Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 20

Religion and modernity a century ago

Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey by Aldous Huxley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A travel diary of a journey undertaken nearly a century ago — the book was first published in 1926. On his journey Huxley and his companion(s) (whose name(s) are never mentioned) visit India, Burma, Malaya, Java, Borneo, the Philippines, China, Japan and the USA.

His observations are interesting historically, because the first three countries he mentioned were still under British colonial rule, while the Philippines were under American rule. At the end of his journey he concludes that travel is broadening, that it makes one aware of human diversity, and that awareness of that diversity should make one more tolerant, but not too tolerant. His views change with each country he visits, and one can see how each one changes the way he sees things.

The first country he describes is India. As a Westerner he regards India as too “spiritual”, and doesn’t think that attitude has done India much good. Back then India was one country, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (which he did not visit). Muslims and Hindus lived side by side. He describes a visit to the River Ganges, where about a million Hindus had gathered for an eclipse of the sun. They were there to save the sun from a serpent that threatened to eat it. Huxley writes:

To save the sun (which might, one feels, very safely be left to look after itself) a million Hindus will assemble on the banks of the Ganges. How many, I wonder, would assemble to save India? An immense energy, which, if it could be turned into political channels, might liberate and transform the country, is wasted in the name of imbecile superstitions. Religion is a luxury which India, in its present condition, cannot possibly afford. India will never be free until the Hindus and the Moslems are as tepidly enthusiastic about their religion as we are about the Church of England, If I were an Indian millionaire, I would leave all my money for the endowment of an Atheist Mission (Huxley 1994:91).

After he had visited the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Philippines he made an observation about Christian mission and colonialism that I, as a missiologist, found interesting:

The Dutch and English were never such ardent Christians that they thought it necessary to convert, wholesale and by force, the inhabitants of the countries which they colonized. The Spaniards, on the contrary, did really believe in their extraordinary brand of Catholic Christianity; they were always crusaders as well as freebooters, missionaries as well as colonists. Wherever they went, they have left behind them their religion, and with it (for one cannot teach a religion without teaching many other things as well) their language and some of their habits (Huxley 1994:161).

When he visited the USA he describes his reaction to an advertisement for a firm of undertakers in Chicago, where the undertaker became a mortician, the coffin became a casket, and the deceased became “the loved one” — a phenomenon that was to lead a couple of other British authors to write books about it — The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and The American Way of Death by Nancy Mitford.

The thing that really caught Huxley’s attention, however, was the difference in values that this indicated, between the USA and Europe. The undertaker was proud of providing a necessary “service”. Huxley thought that the people who really provided a necessary service did not represent higher values, as the undertaker’s advertisement implied, but rather lower values. Higher values, for people in Europe, were represented by unnecessary services, like art and religion (Huxley seemed to have changed his mind about the value of religion by the end of his journey). In American modernity and materialism unnecessary services were just unnecessary.

[image error]In describing this, Huxley reflects on the source of values. He recognises that if one is a thoroughgoing materialist, there can be no values. One cannot talk of “higher values” or “lower values”, because it is meaningless to do so. The problem with America, he realises, is democracy. Science and technology made it possible for him to read, on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about a young wife of an old doctor in California who was arrested and charged with driving her car onto a railway line while drunk and whistling like a train. The people who were entertained by these stories could not possibly have invented the technology that made it possible to transmit them to the furthest reaches of the universe. That was done by the few. I wonder what he would of made of our technology, where people send pictures, not of unusual events, but of what they ate for lunch.

What struck me about it was that in India, Huxley was a liberal, seeing the need for the liberation of the oppressed Indians.By the time he got to America he had become a conservative and an elitist, saying that democracy was causing lower values to have precedence over the higher.

In this I was struck by the contrast between Aldous Huxley and G.K. Chesterton, who was 20 years his senior. By the end of this book Huxley is coming across as a young fogey. Where Huxley was conservative and elitist, deploring democracy, which allowed the untalented many to enjoy the fruits of the work of the talented few, Chesterton was liberal and egalitarian, and stood up for the common man whose common sense was needed to protect him from the elite.

Huxley gives us fascinating glimpses into other places, other times, other values. Travelling eastwards round the world, he thought India needed to modernised, but after crossing the international date line from the East to the West, he seemed to change his mind, and thought that America was too modern.

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Black Diamond: yuppie life in the new South Africa

Black Diamond by Zakes Mda

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don Mateza works for a security company in Johannesburg, and his ambitious girlfriend Tumi, who runs a modelling agency, is grooming him to become a “Black Diamond”, one of the nouveau riche of the new South Africa. Don is asked to be the bodyguard of an uptight white female magistrate, who has been threatened by a petty criminal she has sentenced to prison, and there is the hope of promotion if he does the job well. This does not satisfy Tumi, however, who thinks it demeaning, and Don has to spend too much time away from her. The magistrate, Kristin, did not ask for protection, and sees having a bodyguard as a sign of weakness.

In this scenario Zakes Mda weaves a plot of shifting loyalties and the conflicting values that characterise the “new” South Africa, though it was already ten years old in the time the story is set, and is another fifteen years older now.

I had only recently finished reading Mda’s memoir Sometimes there is a Void and so was aware that a lot of this book is based on his own real-life experiences. It is social satire, and the story is rather sad, but Mda also sees the funny side of it. I gave it five stars, on GoodReads, but perhaps that is because it is set close to home, and if I were living on another continent I might have given it fewer. Though I don’t move in the kind of social circles described in the book, it looked pretty authentic to me.

It also seemed to complement another book I had recently read, Darkness Suspended, though the tone in that one is much more serious, and lacks Mda’s humour. Both show life in Gauteng, and both observe similar events. Zakes Mda is an atheist and Jurie Schoeman is a Christian, and that could account for some differences, but the picture they give is broadly similar.

One of the debates in South African literary circles has been about what post-apartheid literature should look like, and perhaps these two books provide one answer. The debate was influenced by a book of essays published by Njabulo Ndebele in the 1990s, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. I’ve not read it yet, but I have read quite a lot about it, and I gather that the main thesis is, as the title suggests, that post-apartheid literature should not be dominated by political protest, but should rather deal with ordinary people and ordinary lives.

These books do so to some extent, though there is a strong element of political protest in Mda’s book. The message from Mda is that the new South Africa wasn’t meant to be like this, and shows how its failings affect people. The System has changed, but it remains the System, and it still crushes people. The emphasis in Darkness Suspended, however, is more on whether one’s Christian faith can withstand what the System throws at us, and whether and how one’s faith can help one to cope with the System and one’s own personal weaknesses. How “ordinary” any of this is is a moot point.

But reading these books makes it very clear to me that I could never write like this, not just because I don’t move in those social circles, and so my notion of what is “ordinary” is probably quite different. But to me the “ordinary” remains the apartheid period, and protest, and the roles of ordinary people in that. Perhaps it’s because I like reading and studying history, and live in the past, and so most of what I write about is “Tales from Dystopia“.

 

 

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Out of the Silent Planet

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book at least four times, and probably more, and when a friend who had just read it for the first time posted a review, I realised that I hadn’t yet done so, and that after having read it so many times, any review that I posted would probably contain spoilers, and so I should mark it as such.

*** Spoiler Alert *** If you haven’t read this book, don’t read on unless you don’t mind spoilers.

The book is usually described as science fiction, and Lewis himself intended it to be science fiction, but it is closer to fantasy than science fiction. And even more, it is social satire along the lines of Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathan Swift wrote at a time when most people in the British Isles knew less about earth than Lewis’s generation knew about the solar system, so he could people far-away lands with strange people and societies to his heart’s content. Lewis, writing in the 20th century, had to move the scene to another planet.

The state of geographical knowledge was not his only reason for doing so. He had a theological reason as well — he saw earth as being behind a kind of cosmic iron curtain, sealed off and in quarantine from the rest of the universe, ruled by an insane planetary dictator, a bit like Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Earth was the silent planet.

Quite often people ask questions about what effect the discovery of intelligent life on other planets and encounters with alien species from outer space would have on “religion”. There is usually the implication that the alien species would be a threat. If those who ask such questions were to read C.S. Lewis they would see that he had anticipated their questions by several decades, and turned the answer around. The danger is not from outer space, threatening earth, but earth is the threat, bottled up behind the sanitary cordon of the moon’s orbit. The danger to the universe comes out of the silent planet, not into it.

Lewis is an academic, and his social satire is primarily academic. Even today, people argue about education. Should education be STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)? Weston, the chief villain of Out of the Silent Planet clearly seemed to think so, and had no time for the humanities, represented by Ransom, the philologist. These two branches of academia were fighting over funding and resources, and are still doing so today. For more on this see The Two Cultures.

[image error]And what about vocational training? People feel they need a university degree, and being a plumber or an electrician or a mechanic is regarded by many as not good enough.

As Swift with his society of Houyhnhnms shows something better than human society, so Lewis shows three kinds of intelligent beings living together in harmony and seeing their skills as complementary rather than in competition — the Hrossa (poets), the Sorns (scientists) and Pfifltriggi (artisans) see each other, not as rivals, but as collaborators. Human beings in the silent planet are divided by race and class. It is apparent even in the opening scenes that Ransom is torn between his own professional and class links with Weston and Devine, and his exasperation yet sympathy with Harry and his mother.

The difference is that Ransom learns from his experience on Malacandra, while Weston and Devine do not. While human beings may differ in race, class and culture, they all belong to the same species, so should find it easier to get on than the three “races” of Malacandra, which differ far more in physical appearance. They are not simply different races, as human beings are, but they are different species. Nevertheless, they live in harmony, without conflict. That is Lewis’s answer to the question of how we should regard space aliens, and also to differences of “race” and class on earth.

[image error]Ransom’s learning from his experience on Malacandra is shown in the third book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, when Jane Studdock joins the commune headed by Ransom and finds her domestic servant, Ivy Maggs, there before her, and it takes Jane some time to realise that in that intentional community the class barriers of the secular world outside count for nothing.

The social satire deepens towards the end, when Lewis tackles imperialism and colonialism, trying to translate Weston’s speech to a being that has no comprehension of human sin. Lewis was clearly aware that anthropology as an academic discipline was introduced to serve the needs of European colonialism, and Weston’s assumptions and explanations fit this mould. Dick Devine fits the mould of Cecil Rhodes, and could almost, but not quite, be taken as an allegory of Rhodes.

I’m rather surprised that none of the “cosmic trilogy” books has been made into a film. But one science fiction film, Avatar, did have a similar theme of earth as the “silent planet” from which dangerous space aliens come to destroy an innocent planet — see District 9 versus Avatar.

None of this was apparent to me on my first reading of the book at the age of 18. I was vaguely aware of some of the theological implications, but it took quite a lot of study of history and other literature to see the full implications of what Lewis was saying. Science fiction, in the sense of interplanetary travel, yes. But the book is even more fantasy and social satire, showing in an exaggerated way the social situation on earth.

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Review of “The Year of the Dragon”

I don’t usually have guest posts on this blog, but an exception is Bishop John Davies, who has kindly written a review of my recently-published book The Year of the Dragon.

Reviewed by the Rt Revd John D. Davies

Honorary Assistant Bishop, Diocese of St Asaph, Church in Wales

THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

by Stephen Hayes

2018

This book has two natures in one binding.

[image error]Primarily, it is a lively adventure story. It has a whole range of classic ingredients – a puzzling bequest, a search for beneficiaries, a strange exploration of possible treasures, along with a possible link to another

search for treasure in an earlier phase of history, an investigation which takes us from Southern Africa to the UK and to the USSR, dealings with oppressive and dishonest police, travels across deserts and into trackless woodlands and treacherous rivers, imprisonments, malaria, pursuits by armed militias, violent deaths, and a strenuous battle with crocodiles. And it is all set in the violent and destructive context of South Africa.

What more could you want?

But at the same time, the narrative introduces an element which goes way beyond physical adventure.

In an age when, in all sorts of enterprises, people and things are being described as ‘ikons’ or ‘iconic’ – everything from footballers to sopranos, experimental buildings and motorbike designs – this story

depends on identifying and handling ikons in the original and accurate sense of the word, the special art of painting the features and figures of saints, paintings which serve as access-ways between ourselves and the world of holiness which the saints inhabit and represent.

A major issue in the book is the difference in the ways in which some historic ikons are valued – valued by lawyers and police and auctioneers, and valued by people who treasure and use the ikons in the way that their creators intend. This further raises the valuation put upon different types of people. In the story, the people with greatest wisdom and insight, on whose characters the total balancing of the story depends, are

some rather ‘ordinary’ black priests. They put together the connections which make the story work. But they do not come across as exceptional. In the eyes of the white police they are just kaffirs.

To get the point of the story, the reader needs to recognise the geography; although the author acknowledges that he has somewhat adapted the landscape of Southern Africa, the reader would be helped if there were at least an outline map, showing the boundaries of the western Cape, Natal, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia etc -And the reader needs to recognise the stage of history, when (as I understand it) the apartheid regime is beginning to crack, but the police are still forcibly ready with hippos, helicopters, saracens, and other hardware for suppressing opposition, still ready with detention without trial, functioning in buildings designed to intimidate and terrify.. So, along with the struggle for truth and survival at the level of the physical adventure, there is a parallel struggle for truth of the spirit.

This gives the story its edge and interest, along with a thread of dislocation which requires the reader to identify which genre of struggle we are engaged in at any particular stage of the story.

Altogether, an enjoyable read, and a valid exploration of new roads of encounter.

JOHN D DAVIES

Nyddfa, By Pass Road Gobowen SY11 3NG, UK

Honorary Assistant Bishop, Diocese of St Asaph, Church in Wales

2nd January 2019

In the interest of openness and transparency I should point out that the review might not be entirely unbiased, as I have known the reviewer for 60 years. John Davies used to be Anglican chaplain at the University of the Witwatersrand, and was at one time national chaplain of the Anglican Students Federation of South Africa (ASF) when I was a student in the 1960s.

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Revd John Davies, ASF Chaplain, Modderpoort 1964

At one of the conferences of the ASF he led a series of Bible studies on the first three chapters of Genesis, which was later expanded into a full-length book with the title Beginning Now. He was also one of those who identified the ideological underpinning of apartheid as a pseudogospel, and thus more than a mere heresy, and that in turn helped to shape my own theological understanding apartheid, and hence the view of it reflected in my own book.

In 1970 John Davies when to the UK on furlough, and was in effect not allowed to return to South Africa by the apartheid regime, so his main involvement with South Africa was during the 1960s. For the rest of his career, see John Davies (bishop of Shrewsbury) – Wikipedia

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Tales from Dystopia XXIII: Academic freedom and university apartheid

Sixty years ago the Extension of University Education Bill was passed by the South African parliament, which enforced university apartheid. At the time I was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and on 16 April 1959 there was a protest meeting addressed by the Chancellor at which all members of the university were asked to affirm the principles of academic freedom and university autonomy.

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Wits University, 16 April 1959

We made the following declaration:

We are gathered here today to affirm in the name of the University of the Witwatersrand that it is our duty: to uphold the principle that a University is a place where men and women without regard to race and colour are welcome to join in the acquisition and advancement of knowledge; and to continue faithfully to defend this ideal against all who have sought by legislative enactment to curtail the autonomy of the University. Now therefore we dedicate ourselves to the maintenance of this ideal and to the restoration of the autonomy of our University.

The Extension of University Education Act, which curtailed academic freedom, essentially turned all existing universities into tribal colleges for Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking whites, and made provision for new ones, separate colleges for Xhosas, Zulus, Tswanas, .Coloureds, Asians etc.

[image error]

It was, however, a case of “You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.”

The only really “open” universities that had non-white staff and students were Wits and Cape Town, and non-white students were not admitted to the university residences (OK, there were laws preventing that). No Afrikaans-speaking universities admitted black students, and other English-speaking universities, like Rhodes and the University of Natal did not do so either. The University of Natal (now UKZN) did have a separate campus for “Non-European” medical students.

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Wits University 16 April 1959

About a month before. we had held another protest demonstration, when the bill was first introduced to parliament. About 1000 students stood on the traffic island in Jan Smuts Avenue, during the evening rush hour, holding a chain to symbolise the enslavement of the university. One of the organisers of the protest was our Latin lecturer, Saul Bastomsky, and a newspaper reporter asked him whether first-year students even knew what the protest was about. I was standing nearby and Saul Bastomsky, much to my consternation, pointed at me and said “Here’s a first-year student, ask him.”. The reporter asked me what I thought we should do next, and I said, “Stand outside the houses of parliament.” We didn’t, of course, it would have cost far too much money to get there. But there was the very dignified, very official formal protest meeting on 16th April, which made quite a deep impression on me. .

Not all agreed, of course. While we were standing holding the chain in Jan Smuts Avenue about 20 students stood at the side of the road with placards reading “Fight liberalism at Wits” and “Not all agree with the SRC”, But there were about 1000 students holding the chain.

Ten years later, on 16 April 1969, I observed another protest, this time at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. In 1959 I had been a rather naive first-year student; Ten years later I had completed my full-time studies, and would never been a full-time student again. My last year as a full-time student, 1968, was the year of student power, and son on 16th April 1969 I was asked to speak at a student meeting in Pietermaritzburg organised by the University Christian Movement on “methods of protest”. But it seemed to me that the methods of protest are very much determined by the aims of protest, and that not enough thought had been given to that.

[image error]

Children fleeing from a burning village in Vietnam.

So I tried shock tactics, which proved to be a little too shocking for many of the students. I told of a group of students in an American city who publicly burnt a dog as a protest, and it caused a huge uproar. Many said that it was counterproductive, and that they weren’t “helping their cause” by doing such a thing. But the uproar itself was the point. They demonstrated clearly that the American public was more concerned about the burning of one dog in San Francisco than about the burning of hundreds of children in Vietnam, which their government was doing with the taxes they paid. The girl in the centre of the picture on the right was one of those children; she eventually recovered, but many others did not.

I don’t recommend burning dogs as a form of protest, but in that instance it clearly made its point.

By 1969, too, many protests were directed at university authorities as much as at the governments. There were sit-ins at university administration offices, and the fees-must-fall protests of a couple of years ago show that some things have changed little. In 1959 it was the government deciding to segregate universities on the grounds of race and colour. In 2019 students are being excluded on the grounds of wealth, or rather the lack of it. As one British friend once said to me back in the 1960s, when South Africa has sorted out the problem of the black and the white, it will come face to face with the real problem — the haves and the have nots.

A luta continua. Die stryd duur voort.

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This is part of a series of posts about life in South Africa during the time of apartheid, called Tales from Dystopia. You can see more Tales from Dystopia here.

 

 

The Black Angel

The Black Angel by John Connolly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book of the Charlie Parker series that I have read, though it is actually number 6 in the series. I read them in the order 2, 11, 2, 1, 6.

I read this one because it was about halfway between 2 and 11, and I wanted to see how the series developed. I think it is the best one, but if you want to read any of them then it is best to begin with the first, Every Dead Thing, because all the others seem to make frequent reference to it.

I’m not sure whether I’ll read any more. The series seems to do a lot of genre hopping. The first book is a mixture of crime thriller and urban fantasy. with a hunt for serial killers and coping with organised crime, but with some of the serial killers turning out to be more than human.

The Black Angel turns out to be more straightforward urban fantasy. Most of the books in the series are based on the stories of fallen angels from the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and seeing them as behind most of the evil on earth. Most of the villains in this book are either fallen angels or think that they are. It is similar to its contemporary work, The Da Vinci Code, but this one is better written, and the plot holds together better.

Like The da Vinci Code it claims to be based on real history, at least as far as the backstory is concerned, and in that respect the historical background is based on real history books and not on dodgy conspiracy theories like The Messianic legacy. But there are still the detailed descriptions of very mundane firearms, and the protagonists don’t even have to use silver bullets, much less holy water, garlic or crucifixes to ward off the bad guys — a Heckler & Koch or Smith & Wesson will do the job. Charles Williams it isn’t, and not even Bram Stoker.

So though I enjoyed this one, I don’t think I’ll be looking for any more, now that I’ve worked out the formula.

I’ve written about the other books, and about the series here: Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The Wrath of Angels, and more generally about the genres, The Paranormal in Literature and Popular Culture.

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Am I an Indie Author?

About seven years ago I discovered the Smashwords web site, through my kinsman Graham Downs (kinsman is such a nice word, but I think strictly speaking one should say “affine”, since he’s my wife’s cousin). He had published a short story there called A Petition to Magic.

I found the Smashwords site interesting. I’d written a children’s novel a few years back, and approached several literary agents asking if they would have a look at it. I can’t say I even got a rejection slip, because none of them wanted to look at it. I thought of the possibility of begging some publishers to allow it to sit in their slush pile, but back then they wanted hard copy, and the overseas postage was getting prohibitively expensive, and one had to send them enough postage to return it. They wouldn’t entertain the idea of tossing it in the bin because the cost of printing a clean copy was less than half the return postage. No, they had to send it back. So I dropped the idea of trying to get it published and it just sat on my hard disk.

[image error]By 2013, however, quite a lot of my friends had Kindles and other e-book readers, Smashwords offered a way to publish an e-book with minimal capital outlay. Format the electronic manuscript according to their template and styles, upload it, and they produce it and distribute it in several different e-book formats. They take a percentage of every book sold. So in December 2014 Of Wheels and Witches was published by Smashwords. I still keep hoping that a child of the target age group (9-12) will write a review.

And then I suddenly discovered that “indie authors” were a thing, and I had apparently become one of them.

I wasn’t sure that that’s what I wanted to be.

Indie authors are those who self-publish their books instead of going through a traditional publisher, and with facilities like those at Smashwords self-publishing has never been easier, at least for e-books,.

I had, however, already had one and a third books published by Unisa Press, which was a traditional academic publisher like most other university presses. The first book was Black Charismatic Anglicans which had a print run of 250 and is now sold out. The second was African Initiatives in Healing Ministry, which had Lilian Dube and Tabona Shoko as co-authors.As far as I know it is still in print.

So I’m not a pure “indie author”.

[image error]So why did I decide to publish my latest novel, The Year of the Dragon through Smashwords instead of looking for an agent?

I suppose the main reason is that I’m getting old. Querying agents and publishers and waiting for replies is time-consuming and I’d probably be dead before a received an actual rejection, never mind an acceptance. Publishing through Smashwords is relatively quick and easy. Instead of sending one query you upload one completed MS, and the work is done.

Well, not quite.

In self-publishing the work comes after submitting the MS rather than before. Traditional publishers usually handle things like publicity, sending out review copies and nagging the reviewers for reviews, and sending copies of the reviews to the authors.

Well, not quite that either. I never saw a single review of African Initiatives in Healing Ministry and to this day I don’t even know if any review copies were actually sent, or to whom. But at any rate that is what traditional publishers are supposed to do.

Another reason for not bothering with traditional publishers is that I was thinking of getting my doctoral thesis on Orthodox Mission Methods published. Various people had told me that they wanted copies either for themselves or their students. So I sent the MS to an academic publisher, and they said they would accept it, provided I could get three readers’ reports. One reader replied positively, thought it could be published. Another didn’t reply. The third said he would be going to a meeting the following week of a different publisher he was associated with, and could he present it to them for publication? I said OK, and ten years later I’m still waiting for a reply, to hear whether the second publisher was interested, or whether he thought it was good enough for the first publisher.

The first publisher nagged me for the readers’ reports for a year or two and gave up, but no amount of pleading could get the readers to respond. Much easier to send it to somewhere like Smashwords. The only problem there is that Smashwords doesn’t do stuff like footnotes and indexes, which are needed for an academic text.

And now, ten years on, my thesis is well out of date. Much of the research is more like 25 years out of date. Would anyone like to offer me a research grant to update it?

A lot of the original research was done with a scholarship of R10000 from Unisa, awarded because of my Masters’ dissertation. But 25 years on it would cost at least ten times as much, and R100000 would barely cover the cost of updating the research. And for that price you could probably set up the academic equivalent of Smashwords.

So I’m an Indie Author, sort of, and Indie Authors are a thing, sort of. But what a thing!

[image error]Indie Authors help each other with publicity and things like that, and then you discover what other Indie Authors are up to. And one of the things they are up to, I soon discovered, was male torsos. About one in ten self-published books seems to have a male torso on the cover. Newspapers  may have bums and boobs on page 5, but Indie Authors have torsos on the cover.

Do all the books with male torsos belong to the same genre? There used to be a genre called “bodice rippers”, but these have no bodices to rip.

But that’s OK, because you can have the ripped without the bodices. As one dictionary defines it, “ripped” means “Having an extremely defined physique; toned: ripped, bulging muscles”.

For more on the male torso phenomenon, see here Urban fantasy, mediocrity, and the male torso | Notes from underground and here Graham Downs: Judging a Book by Its Cover: Urban Fantasy.

So what do Indie Authors do, apart from male torsos?

And do I really want to be one?

As a reader, I don’t care whether a book is published by a conventional publisher or independently. It’s the content, not the method of publication that counts. And as an author, I’m most concerned that my books reach the kind of people who might want to read them. And my hope is that they find them useful, informative, or entertaining, or all of those things.

So no, I’m not an “Indie Author”, I’m just an author, but I do recognise that independently published books rely, far more than conventionally published ones, on word of mouth (or Tweet, or Facebook shares etc) to reach the people who might want to read them, and so will try to help promote the ones I think are worth a read. And I hope others will do the same for mine.

 

 

 

Every Dead Thing: Urban fantasy or whodunit?

Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first in a long series of books by John Connolly featuring private detective Charlie “Bird” Parker, his ex-assassin bodyguards Angel and Louis, a psychologist, Rachel Wolfe, who does criminal profiling for the New York police, and his former New York Police Department colleague Walter Cole.

Though it is the first in the series, it is the third one I’ve read, for reasons explained more fully here. I read the second in the series first, about 20 years ago, then the eleventh, and came back to the first to try to make sense of what I found in the other books. I strongly recommend to anyone reading this series that you begin with this one, as the later books frequently refer to events that took place in this one.

[image error]What grabbed my interest in reading more of the series was that The Wrath of Angels had an element of supernatural horror that was not noticeably present in the first book I had read, and it seemed that John Connolly was developing in the opposite direction to Phil Rickman, who started out as a writer of supernatural horror with books like Crybbe and Candlenight and ended up writing more conventional whodunits.

But reading the first book in the series proved that hypothesis wrong. The supernatural horror element is present in this one from the start.

In Every Dead Thing Charlie Parker leaves the New York police force after his wife and child are killed, and becomes a private detective. It is really two books in one. In the first part he is asked to search for a missing woman from a small town in Virginia, and comes across a serial killer. In the second part he is looking for a serial killer in Louisiana, one whom he also believes to have been responsible for the death of his wife and daughter, who is known as the Travelling [sic] Man.

John Connolly is Irish, and the books are written in British English, and published in England. The villain is the Travelling Man, not the Traveling Man, and Connolly uses the British “towards” rather than the American “toward”. It made me wonder if there were American editions of the books, and whether they had been adapted to US English.

I read a library copy, and it had been edited and annotated by another library patron, something that I find rather irritating, though I had to agree with one comment: Too much blood, too many corpses. There is also rather a strong element of organised crime in the book, and while I enjoy reading whodunits and police procedurals, I’m not very fond of the “Godfather” type of story with organised crime families. This book has two sets of rival gangs, one in New York and one in New Orleans.

What kept me reading, and kept my interest, was my curiosity about the element of supernatural horror, which edges the book (and the series) into the urban fantasy genre. I became interested in that genre mainly through the works of Charles Williams and I’m always looking for similar books and even tried to write one.

I found the element of supernatural horror present in the first book of the series, which abolishes my Phil Rickman hypothesis. It’s right there on page 121 in the edition I read, where Charlie Parker gets a phone call from someone who claims to be the killer of his wife and child, and there is the following conversation:

“You’re a sick man, but that isn’t going to save you.” I pressed Caller ID on the phone and a number came up, a number I recognised. It was the number of the call-box at the end of the street. I moved towards the door and began making my way down the stairs.

“No, not man. In her final moments your wife knew that, your Susan, mouth to mouth’s kiss, as I drew the life from her. Oh, I lusted for her in those last, bright-red minutes but, then, that has always been a weakness of our kind. Our sin was not pride, but lust for humanity. And I chose her, Mr Parker, and I loved her in my way.” The voice was now deep and male. It boomed in my ear like the voice of a god, or a devil.

My question was answered by “not man” and “our kind”.

The enemies detective Charlie Parker is up against in the first book, and apparently in the rest of the series, are more than flesh and blood, but are demons, or at least demonised human beings.

The trouble is that, in contrast with the books of Charles Williams, the weapons of his warfare are very carnal indeed.

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The above is based on my review at GoodReads, but I’ve added some theological comments and thoughts on the urban fantasy genre generally.

As I mentioned above, what interested me about the series in general, and this book in particular, was the mythological dimension and the way Connolly handles it. I don’t think he handles it very well. In addition to the “our kind” reference, there is specific mention of the Book of Enoch. about which I have had more to say in another review here: Angels, demons and egregores.

In Every Dead Thing the Book of Enoch is mentioned as a possible source for the killer’s thinking of himself as a demon or a fallen angel, and at that point of the story is part of the criminal profiling work of Rachel Wolfe. The distinction would be between a human criminal who thinks of himself as a fallen angel, and one who is actually demonised. It is clear from The Wrath of Angels that the enemies that Charlie Parker is battling are the latter rather than the former. They are more than mere flesh and blood.

This is what makes the theme of Connolly’s novels similar to those of Charles Williams. But Connolly’s handling of the theme is very different, and in my view inferior, to that of Williams. In 2 Corinthians 10:2-7 St Paul writes that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal”, but in Connolly’s books they are very carnal indeed, and he describes in great detail the make and model of every firearm used.

C.S. Lewis, in Perelandra, acknowledges that sometimes carnal weapons may need to be used in spiritual warfare, as the protagonist Ransom pursues the demonised villain Weston into a tunnel in the only fixed land on the planet. But Connolly somehow fails to integrate the carnal and spiritual elements in his stories. His spiritual evil is far too materialistic. It reminds me of the novels of Frank Peretti, who also depicts spiritual evil in very materialistic terms, and thus gets the balance wrong.

So I’m again thrown back on the conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: if we want more of the kind of stories we like, we shall have to write them ourselves.

A note on current reading

A note about current reading…

My current reading list has got stirred up a bit, with some books being pushed down the pile, mainly because I need to give priority to library books that I have to take back.

I recently read The Wrath of Angels by John Connolly, which I’d picked up in the library almost by accident when I was looking for something else. It featured a private detective, Charlie Parker, who seemed familiar, and the book turned out to be 11th in a series of which we had a copy of the 2nd, Dark Hollow, which I then felt compelled to re-read. It confirmed that the earlier book was a straightforward whodunit, while the later one was urban fantasy.

I became curious about how the series had mutated in its genre, so on my next trip to the library I took out three John Connolly books.

Every Dead Thing – the first in the Charlie Parker Series
The Dark Angel — midway in the series, to try to find where the switch in genre takes place.
The Book of Lost Things – not Charlie Parker. I was curious to see what John Connolly writes when he isn’t writing about Charlie Parker.

[image error]I began reading The Book of Lost Things, because I wanted a break from Charlie Parker, though still curious about the transformation. But this one I found utterly absorbing. It’s fantasy of the “doorway to another world” variety, and so far seems far better than the Charlie Parker ones.

It’s about a boy who lives in London during the Second World War. His mother dies and his father remarries, but he does not like his stepmother. He remembers the fairy stories his mother used to read to him, , and which he had read to her during her illness, and after a family fight he finds his way into another world.

[image error]I also looked for a non-fiction book, for variety, and found Sometimes there is a void by Zakes Mda. I read one of his novels a long time ago, but this is a life and times kind of autobiographical memoir.

It’s absorbing because the times are my times, even though the life was not my life, There are ways in which it intersects with the story of my life in a way that the lives of people like Jonathan Swift and J.M. Barrie do not.

It reminded me that I often like literary biographies of authors better than I like the books they write, and this one is no exception. So I’m hooked. My other reading is on hold while I finish Sometimes there is a void and The Book of Lost Things.

The Paranormal in literature and popular culture

Paranormal hasn’t been part of my active vocabulary until recently. I’d seen the word, and had a vague idea of what it meant, gleaned mainly from books like Supernature by Lyall Watson. It was all 1970s stuff like Uri Geller bending spoons by looking at them and razor blades being sharpened in pyramids. Mildly-interesting uh-huh stuff, of no practical use. A bent teaspoon stirs no tea, and I haven’t shaved for 50 years.

Then someone wrote a review of my book The Year of the Dragon, and said it might appeal to those who like paranormal thrillers, and I began to wonder. It’s a fairly mundane adventure story, set in this world, with some mythological or fantasy elements. I’d not thought of it as “paranormal” before.

I said something to that effect in an online forum for discussing books and writing, and several people told me that “the paranormal” and “fantasy” were regarded by publishers as different genres. The “fantasy” genre, they said, required romance, and if the romance element was missing, then it was “paranormal”. I suppose under that definition The Lord of the Rings would just make it into the fantasy bracket because Aragorn and Arwen marry. But Lewis’s Narnia stories, or Alan Garner’s children’s books must be paranormal, because the main characters are siblings and there’s no hint of incest. I’m not entirely convinced.

[image error]I then learned of a new book edited by John Morehead The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape, and on asking about it, he pointed out that “This book draws upon Jeffrey Kripal’s definition of the paranormal as those phenomena rejected by mainstream religion and traditional science. It is expressed in a variety of ways, and this book looks at some of the more popular forms in popular culture.”

That definition certainly still fits the Lyall Watson stuff of 40 years ago, But where do you draw the line between paranormal and myth?

The Inklings, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien, spoke of their writing in relation to myth. I’m not aware of their having used words like “paranormal”. Can one draw a line between myth and the paranormal, either in literature or in popular culture? And somewhere nearby is folklore.

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From Paranormal Activity 3.

In another recent blog post, Angels, demons, and Inklings, I wrote about the mythical creatures that populate the works of the Inklings, and this post is related to it, and perhaps can be seen as a follow-on from it, but relates more to the literary genres in which such creatures appear. Could one regard eldila as being “paranormal”?

Can the term “mainstream religion” help here?

Though eldila and the like are not referred to by name in works of theology, the kind of creatures Lewis had in mind are, but what about elves and Tolkien’s dwarves and orcs, and Lewis’s dwarfs?

Goblins, ghosts and fairies belong to folklore rather than to mythology, and, as Morehead suggests, there are different lines by which we can trace the paranormal in literature back to the Gothic tale. And as for the theological significance, Charles Stewart, who made an anthropological study of villagers on the Greek island of Naxos, found their folkloric beliefs were not really survivals of ancient Greek paganism as some romantic neopagan Hellenists like to claim, but were fitted entirely into the Orthodox worldview, yet Stewart also commented on the theological point: “The main doctrinal point is simple: NO DUALISM. Satan is not to be regarded as a power equal to God. He is God’s creation and operates subject to divine will.”

[image error]Other points made by Stewart in his book Demons and the devil are : (1) Satan has no independent power. He may tempt, but his success is strictly dependent on lapses in human will; (2) Satan is immaterial; there is no excessive concern with his form or geographical associations; (3) as he has no real power, there is no reason to appeal to him. All rites, sorcery, black magic, astrology and the like that appeal to demons or the devil are fruitless; (4) Satan’s field of operations is narrow, and the harm he can provoke is limited; (5) Satan is strictly and intrinsically evil. The Church does not accept the existence of intermediate or ambiguous fairy-like creatures such as neraides, gorgones and kallikantzaroi; (6) Satan is singular. He is the leader of demons who are fallen angels of the same order as himself. There is no real concern for the names of demons.

His research showed that beliefs of the villagers of Naxos fitted into the Orthodox theological framework, with the possible exception of the exotika, who formed no part of formal theology.

I’ve just finished reading another book, The Wrath of Angels, by John Connolly (my review here), which could help to clarify the distinction. The fallen angels in Connolly’s book seem to belong to the paranormal category rather than to the mythical category. And perhaps that could take one a step closer to articulating the distinction.

I agree with what Nicolas Berdyaev says about myth:

Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality, and with anything, in fact, which is essentially opposed to reality… The creation of myths among peoples denotes a real spiritual life, more real indeed than that of abstract concepts and rational thought. Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do; its nature is bound up with that of symbol. Myth is the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language memory and creative energy of the people… it brings two worlds together symbolically.

I don’t think one can say that of the paranormal.