Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 10

Why has Blogger lost its search function?

 Blogger now won't let me enter anything in the search box.

Are the people at Google out to kill Blogger and blogging?

Why this reduced functionality?

They made the "Blog This" function post garbage. See, for example, my Simple Links blog, which I used as a straight blog, that is, a web log of sites visited that I might want to refer to again. The "Blog This" feature worked well for that purposes, as well as for quoting extracts from other sites to quote in blog posts. Then Google decided to "improve" it, which made it useless for any purpose at all -- have a look at Simple Links to see how "improved" it is.

They made the editor a lot more difficult to use too. So much so that I went back to LiveJournal, until they decided to go one better than Blogger by making their editor not only more difficult but impossible to use.

All the blogging platforms seem to be in an intense rivalry to produce the worst UX (user experience) ever.

Cross Purposes: A New Novel

I've written a new novel, Cross Purposes, which is due for public release on 22 October 2022. But if you order an advance copy from Smashwords before that date, you will be eligible for a substantial discount.

It's intended to be a children's story for kids aged about 9-12, but adults who like books like C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories or books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner might enjoy it too.

The main characters, who appeared in my earlier books Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove,  are Sipho Mdluli (13), Jeffery Davidson (12), Janet Montgomery (11) and Catherine Kopirovsky (10). Catherine is given a jewelled cross by he grandmother, an ancient family heirloom from Russia, which gives them mysterious signals when they go on holiday together. At first they think it might just be warning them of danger, but later it seems to be leading them on a quest, whose nature they must find out as they go along

I quote from one review (well, the only one so far, but I won't link to it because it has too many spoilers):

These books seem to me to be what (Charles) Williams might have written, had he been spared to do so, if he had decided to write children's novels, somewhat under Lewis's influence, South African children in the early 1960s (with, yes, all the social and political baggage that implies). They have (to me) the same sense of the blurring of the natural and the supernatural so that the natural becomes numinous and the supernatural sensorily immediate that I love in Williams.

 

You will be at a *slight* disadvantage if you start with this one; it is about four characters established in the earlier novels, and, perhaps as a courtesy to those who have read those other books, does not spend as much energy in setting up the children as another writer might. There are no plot summaries to explain how they, and especially Sipho, met and became friends; you just have to take it as given.

The stories are set in the mid-1960s, which is when apartheid was at its height in South Africa, so in a way that makes them historical novels, because any children, even South African children, who are in the age range of the target readership will have had no experience of what apartheid was like, and part of the aim of the first two books was to give children who didn't live through it some idea of what it was like to live under apartheid. 

This isn't really the aim of Cross Purposes, though, because most of the action takes place outside South Africa. But I've tried to make the historical background as accurate as possible without being too didactic about it.

This one is less ambitious than the immediately preceding one in the series, The Enchanted Grove. I made that one available in hard copy, and asked my son (an artist) to design a special cover, and made it available in a paperback edition as well, but it didn't sell enough copies for me be able to buy enough copies to send to the copyright libraries, never mind pay my son for the cover design. So this one is less ambitious: ebook edition only, and an el cheapo abstract cover. In the unlikely event of the sales of this one covering the production cost of The Enchanted Grove, I may think about new paperback editions of the other two with better covers. The only way that can happen is if this one gets a lot of good reviews. 

The Dispossessed: an sf novel on two dystopian cultures

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of Ursula le Guin's better novels, I think.

Two planets orbiting the same sun act as moons to each other, and the inhabitants have split because of political and cultural differences. Anarres is dry and austere, and its inhabitants are libertarian and socialist. Urras is lush and green, and its inhabitants are authoritarian and capitalist, or propertarian, as the Anarresti like to call them.

Shevek, a physicist on Anarres , feels that his research and discoveries are unappreciated at home, and makes a journey to Urras to meet physicists there, but finds that the Urrasti want to use his discoveries to increase their own power.

The people of both Anarres and Urras have adopted a kind of apartheid, and want to keep their cultures and political systems separate, so that neither will be contaminated by the views and principles of the other. . The culture of Urras is closer to that of the world we live in and so is easier to depict; the culture of Anarres has no real life model, though certain aspects of it have been advocated by some anarcho-syndicalists, thus it is harder to depict in a convincing way. But authoritarianism manages to creep in there, under the guise of protection of liberty. Though I'm inclined to favour anarcho-syndicalism myself, I've never really tried to envisage just how such a society would work. Ursula le Guin makes a valiant attempt, but it is not quite convincing enough. For the most part Ursula le Guin does a fairly convincing job of showing how such diverse cultures might interact with each other.

Apart from space travel, le Guin does not envisage much technological development in society, and most of the technology -- transport, communications, computers, and the like, are much as they were in the mid-20th century on earth. Anarres has abandoned the week, and based its time measurement on units called decads, presumably of 10 days. But they also speak of "years" when referring to the age of people, and though it seems that these years must be fairly similar to earth years, it is nowhere stated that they are, or how it relates to the orbits of Anarres and Urras.




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Diepsloot, a paradigm case of an informal settlement

Diepsloot by Anton Harber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Diepsloot is an informal settlement (shanty town) on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg and the southern outskirts of Tshwane. It began post-apartheid in the late 1990s and this study of it was made by journalist Anton Harber about 2010, so it is probably out of date now. At the time the author estimated that there were about 1700 similar settlements throughout South Africa, and there are now probably many more. This detailed examination of Diepsloot at a particular point in its history gives a pretty good picture of how a lot of South Africans live today, and the number of people who live in this way continues to increase.

Anton Harber analyses Diepsloot from many different points of view -- its history, how people came to live there, the difficulties of life, accommodation, transport, housing, schooling, municipal and government services and the lack of them, and protests against lack of "service delivery".

Diepsloot and its problems are rarely known to anyone outside, and the place is rarely mentioned in the news media other than from an outside point of view, the only exception to this being the Daily Sun, which, however, concentrates almost exclusively on crime stories.

Diepsloot consists mainly of shacks erected in unplanned fashion by those who live in them, and the shacks were erected before there was any infrastructure like roads, sewerage or electricity, so providing such services is difficult without disturbing or demolishing existing shacks, which of course evokes protests from the residents.

Crime is rife, and the police were absent for a long time -- the nearest police station was in Erasmia, 16 kilometres away in the City of Tshwane, though Diepsloot itself is in the City of Johannesburg. so by the time a crime was reported to the police, and the police had arrived on the scene, the perpetrators had long gone, if they had not been caught be people in the vicinity and often dealt with by vigilante justice, so by the time the police arrived the only people they could arrest were those who had punished the original criminals by beating them up or even killing them. Later a police station was built, but because of the difficulty of reaching places within Diepsloot by vehicle, the police could still not reach crime scenes quickly.

Places like Diepsloot illustrate the problem of housing in South Africa. The figures for the provision of housing are impressive, but the need for housing is growing faster. Harber analyses this, and shows, pretty convincingly I thought, that the need is not so much for housing as for accommodation, and the distinction is significant and important.

The provincial and local government have tried to provide "RDP" houses, which are single-family houses in the middle of their own plot of land, very much on the same pattern as the previous apartheid government sought to provide. There is a shortage of land for such houses, and that makes it difficult for Diepsloot to expand for its increasing population, which is also complicated by some nearby land being the breeding ground of an endangered species of frog.

Outside politicians and bureaucrats have tried to impose a "one family, one house, one plot" model, but the people of Diepsloot gravitate naturally to a pattern in which

...shacks are in small family clusters, bunches of them sharing small courtyards and fenced off as units... People have structured the space to serve their needs, and it means that child-headed households, for example, get the support and assistance of their neighbours.

Finding solutions is made more difficult because of bureaucracy. Money is budgeted by one agency and allocated for something like road improvements, for example, but that requires drainage and various other planning permissions from different departments, which takes longer, and so the allocated money is not spent and has to be returned to the Treasury. The City of Johannesburg decided some years ago to separate the provision of electricity, water, and rubbish removal into several autonomous "silos", each with its own bureaucratic structure, so coordinated planning is almost impossible. 

...the electricity, water, refuse removal and transport departments... (were) carved off into independent companies, known collectively as City-Owned Enterprises.... Coordination, though, is a nightmare. Now they have more silos than a Free State farming cooperative and getting them all to operate and implement, in harmony, is extremely difficult.

One harassed bureaucrat from the Development Bank of Southern Africa showed Harber a shelf full of files of completed development plans, waiting to be implemented.

Because of this, the people of Dielsloot have de3veloped their own structures and systems of authority, and these are often rivals, and there are rivalries within rivalries. The ANC, the dominant political party in Diepsloot, sees power struggles between the ANC itself and its alliance partners. There are also tensions between businesses -- small businesses and bigger businesses, and between local business people and foreign traders.

Harber tried to interview representatives of each, bureaucrats, business people, teachers, NGOs, politicians (local, municipal and provincial), teachers, health workers and others, to build a picture of the settlement. People like to speak of the "community", but in fact there are so many overlapping and often rival "communities" within a place like Diepsloot that it is a misnomer.

 I found it particularly interesting  because some members of our church in Atteridgeville live in such an informal settlement, Phomolong in Atteridgeville West, and they sometimes mention similar problems. And sometimes our diocese has tried to negotiate for places for building temples in such places, without understanding the complexity of political structures and power relations. Some of that is unique to Diepsloot, of course, but the complexity is universal. We have been trying for 20 years to get a church site in Soshanguve, but the land, earmarked by the City of Tshwane as a church site, is registered in the deeds office as owned by the Gauteng Province, and before the site can be allocated and developed, someone must pay the conveyancing fees, and is it the municipality or the province? So people tell us to make like an informal settlement, and just build something on it before someone else does.
This book is important reading for South Africans, both those who live in places like Diepsloot, and perhaps even more, those who don't.




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Academic versus spiritual knowledge

Someone asked on Twitter

Academic Bible readers, how do you separate the head knowledge from feeding the spiritual, contemplative side of your faith?

My short answer was that I try not to separate them, but to integrate them, but it deserves a longer answer, which is not possible in the 240 or so characters allowed by Twitter, because it's not really as simple as that. 

Academic theology tends to be book knowledge, learned from reading a lot. But Evagrius of Pontus said that a theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.

In the Orthodox Church there is book learning, certainly, but you cannot really learn about Orthodoxy from books, or from searching stuff on the Internet, because the core of Orthodox theology is enacted theology. Yes, people wrote theological books, but the people who wrote the books also participated in the Divine Liturgy. They followed the rhythim of the liturgical day, week and year. They fasted and prayed, and that shaped the books they wrote and the way they wrote them.

Western theologians often fail to understand this, and tend to get things very wrong when writing about Orthodox theology. For an example of this, see here: Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Book Review).

So trying to separate the academic head knowledge from the spiritual and devotional knowledge of the heart can be a dangerous and limiting thing. The very title of the book was misleading, "constants in context", because in the Orthodox case the context is Orthodox liturgy and worship, so in that particular book the Orthodox constants were taken out of context.

Theology can also be anecdotal, or, as the academic theologians like to say, narrative. So here is an anecdote or narrative from my own experience. 

As an undergraduate in the 1960s I studied theology at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and our lecturer for both New Testament II and Doctrine II was Vic Bredenkamp, who was also a Methodist minister. He was teaching on Ephesians 6about St Paul's reference to "principalities and powers", and what he said blew my mind. 

My conception of "principalities" was places like Monaco and Andorra, and  "powers" were the USA and USSR (in the 1960s the Cold War was at its height). So I asked Vic Bredenkamp about this, and he pointed out that St Paul was referring to these principalities and powers (rulers and authorities) in the heavenlies. 

He referred me to a book, Principalities and Powers by G.B. Caird, which explained the context of St Paul's teaching on the topic. The context was the institution of divine kingship, and the Roman religion of emperor worship. The Romans did not worship the flesh and blood emperor, but they worshipped his genius. The emperor's authority (exousia) was a spiritual power in the heavenlies. 

The point here is mythical and symbolic. When a traffic cop holds up his hand on a busy highway, he can stop a 26-wheeler truck. It is not his flesh and  blood that stops the lorry -- if he tried that, it would squash him flat. It is his exousia, his authority, that stops the truck. If he were not wearing the uniform that symbolises his exousia, and were naked, or wearing pyjamas, the truck would not stop. It his his exousia, symbolised by the uniform, that stops the the truck.

The "powers", like the USA and the USSR, had their angels, their archons, in the heavenlies. Nations had "national spirits" (archons) in the heavenlies (cf Daniel 10:12-17), as did most earthly power structures. The "prince (archon) of the king of Persia" was analogous to the "genius of Caesar". This made clear to me the meaning of some other Bible texts, like Deuteronomy 32:8-9, and Psalm 81/82. YHWH, the "great king above all gods", speaks to the assembled gods and tells them they have messed up, and the psalmist prays "Arise O God, judge the earth, for to thee belong all nations" -- a prayer that Jesus answered in John 12:31-32.

But this is all experienced in the context of Orthodox worship on Holy Saturday, when the vestments  etc are changed from Lenten purple to Paschal white, and during the singing of Psalm 81/82 the priest bursts from the holy doors scattering bay leaves while shouting "Arise O God, judge the earth, for to thee belong all nations" and the congregations sings the refrain and the reader chants the rest of the psalm, and everyone bangs on the floor or the benches or anything that will make a noise, symbolising the earthquake.

Vic Bredenkamp's dry academic lecture opened my eyes to that, and also to the demonic nature of the contemporary government policy of apartheid, which, in the words of Psalm 81/82, failed to give justice to the weak and needy, or deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

Many years after I had graduated, I saw Vic Bredenkamp again, and thanked him for opening the holy scriptures to me, and was greatly disappointed to realise that he didn't get it. He wittered on about "ripe scholarship" and it became clear to me that for him, what's said in the classroom stays in the classroom, and had nothing to do with the world outside, or spiritual and devotional life. What he had said in his class all those years ago was to remain locked up in the academic ivory tower. 

I close with another tweet:

Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate. But a discarnate world, like the one we now live in, is a tremendous menace to an incarnate Church, and its theologians haven’t even deemed it worthwhile to examine the fact (Marshall McLuhan, 1977).

Bog Child

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is classified as "young adult" -- at least I found it in the Young Adult section of the library, but i can say that this old adult enjoyed it immensely, and I think it can be read by adults of any age. When I picked it up and started reading the blurb, I immediately thought of The Barrytown Trilogy and others by Roddy Doyle, but it wasn't really like those, though it does deal with Irish family life.

Fergus McCann is 18 years old, living with his parents and two younger sisters in Northern Ireland. His brother Joe is in jail for IRA activities, and thinking of joining other prisoners in a hunger strike. While out with his uncle digging for peat Fergus discovers what appears to be the body of a child. The place where they are digging is close to the border, so they notify the police from both sides, but the pathologist recons the body is old, and so they call in an archaelogist.

Fergus has a lot on his plate. He is writing his A-level exams and hopes to go to Scotland to study medicine. He's also learning to drive and hopes to pass his driving test. One of his brother's mates asks him to take dubious packages across the border, so he feels under pressure from all sides. The book is about how he tries to cope with all this, and all the way through you can feel the pressure on Fergus, feel for him as he tries to cope with several dilemmas and no sooner has he dealt with one than the unfinished business of one of the others crops up. And thoughout it all he dreams of the bog child, and shat she might have faced.

Not quite a Bildungsroman, but the picture of a young man at a particularly intense and stressful period of his life.




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The Client (book review)

The Client by John Grisham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother Ricky go for an illicit smoke in the woods when they come across a man trying to commit suicide. Before he succeeds he reveals to them that he was the lawyer of a man who murdered a US senator, and knows where the body was hidden - the vital evidence needed to convict the killer. Mark soon finds himself being hunted, both by the killers who want to silence him, and the prosecutors and police who want him to talk.

John Grisham is a well-known author of crime fiction, and, having been a lawyer, usually with a legal twist and quite a lot of courtroom drama. I've read several of them, but this is the only one I've read three times. I first bought it at an airport bookshop to read on a plane -- a 17-hour flight to Russia. A few years later I saw the film on TV, and re-read it then, about 20 years ago.

This time my interest was more technical -- I'm writing a book, and wanted to see how Grisham handed the dialogue of kid versus cops. But after 20 years I'd forgotten many details, so I enjoyed reading it again, and I think it is one of Grisham's better books. From the point of view of technique, it was not a great deal of help, but interesting none the less. The book I am writing is set in the past, before South Africa had television, and so I was struck by how much of Mark Sway's interaction with cops was shaped by what he had seen on TV. In many places in the story he saw himself almost as an actor in a TV drama.

When he realises the difficulty of his position, Mark thinks he needs to hire a lawyer, which is what the characters in TV dramas do. He first tries to see an ambulance-chasing lawyer whose advertising he has seen on TV, but is turned down because he doesn't have a potentially lucrative actionable injury. He randomly knocks on the door of another lawyer who has an office in the same building, who happens to do a lot of work for children, and so begins the relationship between lawyer and client that is central to the story. Mark had to learn that the law and lawyers are not always what they seem to be on TV, and the lawyer, Reggie Love, has to learn how to handle legal battles that are not usually the ones that children are faced with.

It made me think about media and children's perceptions of the law. I can remember two films I saw when I was Mark's age, one in a cinema and one in the social hall at Mount Edgecombe, then a little village isolated in the cane fields somewhere north of Durban. One was called Knock on any Door, and was dark and quite violent. The other was The Lavender Hill Mob, which was light and humorous, and had the most memorable car chase of any movie I have ever seen. Neither seemed much of a basis for shaping one's perceptions of police, lawyers and criminal law.

Mark Sway, on the other hand, seemed to see shows like LA Law frequently. But in a sense, he was the last of a generation; 1993, when The Client was published, when the Internet and mobile phones were moving from being the prerogatives of a few to becoming available to the masses, which would change to role and focus of broadcast TV. So perhaps the post-TV generation would relate to the law, the police and crime differently.

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Fever: a Dystopian Novel about a Pandemic and its Aftermath

Fever by Deon Meyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read and enjoyed several books that envisage a scenario in which the world's human population is drastically reduced following some cataclysmic event. In Fever the cataclysmic event is a pandemic which seems uncanny in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, which started two years after the book was published, and the book also predicted a Covid variant.

I can't help comparing it with others in the sub-genre that I have read, Earth Abides by George Stewart and The Stand by Stephen King. Earth Abides, which I read in the early 1960s, introduced me to the concept of ecology and the effects that the presence (or absence) of human beings have on the environment.

One effect of such a cataclysm, envisaged by all three of the authors I have mentioned, is a new Dark Age, where humanity is divided into isolated pockets of people struggling to develop a new community. In Fever some of these attempts were constructive, and others destructive. As in the European Dark Ages, there is an incipient feudalism, with marauding predatory gangs of bikers, who might, if they developed along those lines, become warlords and protectors that evolved into the aristocracy of the High Middle Ages. Meyer reminds us that most of the aristocracies of Europe originated in the medieval equivalents of the leaders of biker gangs.

The story is told mainly from the point of view of a teenager, Nico Storm, whose father, Willem, is aware of this danger, and tries to gather people who want to rebuild a productive community, and chooses a site by a dam on the Gariep (Orange) River which has hydro-electricity, plentiful water, and potential for irrigation of crops. They produce leaflets to inform other survivors of their community, and distribute them as widely as they can, as a result of which small and large groups of people join them.

Some of the people who join them have useful skills for maintaining the electrical generating equipment, or producing diesel fuel from plants. One, who chooses to be known only as Domingo, has military skills, to ward off the attacks of biker gangs,

The different characters of the leaders of the community also reflect different trends in society. Willem Storm, the ethical humanist, wants an inclusive society in which people of different backgrounds and interests can live together in peace and freedom, and wants the community to be governed democratically. Domingo, the militarist, thinks a benevolent dictatorship would be better, especially in the chaotic times in which they are living, Pastor Nkosi, representing the religious interest, longs for a utopian community of dedicated Christians living in a theocracy. But somehow they manage for the most part to balance these different visions.

Nico Storm sees all this through the eyes of an impetuous teenager, with volatile emotions, whose loyalties and suspicions keep jumping from one person to another. Willem Storm, perhaps aware that the Dark Ages got that label because of the absence of historical information about them, is determined to prevent that happening in their community, which they call Amanzi (Zulu/Xhosa for "water"), and starts a history project of recording the history of the community and its members, and so the story is not told entirely from the point of view of Nico Storm, whose impetuous judgements and misjudgements and mood swings could give a distorted picture.

I thought Deon Meyer told the story very well, and found it an enjoyable read. The events all seemed believable in the context of the story, until the last 25 pages or so. Then it jumped the shark, and I found the ending of the story disappointing, and almost an anticlimax. It reminded me of another TV series, Dallas, which did something similar when one of the characters returned from the dead. If it weren't for the weak ending, I would have given it 5 stars on GoodReads.

 But I also found The Stand by Stephen King disappointing, and more disappointing than this one, because the disappointment came much earlier in the story -- it was the introduction of a villain who smacked of cheap melodrama, the kind of opponent that Batman would have to deal with, rather than the characters in Stephen King's novel. The villains in Fever are far more convincing, and just as villainous.

In Earth Abides George Stewart has, in some ways a more pessimistic vision, though there is less overt violence than there is in the other two books. But in that book the random survivors have no special skills, and when a community does form, it takes longer, and there is no Willem Storm to provide the vision and lead it. Most attempts to rebuild a community according to a plan fail, because there are simply not enough people with the necessary skills to carry out anything planned, and the community develops in a largely unplanned but possibly more organic way.

Earth Abides was first published in 1947, and is set on the west coast of the USA, and for years after reading it I tried to imagine what I would do in similar circumstances, if such a cataclysm occurred in South Africa. Deon Meyer was obviously wondering the same thing, and his book is the result. My imaginings were similar in some ways, but different in others. I pictured roads deteriorating rapidly, as they tend to do without traffic, and envisaged travelling by rail, using steam engines, which could be made to burn wood if necessary, and so be less dependent on imported fossil fuel.

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Writings of Nadine Gordimer

The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places by Nadine Gordimer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nadine Gordimer was a South African author, of a generation before me. I had read one of her novels, of which I could remember little, and a couple of her short stories. I had heard of her, and even met her once, but wasn't particularly drawn to her books. I picked up this one, a collection of essays, and a couple of others in the library in haste, and thought I'd read a couple of the essays and bring it back a week or two later.

When I started to read it, however, I found that it was the story of my life. Well not quite, but it dealt with times I lived through and remembered. And Nadine Gordimer's memories were much the same as mine. The 23 essays were collected and annotated by Stephen Clingman. His introductions and explanatory notes also tell it like it was. The introductions give enough of the historical background to each piece to enable the reader to place it in context, and the explanatory notes give information about people and events mentioned in the text of each piece.

The essays are arranged roughly in chronological order, with the first group dealing with events and people up to the schoolchildren's revolt of 1976, There follow some articles about travels elsewhere in Africa and Madagascar, and finally more pieces on South Africa between 1976 and 1985, which Gordimer felt was like living in an interregnum.

The penultimate article, the eponymous "essential gesture" deals with the responsibility of a writer to society, something which South African writers find hard to escape. Several of the articles are diatribes against censorship, which Gordimer fiercely opposed, and one point she makes in that connection is worth repeating:

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and the heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? And there is some evidence that is ceases to. What writer of any literary worth defends fascism, totalitarianism, racism, in an age when these are still pandemic? Ezra Pound is dead. In Poland, where are the poets who sing the epic of the men who broke Solidarity? In South Africa, where are the writers who produce brilliant defences of apartheid?

I can't recall a single work of fiction, whether of any literary merit or none, that extolled the virtues and glories of apartheid, though there were plenty that attacked and criticised it.

In many of the essays, letters and speeches, however, Nadine Gordimer emphasised that she saw herself primarily as a writer of fiction. " I have to offer you myself as my most closely-observed specimen from the interregnum; yet I remain a writer, not a public speaker. Nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction."

So I thought I should read some more of her fiction, and read this:

Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A book about a white middle-class family living in Johannesburg in the early 21st century. Paul Bannerman is an ecologist, an environmentalist, with a wife, Berenice, who works in an advertising agency, and a small pre-school son.

Paul has cancer, and has to have radiation treatment that makes him temporarily radioactive and a danger to others with whom he comes into contact, so he has to live in quarantine, and does so in the house of his parents, Adrian, a businessman, and Lyndsey, a lawyer.

The family responds to various internal and external crises, the first of which is Paul's cancer and enforced isolation. Berenice has two personas. At work she is Berenice, at home she is Benni, and there are hints of a conflict between the interests of the clients of her agency whose business can be a threat to the environment that Paul is trying to protect.

When Paul recovers, he returns to work, and his parents go on an extended holiday to Mexico, where his father, beginning retirement, can indulge in his interest in archaeology. The family relations change in various unexpected ways as a result of subsequent events.

I found it a difficult book to read. Nadine Gordimer's prose, which was lucid and flowing in her essays, letters and speeches, which I had just read, was awkward and jerky. I had to go back and re-read passages because I either couldn't understand them, or because they seemed to change their meaning halfway through a sentence. Eventually I attributed this to bad punctuation. Commas were missing, or in the wrong places. Perhaps Gordimer's writing had slipped badly in the 20 years since the book of essays I had just read, or else she had been very badly served by an editor who had decided to mangle her sentences and had no feeling for language.

Another problem with Get a life was that it was too expository.

It feels strange for me to say that, because someone quite recently criticised my own writing on that ground, using that very word. By that they meant (I think) that there was too much detail extraneous to the story, and in the one example given I agreed with them. I probably tend to err in giving too much detail, partly because I am concerned that readers not familiar with the setting or social and political background might not follow the story because of that, and that forms part of the story. So when I say Nadine Gordimer's writing is too expository, I feel like the pot calling the kettle black.

Nevertheless I think Nadine Gordimer does this to excess, giving excessively repeated details of plans to build a toll road or mine the dunes of the Wild Coast, and build dams in the Okavango Delta, in ways that go way beyond the needs of the story, even if one of the aims of the story is to raise awareness of these things among readers. And this is not an early work by a novice writer, it is a late work of a much-respected writer with a long career. Were it not for these faults, I might have given it 5 stars on GoodReads, and there was a time, in the early chapters when I was thinking of giving it 3.

So what can I say about Nadine Gordimer as a writer, and as a person?

I met her once, back in 1972. It was at a kind of press conference. Most of the Ovambo contract workers in Namibia had gone on strike, and the people the police claimed were "ringleaders" were arrested and  put on trial in Windhoek. There was an observer from the International Commission of Jurists, a black judge from the USA, William Booth. You can read about the background to this here.

This was something of a media sensation in the apartheid era, and the Anglican Bishop, Colin Winter, with whom the judge was staying, held a sort of open house for the press and black leaders to meet the judge. Nadine Gordimer was there.  Some of the journalists present seemed disappointed that, as a black visitor from the USA, Judge Booth had not provoked a racial incident, and had been well received by white people he had met. Nadine Gordimer suggested that that that might be because he was very light-skinned himself, and though he might be regarded as black in America, in South Africa he could pass for white, or as a very light-skinned coloured. 

That struck me at the time as being very colour-conscious, something that the South African government, which ruled Namibia at the time, was trying to instill into all the people it ruled. The first thing one had to know about a person, that would determine your relationship towards them, was their racial classification by the South African government. For one opposed to apartheid, Nadine Gordimer, struck me as overly colour-conscious, and that comes out in her essays, letters and speeches too.

On the other hand, one could not ignore such things entirely. Being "colourblind" was not a solution. Skin colour mattered, partly because the government made it matter, and Gordimer had useful things to say about white privilege, which perhaps still need to be said in a time when many white people deny that such a thing exists or ever existed.

As of now (1986), the power structure remains the same: the whites make the law, and the blacks must direct their lives in accordance...

Of course there always has been some recognition that the privileged whites are not quite so privileged as they like to think, that while the Dorian Grey reflected in the swimming pool remains eternally bronzed and fit, fear, guilt, shame of that coarsening and blunting of the spirit that is the price of indifference, presents a different picture when he is alone with himself. Many psychological studies have pointed out that segregation is harmful both to those who impose it and those who submit to it. Yet we who live here see around us that any white man, whatever the state of his soul, lives the dolce vita in comparison with the black man bulldozed out of his home by resettlement, or the Indian banished from his livelihood by the Group Areas Act.

The Essential Gesture is a pretty good introduction to South African history between 1956 and 1986, and a good guide to South African writers and writing in that period as well.Contrary to what she suggests, I think I like her non-fiction better than her fiction. 

Biblical Literalism

Someone posted the following diagram on Twitter, with a note that it was the Bible's description of the universe: 

That struck me as being the ultimate in Biblical literalism. 

The problem with taking metaphors too literally is that you fail to see the wood for the trees, and miss what is actually being said. And there is also the danger of reading into a text a lot of things that are not being said.

In my youth there we often used other metaphors for the world (cosmos) we live in. One was "Spaceship Earth". I wonder whether, in about three millennia's time, someone will produce a drawing of whatever their current conception of a spaceship is, and say, in all seriousness, that that is how the ancients of the 20th century pictured the earth?

Another metaphor that I have often used in sermons, is based on a song by the Beatles that was popular about the same time as the "Spaceship Earth" one. I din't know if the Beatles themselves conceived it that way, but I used it in sermons describing the world in the time of Noah: We all live in a Yellow Submarine. Combine the metaphors and you get a submarine capable of travelling in outer space, which, of course, is what the Polaris missiles of those days did. 

The point of those metaphors, of course, is that both submarines and spaceships have limited resources and a confined space in which to preserve the life of the occupants. And in the days of Noah, men were filling the earth with violence .in a confined space. Do that in a submarine, and sooner or later an armour-piercing projectile will make a hole in the hull and the waters above the roof and below the floor will come flooding in. Not windows in the firmament, but bullet holes in the hull. The effect is the same. It lets in the water. But it's a metaphor. 

If anyone has a problem with biblical literalism, and wants to go beyond it to see the big picture, I recommend reading a book by Anglican bishop John Davies, called Seven Days to Freedom, which gives a better understanding of the creation story in Genesis chapter 1.