCarthy. I will not say that there is an overt Christian message meant to be read in this book. However, there is a strong whiff of the Calvinist about his worldscape and his view of the utter depravity of most of humankind. The elect are few, but they are always around, ready to step in as needed.
In the words of Ely the strange man they meet who wanders the Road and claims to be ninety years old,
There is no God.
No?
There is no God and we are his prophets.
I dont understand how you're still alive. How do you eat?
I dont know.
You dont know?
People give you things.
People give you things.
Yes.
To eat.
To eat. Yes.
No they dont.
You did.
No I didnt. The boy did.
This Estragon and Vladmir dialogue pervades the book, but its rhythms and meanings sink in and you become aware of the hidden streams.
Simply, powerfully, idiosyncratically written--brutal and beautifully humane and loving I cannot recommend this book highly enough. However, be aware--it is very strong meat and very difficult going. It may trouble you for many days after you put it down. And that is precisely how I know it was worth having read it. (And perhaps someday I'll take the time to produce a review from this incoherent ramble--but for now, let this stand--the recommendation of one who cares very little for the style and the work of the author, but one who was for a few days at least transformed by his presence.)
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:33 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
October 24, 2006
"So Long Self"
In the car, I tend to listen to a Christian Music station. I don't much like it; however, if I'm going to hear words coming out of Samuel's mouth I'd rather they be "Holy, Holy, Holy" than "I'm as good once as I ever was." Given the dearth of classical music and even of classic radio, it's either CDs or Christian music or silence, and a car is never silent.
So, I was listening this morning as I came into work and I was really surprised by a very pop-py, kicky sixties-mod Beatles invasion-rock piece by a group called Mercy Me. For a moment I forgot I was on Christian Radio and was just really enjoying the music, and then I paid attention. I was stunned by the subversiveness of the lyrics and how I was drawn into this very anti-secular song. This is the power of Christian art--it creeps in under the radar and wallops you. A perky, Petula Clark tune becomes an anthem to immersing oneself in Christ and putting on the "new man." Cool.
Note: For several days I had the wrong title in the header. I thought I fixed this yesterday (10/26) but it appears to have failed. So, trying again.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Road Redux
I know, I wrote too-long a review yesterday, and I now intend to add to it.
While I said yesterday that one should not view The Road as an allegory, I do think that it falls squarely in the realm of symbolic novel. The landscape, events, scenery, and even some of the people are more symbolic than realistic and as symbols they speak of a great many things:
isolation, desire, loneliness, despair, depravity, sanctity, love, divinity, life's journey,
among others. The richness of the symbolism and of the narrative and, as I pointed out yesterday, the Godot-like dialogue and description all move toward several symbolic ends--all of which, surprisingly are warm, humane, and good. The apparent nihilism of the surface is resolved into the order and beauty of human love, the transcendent note that stems from Divine love and through which the book triumphs even in bleakness.
I don't know how often I will be rereading this book, but it can bear the weight of a great many rereadings and always yield fruit. Because the author is not too didactic either way, it is entirely possible to give the book a deeply Christian interpretation and to bring the symbols and actions into a conformity with the Christian understanding of the world.
Once again I encourage everyone who is strong of heart to take the journey and find out what The Road is all about.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2006
Middlemarch Revisited
This is the woman that George Eliot wants us to sympathize with, or at least accept as the heroine of our novel:
from Middlemarch Chapter 4
George EliotDorothea laughed. "O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!" She pinched
Celia's chin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and
lovely--fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub, and if it were not
doctrinally wrong to say so, hardly more in need of salvation than a squirrel.
"Of course people need not be always talking well. Only one tells the
quality of their minds when they try to talk well.". . . .
"_Fad_ to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my
fellow-creatures' houses in that childish way? I may well make mistakes. How can
one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty
thoughts?"No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper
and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was
disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind
conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the
eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian,
worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The _fad_
of drawing plans! What was life worth--what great faith was possible
when the whole effect of one's actions could be withered up into such
parched rubbish as that? When she got out of the carriage, her cheeks
were pale and her eyelids red. She was an image of sorrow, and her uncle
who met her in the hall would have been alarmed, if Celia had not been
close to her looking so pretty and composed, that he at once concluded
Dorothea's tears to have their origin in her excessive religiousness.
He had returned, during their absence, from a journey to the county
town, about a petition for the pardon of some criminal.
What a dreadful, supercilious woman--unfortunately, from all signs, she has her comeuppance shortly, and it is like to be as dreadful as a woman who thinks of her sister as a squirrel.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 10:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Look! Look! A St. Blogger's Book
Because Mrs. Nancy Brown was gracious enough to stop by, leave a comment, and an address whereby I might find her, I discovered that she has out (or will have out shortly) A Study Guide to G. K. Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi. If this is cover proof, we may soon see the book. Go, admire, ooh and aah, and wish Nancy the best on her new publication!
Posted by Steven Riddle at 12:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Our Lady of Kibeho
Western Confucian has a series of links to the apparitions of Our Lady in Rwanda--Our Lady of Kibeho. Some of these links seem to overstate the case in saying that the "have been officially recognized" by the Church. In fact, the local Bishop has determined that there is evidence that these apparitions may be real and has not discouraged devotion and pilgrimage--but that is not the determination of the entire Church and one must be exceedingly cautious. However, they immediately appealed to me even as I await the solemn judgment of the Church in the matter.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 3:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 26, 2006
Retraction: Karen Valentine
Now boys and girls, it's time for everyone's favorite segment of the show in which Steven is required to eat crow. This week's session is Karen Valentine.
I was thinking over what I had said a while ago about Karen Valentine and realized that I had made several errors and hasty decisions and judgments regarding her work. The particular book I was reading was The Haunted Rectory, one I had picked up with the hope of a frisson of delight during the Hallowe'en season. Perhaps part of the reason for my hastiness is that the frisson was a long time coming--in fact, as far as I read it never really did. Whatever the cause, let me explain why I think I was in error. In the course of the work Ms. Valentine introduces us to a character who seemingly blithely had determined in the course of a possibly invalid marriage to a previously divorced person that they would have no children of their own in the course of the marriage. And to the point of the book I had gotten (and that point in the marriage) they had lived true to that determination. This set off the usual alarm bells that can be overly sensitive in those of us who have emerged from that mindset and have determined to entertain that idea no more.
So, where's the error? (1) It is inappropriate to attribute to an author the feelings, idea, or thoughts of any one or any aggregate of the characters they present. Were I to be consistent in this condemnation, I would have to throw away half of Flannery O'Connor, most of Graham Greene, and all of Walker Percy, amongst others. (2) It is inappropriate to assume that the author condones the attitude of the characters, even if there is considerable sympathy on the part of the author for the individual. Once again, consistency would force me to abandon Endo's Silence, Greene's The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair and many other worthy works.
Why the error? It's a curious thing--I am less tolerant of this type of thing with regard to my light reading than I am with my "literary" reading. Stuff I read for entertainment must reach higher standards than stuff I read for edification. Part of the reason for that is that I leave much of the critical apparatus and defensive shields out of my light reading. The shields are down so bad ideas have greater influence than they might otherwise have. (This explains, in part, my reaction to The Devil's Advocate.)
I have always been a reader. Fiction is subversive. It shapes the way I view the world in ways far more profound than any piece of nonfiction (other than the Bible) has ever done. Hence, greater caution is required with fiction than with nonfiction. Nonfiction invites skepticism and challenge--fiction invites intimate conversation.
So, I made a blunder, overreacting to a piece of fiction; and that blunder unfairly maligned an author about whom I should have better remained silent. What's done cannot be undone, but at least I can say that it was done in error and one needs to judge each work individually. I sha'n't return to The Haunted Rectory for a great many reasons, and I wouldn't recommend the work; however, I shall attempt other works. Ms. Valentine's writing is stronger and less inclined to some of the sappiness inherent in Jan Karon's work. I like her tight style and the lack of sentimentality that I found in her work. She reminds me more of Philip Gulley than of Jan Karon, and so while all three present a kind of idealized community, I prefer the presentations of Gulley (Quaker) and Valentine than that of Karon.
So, Julie, take that book off the bottom of your stack and put it back on the list. Be vigilant, but enjoy the book. You read quickly enough that Ms. Valentine's novel won't take more than two hours out of your hectic schedule, and it might well be worth it. Sorry for the faulty guidance and next time I'm not talking about a specific work, I will endeavor to be more careful. My apologies to all and most particularly to Ms. Valentine.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:24 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
Before I start, let me post a hypersensitivity alert--this was, overall a very fine book. But what you're likely to read about more than anything else are my quibbles with it because he managed to push two hot-buttons in one slender volume.
The book is both a personal history and a history of bookselling at large. I shared an excerpt that has provoked in everyone who has heard it the same reaction--"That was me!" And the book is fascinating with bits and pieces and insights into the bookselling world. The memoir material really appealed to me. The data on how much money various parties make from the sale of a books was also fascinating. The tale of how booksellers were once book printers and in the course of time became book printers again, was fascinating.
Indeed, except for the two points I'm about to grouse about, most of the book was fascinating and rewarding. The last chapter lagged a bit, but even it had some fascinating anecdotes about unique bookstores.
Okay, my two gripes--the two hot buttons. The hoary old "repression of the Middle Ages" big-bad Catholic Church nonsense makes its customary appearance. One would have hoped that with a person so enamored of books, he would have taken the time to disabuse himself of the pervasive anti-Catholic bigotry and diatribe that informs most of our Elementary School educations. Ah, but not so. While there may be the merest of nods toward the scriptoria--the Church was the means of repression. Works it did not care for were not tendered to all and sundry. Essential knowledge was locked away, while the enlightened Islam shared all. Balderdash! The western world has what it does of age old Classics because of the scriptoria--not because (or at least not solely because of) Islamic preservation of the classics. But to treat Buzbee fairly, he does go on a bit about the wanton destruction of the library at Alexandria.
The second point that set me off, but which is at least merely a disagreement of degree not of kind, was his rant and rage at "censorship" and his exaltation of the Bookstore as the defender of the free exchange of ideas. In this case he picked the cause of Salman Rushdie and that marathon readings of the utterly unreadable The Satanic Verses that occurred in bookstores around the world after the fatwa against Rushdie was issued. In the course of which we have the usual defense of The Anarchist's Cookbook and the obligatory slash at Lofting's Dr. Doolittle (with perhaps a good deal of justification). He also attacks The Patriot's Act (not necessarily a bad thing). However, perhaps it is only me, but I could care less if the FBI wanted to spend long office hours poring over the lists of books I check out from the library or get from bookstores. And I doubt the FBI is particularly interested. This is one of those matters like confession, where you go in thinking you've got about the most shocking thing in the world to tell the priest, and the poor man on the other side of the screening has to prop his eyelids open just to keep awake long enough to give absolution. I'm not defending the Patriot Act's carte blanche to invade the privacy of the individual in this way. But I can't get too worked up about it. After they've gotten through the four-thousandth checkout of Howl's Moving Castle (book and film) or the thirty-thousandth romantic thriller (Linda uses my card as well) they'll be needing something stronger than the freeze-dried coffee they're eating to keep them awake. I don't quake in my boots at the prospect of someone reading my reading list. Can't say I'm particularly fond of the notion, but I don't get all worked up over it either. And perhaps it's good that some people, like Buzbee get all in a froth over it--I'll leave it to him.
However, the right to the free exchange of ideas is not unlimited. In my mind there is no question that The Anarchist's Cookbook falls squarely into the domain of things that should never have achieved print and whose eradication from print would not be a great loss to the ages. The free exchange of ideas does not reach to pornography, pedophilia, and perversions. No one needs to know much of what is laid out in the works of the Marquis de Sade. Free exchange and protection thereof does not mean that we do not discriminate and choose to class come ideas as not worthy of furtherance. And this is where activists begin to lose their minds. They are indiscriminate in the demands for protection--and frankly I'm in favor of some forms of government censorship. I don't think a criminal should be able to profit from his memoirs or from his artwork. I don't think society needs a flood of pornographic images and semi-pornographic images to prove that it is open to the exchange of ideas, etc.
So, now I've belabored my points, spending all these words on what may constitute a total of ten pages in an otherwise very worthy book. So my advice, if these things bother you, skip those pages and continue on the other side. The book is well worthwhile, you'll learn a lot and you'll have a good time doing it. My suspicion is that for most of St. Blog's, you'll see yourselves in several different places throughout the book. Highly recommended despite my blathering. (8-9 out of 10)
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:40 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
A Numerical Rating System--The Road
I've given some thought to a numerical rating system for book reviews. And I may try to implement it.
But in the course of thinking about it, I thought also how the system suddenly shifts when one book intrudes that stands so clearly above all the rest.
The case in point--of recent date I've read a number of really interesting, good, fun books:The Thirteenth Tale and The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop among them--both of which in my system I would have given a 9 out of 10.
Problem is, along comes a book like The Road and all that's left is 10 out of 10, and that hardly seems adequate because it towers above these bon-bons as the Rockies do above the surrounding plains--or as China's karstic mountains do around the surrounding countryside. They don't exist in the same mode of being. So what does one do to emphasize the utter necessity, beauty, and power of The Road in comparison? Well, I'm doing it now. 10 out of 10 on the Tolstoy scale. Whereas Buzbee and Setterfield are 9 out of 10 on the Crichton-King scale. A different mode of existence. (And by the way most Crichton books rate about a 5 on the later scale, most of king somewhere in the 6-7).
And I do have to point out that my scale would probably be likened to geometric rather than arithmetic. So perhaps the 10 stands, understanding that the 10 is the exponent of an underlying positive integer greater than 1.
Nevertheless, this was just another clever (or perhaps not-so-clever) way of saying--read The Road--it's powerful and it's beautiful. Read it, please. Write to me and tell me how I need to say it so you'll try it. It isn't easy going, but it's a fast read and a powerful one. See what good, if idiosyncratic, prose can do.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Credibility Gap
Nonsense like this completely undermines the credibility of real arguments against involvement in Iraq.
According to the hyperbole: "Armies claiming to bring prosperity have instead brought a misery worse than under the cruellest of modern dictators."
Misery worse than Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the two Kims? Really? Worse than that of the Rwanda Genocide. Worse than Saddam's genocide and rape rooms? Heck, misery worse than the entire province of Banda Aceh after the Tsunami. Please, get the rhetoric under control.
I have no problem with rational, real, and measured accounts of what is going wrong in Iraq. I have no problem with criticizing policy. But I have a real problem with the chronological memory of people who would say that this is worse than The Cultural Revolution. That people are more miserable here that they were in, say, Pol Pot's Cambodia. How is anyone to be persuaded to the real urgency of a situation when you start your exposition with this kind of nonsense?
There are many reasonable and rational ways to say that you think that it is not only a bad idea but that it is immoral and out-and-out evil. This particular way does not further the cause.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 5:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 28, 2006
MamaT's Homeschool Contribution
MamaT posted a link to Pachelbel's Canon, a piece Sam is currently learning for a future piano recital.
Here's my response to MamaT:
Dear MamaT,
Thank you! You just contributed to a homeschool lesson about why it's important to practice your piano. Sam loved that piece and he's learning it on piano now. I pointed out to him that once he learned enough piano playing and theory he'd be able to build his own Canon.
"And my own music?"
"And your own music."
"And other people would play it?"
"Yes."
Thanks again MamaT.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dr. Illuminatus: The Alchemist's Son
I post this review to more-or-less warn prospective readers to give this one a pass. The series may improve, but this was a spindly skeleton of a novel with a poorly sketched set of central characters and actions that were episodic to the point of disappearing. Booth appears to have reacted to the accusations against Rowling and her "witchcraft" by going out of the way to point out the Christian roots of alchemy--even to giving a mini-lesson on the Blessed Raymond Lull, the First Doctor Illuminatus, whose work spawned that of the Lullists--alchemists who gave rise to the title character in this work.
As I said the story is solid but so skeletal as to deprive the reader of any real pleasure in perusing it--everything moves so rapidly that by the time you get to the end you've spent only ten minutes reading it because of the time-dilation effect. Unfortunately, that means disjointed plot elements, poor characterization, and poor description. I'm hoping Mr. Booth improves the quality for the next entry in the series. These could stand to be easily about one-and-a-half to two times as long.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch
In sharp contrast to the last review, Joseph Delaney's The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch delivers an enormously satisfying reading experience. While it is marketed in the Teens/Young Adults section, it is pretty strong stuff--when I turned it over to Linda to read last night she read the first few pages and then said, "I can't read this at night, it gives me the creeps."
In this series we will follow the adventures of Thomas Ward, seventh son of a seventh son and now apprentice to "The Spook," whose valuable, but grossly undervalued service to the community, is reaching an End. Thomas Ward is the last apprentice.
In this first book of the series, we see Thomas apprenticed and watch as he learns about Ghasts, Ghosts, Boggarts and their binding, and Witches. These latter are not the airy-fairy wiccan, dance around the circle and everybody be happy Witches. These are the blood and bone witches of English Folk and Fairy Tales. These are the witches that would stuff Hansel and Gretel in the oven without a second thought. These are the witches who sour milk and carry away babies in the night--witches who are buried upside down so they have less traction to climb out of their graves. In other words--really, really scary witches.
Delaney takes the stuff of folklore and turns it into a compelling story in a quasi medieval time. I thoroughly enjoyed this first book, and plunged through its three-hundred plus pages in a matter of hours. I've already purchased the second and am halfway through that.
There are some disturbing elements--a hint of anti-clericalism, but given the circumstances of the time and events surrounding, hardly surprising. I'll watch this strain and see if it develops. It looked like it might veer off into virulent atheism a la Pullman in this second book, but instead treads a careful line of not much liking the strictures of institutionalized religion, while not denying that there is a God.
So, at the end of this first book we discover that the Dark is getting stronger and the apprenticeship of Thomas Ward is all the more necessary. With the dark rising there must be those who are fit to meet the challenge of it. And that cautionary note is salutary in this day and age when the Dark has changed its overt form and rises in the form of all sorts of seeming goods--stem-cell research, extracting vital information from prisoners, bringing democracy to the world. These things are not in themselves bad, but there can be bad means of bringing them about (embryonic stem cells, torture, unjust war) that we must be willing to identify and fight. The first lesson of an apprentice is to learn when we are awake and when we are dreaming.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack