marramgrass

I’ve recently read a book about writing, and I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through a book about reading.

On Writing, by Stephen King, starts with a sparse but very engaging memoir before moving into a series of tips and bits and bobs of advice “on writing”. All the usual pearls are mentioned: practise, practise, practise; expunge all adverbs; write for the love of it; briefer is better (says Stephen King?); don’t expect to make any money, never mind a living (again, says Stephen King?)…

I would say that even if you have no intention of writing for yourself, and even if you have only the slightest curiosity as to what’s behind the curtain, you’ll enjoy a read of this little book.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby, is a collection of columns written for The Believer. He’s giving me a growing list of books, classic and modern, to add to my pile, and doing so with a great deal of good humour along the way.

These two books have in common a deep conviction that fiction, literature, books, whatever, should be accessible, that there’s no place for any notion that reading is only for the posh. In the middle of On Writing I realised that somewhere in me I have this prejudice against Stephen King, even though any book of his that I have read has been great fun. These two books have combined to point out to me how ridiculous that prejudice is.

As Nick Hornby complains, reading’s supposed to hurt, isn’t it? Reading Stephen King (or Nick Hornby, for that matter) doesn’t hurt. It’s fun.

Where theatre, and then cinema, have moved from being looked down upon to being respectable, even cultural, books have fallen by the way. That’s a shame.

I’ve always read a lot, ever since I was able. I remember the first book my parents bought me because I asked for it. I think we were in Newtownards shopping. Either way, I recall defying warnings of car-sickness to read it on the way home. That book was The Owl Who Was Afraid Of the Dark, in big-print kid-friendly paperback. I think that was the book that started a lifetime’s habit.

These days reading is still my most common pastime, almost always for the pure pleasure of it, and it doesn’t hurt one bit.

What about you? Read anything good lately?

While in Santorini last month I took the chance to read a few books of varying quality.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon, is a whodunit set against an alternative history where the Jewish state was established in Alaska instead of the Middle East. Very enjoyable, even when it turns strange towards the end, mixing tales of pseudo-messianic prophecy with blunt political commentary.

Superpowers, by David J. Schwarz,is a fun tale about a group of college students who wake up one morning each having developed a different superheroic ability. An enjoyable yarn, well-told but ultimately unsatisfying. Again, the politics are a bit blunt.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay, is the first novel of the series on which the TV show is based. I’m afraid it did nothing for me (not, as you might guess, because I’m at all squeamish about the subject matter — more the shoddy execution of an interesting idea).

The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick was both fascinating and enjoyable. Less plot, more situation.

I have a long list of books that I mean to read. I’ve just started one of them (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, if you want to know). The last one I read was John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

I’d pigeon-hole it as SF/horror that is disarmingly well-written — Wyndham’s skilfull use of language emphasises the stark environment he describes.

I won’t give too much away (follow the link above to Wikipedia for all kinds of detail), but I’ll make this observation: writing almost 60 years ago, Wyndham hits many of the now well-known post-apocalyptic tropes (did he originate them?). Reading Triffids, I found myself remembering its echoes in 28 Days Later, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Land of the Dead… all kinds of others. I found it a pleasure to read a tale from before many of its key points became hackneyed.

There’s a paranoia that runs through the novel that at first felt a little dated, but quickly seemed to me to take on a new, modern relevance. No-one’s quite sure where the Triffids (man-eating, walking plants) came from, but genetic splicing by foreign government scientists is implicated. The disaster that leaves humankind vulnerable may even have been man-made, too.

Thoroughly recommended.

There’ve been a couple of films and a book lately that I intended to comment on. Here goes.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is what happens when a Respected Literary Author™ tries a little genre fiction. A fairly standard post-apocalyptic yarn, it’s been around for a couple of years and is currently being made into a film starring Aragorn. In a nutshell, America (the world?) is enduring the aftermath of an undetailed (nuclear?) disaster. Society has collapsed, survivors are eating each other, and a man and his young son are trekking across the country in an attempt to find a little safety and security.

The Road gathered very positive reviews, singing the praises of McCarthy’s handling of his fairly sci-fi premise and how he uses it to great effect to explore themes of civilization and fear of death, along with some deftly handled father-son relationship issues.

I wasn’t quite so impressed.

Yes, the book does all those things, but I suspect it gained from the reviewers not being too familiar with the genres in which McCarthy was squatting. Disaster-destroys-civilization has been a popular device over recent years, and lends itself well to this kind of philosophising — so it’s been done a lot, lately.

If you want a study of the end of civilization in all its fascinating horror, check out Max Brooks’ World War Z. I’d love to say that Brooks hasn’t got McCarthy’s touch with language, but actually I found his prose much more interesting and affecting. Sometimes The Road is too clever for its own good: yes, screwing around with punctuation may reflect the chaos and disorder of post-apocalyptic America, but it makes it damned hard to read. (Of course, ‘genre’ authors can be guilty of this, too. The phonetically written portions of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn are as tiring to read as they must have been to write.)

Maybe I’ve got a chip on my shoulder that’s tempting me into a rant. Maybe not. I read a lot of SF and fantasy, but I read a lot of literary fiction, too. I have the fervour of an evangelist trying to convince the world of all the quality writing that exists in the ‘genres’. I just find it sad and a little elitist that when a well-known literary author tackles themes and ideas that have been done very well by genre authors, he gains far greater recognition than those genre folks.

Enough of that. On to a few films:

Iron Man has, I think, claimed the position of my favourite comic book adaptation. Robert Downey, Jr made a most excellent Tony Stark, and the whole thing was great fun.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall wasn’t so hot. It had one or two good laughs, but on the whole it’s best forgotten.

We watched Knocked Up a few weeks back. This was why I went to see Sarah Marshall, because this one was good. It’s the next stage of coming-of-age film after American Pie et al — what happens when the drunken sex leads to pregnancy? The humour may be low-brow, but the characters are surprisingly subtle and the whole thing is sweet and sensitive.

The Heartbreak Kid joins the list of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Looking at that short list, it seems that I’ve mainly been consuming cinematic fluff recently. Ah. So be it; does you good, sometimes.

While I’m still slowly reading through NT Wright, in between I’m having great fun with a series of cheesy fantasy novels.

I think that’s me up to date with the reading and the watching I wanted to mention. Was it good for you?

I’ve come to the end of the middle section of Wright’s book, and while there are a couple of points he makes that may be fairly controversial to some (or many), I think he has largely brought me with him. The problem is that when he writes about what happens immediately after death (in a chapter simply titled “Purgatory, paradise, hell”) — as he really has to, however tempting it might be to skip on by — Wright is addressing questions where we really don’t have much in the way of Scriptural witness to go on, and where tradition is mind-bogglingly difficult to sort through. However, he plainly recognises this fact, offering attempts at understanding rather than suggesting prescriptions.

Following on from this, the final movement of the book is where the author begins to answer the simple question of, in his own words, “so what?”

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p204:

The point of this final section of the book is that a proper grasp of the (surprising) future hope which is held out to us in jesus Christ leads directly and, to many people, equally surprisingly, to a vision of the present hope which is the basis of all Christian mission. To hope for a better future in this world — for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful and wounded world — is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to ‘the gospel’ as an afterthought. And to work for that intermediate hope, the surprising hope that comes forward from God’s ultimate future into God’s urgent present, is not a distraction from the task of ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ in the present. It is a central, essential, vital and life-giving part of it. Mostly, Jesus himself got a hearing from his contemporaries because of what he was doing. They saw him ’saving’ people from sickness and death, and they heard him talk about a ’salvation’, the message for which they had longed, which would go beyond the immediate into the ultimate future. But the two were not unrelated, the present one a mere ‘visual aid’ of the future one, or a trick to gain people’s attention. The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future.

There are a number of phrases in that portion (and the chapter it’s taken from) that I was tempted to highlight, but then I realised that I’d end up emphasising all but a few words. In so many of the conversations I have, day by day and week by week, this is what I’m trying to say. I’m now keen to see where Wright ends up…

The Telegraph’s 50 best cult books, following the example of Random Piercings. Please do join in.

The rules: books you’ve read in bold and books you started but never quite finished in italics.

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
• A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
• The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
• Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
• Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
• The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
• Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
• The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
• The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
• No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
• Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)

I could have added a third category, of the books I plan to read when I come across them.

My reading through of NT Wright’s theology of resurrection has been slowed by life getting in the way. I don’t get nearly as much time to sit and read as I used to, and when I do I tend to fall into easy fiction that doesn’t require too much thought.

As I continue to crawl my way through the second section of the book, the text on a couple of pages jumped out at me.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p108:

Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil which is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p106:

Evil then consists, not in being created, but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God’s wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something which will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure. The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls ’spiritual death’. In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, pp105-6:

Nor — and this is crucial — does evil consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves in autumn… indeed, it is precisely the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose. Creation was good, but it always had a forward look. Transience acts as a god-given signpost, pointing not from the material world to the non-material world, but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant one day to be…

Prior to this, Wright has explored what he views as the two most common ways Christians tend to view the destination of creation: that it is progressively improving towards perfection, or that it a vile physicality to be endured until we find perfection in some ’spiritual’ reality. While he doesn’t spend too long presenting evidence for the prevalence of these views, they certainly fit with what I have heard and observed — while not fitting terribly well with my reading of Scripture. The author then goes on to explain what he understands as the Scriptural picture.

I am intrigued by the image of death as exile, never having given it too much thought. I’m looking forward to exploring it further as a way to help understand salvation, redemption and new life.

At this point in my reading I find the passages I’ve quoted above to be full of hope, but I wonder how well they would be received by the very most conservative and traditional, what with the slightly gnostic (gasp!) tendencies that tend to be expressed in those ends of the Church.

I began blogging my exploration of this book last week. I didn’t originally intend a blogging-through-the-book series, but that looks like where it’s going.

Following on from that previous post, the next two chapters comprise the remainder of the first section of the book. In these Wright offers a defence of belief in the actual, bodily resurrection of Jesus. In doing so he places the events of the first Easter in context alongside Jewish understanding of resurrection — that it will be the experience of all believers on the ‘last day’ — and identifies how he sees that early Christian belief expresses, to use his terminology, ‘modifications’ or ‘mutations’ of that understanding. These changes, of course, came about as a result of the resurrection of Jesus, an event that Wright argues must affect completely how we view the world around us — he talks in terms of paradigm shift1. I agree.

While, in these chapters, Wright addresses in varying detail many of the arguments against belief in the resurrection of Jesus as it is recorded in Gospel, he is careful to not hang too much on historical and scientific enquiry.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p75:

But this is where I want to heed carefully the warnings of those theologians who have cautioned against any attempt to stand on the ground of rationalism and to attempt to ‘prove’, in some ‘mathematical’ fashion, something which, if it happened, ought itself to be regarded as the centre not only of history but also of epistemology, not only of what we know but of how we know it. I do not claim, in other words, that I have hereby ‘proved’ the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint. I am offering, rather, a historical challenge to other explanations, and to the worldviews within which they gain their meaning. Precisely because at this point we are faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in the middle of the epistemological ocean as yet uncolonized by any of the warring continents. Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity. The obvious fact that this remains hugely challenging at the personal and corporate level ought not to put us off from taking it seriously. Or were we only playing when we entertained the question in the first place?

(The question to be entertained being simply, “did it happen?”)

I found it encouraging and refreshing that a serious, contemporary theologian is happy to state his belief that Jesus was actually, bodily raised from the dead.

The discussion in these two chapters is compelling, but often a little quick and shallow. The author recognises this, and rightly points out that to go into full detail just isn’t possible in this book, but he regularly left me wanting more detail. As the end notes frequently point towards his earlier work (frequently The Resurrection of the Son of God, all 817 pages of it), I suspect that I am about to start a long journey through the writings of Wright.

Glenn recently posted his thoughts on this book, and sparked my interest in a volume which has been working its way up my reading pile for the last few weeks. Yesterday I finally had the chance to sit down and read the first couple of chapters, and at this early stage these are my thoughts in progress. Please note that I am blogging this as I read the book, so at two chapters in it is naturally incomplete.

I tend to read too fast. It means I can get through an astonishing number of books in a year, but when it comes to digesting the more thoughtful texts I have to deliberately slow down. If I don’t force myself to take it easy, I may as well not read the book at all.

Surprised By Hope is NT Wright’s examination of a right Christian understanding of what happens when we die, and what happens next. He begins with the assertion, with plenty of supporting illustration, that we have lost the notion of ‘bodily resurrection’ and all its implications for life now and later, and that when most of us use the word ‘heaven’ we are meaning something very different to what is portrayed in Scripture.

A natural first question is, “so what?”

Surprised By Hope, 2007, SPCK, p37:

What role does a belief in life beyond the grave play within the larger issues which face us in Christian life and thought?

Karl Marx famously spoke of religion as the opium of the people. He supposed that oppressive rulers would use the promise of a joyful future life to try to stop the masses from rising in a revolt. That has indeed often been the case. But my impression is that this is what happens when the ‘religion’ in question includes the Platonic downgrading of bodies and of the created order in general, regarding them as the ‘vain shadows’ of earth, which we shall happily leave behind at death. Why try to improve the present prison if release is at hand? Why oil the wheels of a machine that will soon plunge over a cliff? That is precisely the effect created to this day by some devout Christians who genuinely believe that ’salvation’ has nothing to do with the way the present world is ordered.

When I was studying at Bible college, we had a lecturer in doctrine who spent a great deal of time exploring with us the various views of the ‘end times’ (hear phrases like ‘pre-millenial’ and ‘post-millenial’, and shudder). An American, he acknowledged that while the debate between these various positions had been a big deal in the US, it hadn’t really come to anything in the UK. Yet he impressed on us — and convinced me — that whatever beliefs we claim to hold or actually hold about what will happen in the end, and what will happen to us then or if we die beforehand, have tremendous implications for how we approach day-to-day life in the here-and-now.

As the title of the book suggests, it’s about the nature of the hope that we, as Christians, claim.

The first two chapters are a quick survey of some of the beliefs and assumptions about death and ‘after-life’ that are expressed in our Western society and in the Church, and a fascinating survey it is. Wright then lays out the path the book will take, exploring past beliefs about life after death, presenting the ‘ultimate Christian hope’ — what is a right, Biblical understanding? — and concluding with what all this means for life as it is lived, right now.

Surprised By Hope, 2007, SPCK, p41:

Our task in the present… is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

That’s an assertion that excites me, and that has me eager to read the rest of the book.

The list of films, either currently in the cinema or soon to be released, that I would very much like to see. Any chance?

• Beowulf
• The Golden Compass
• I Am Legend
• AvP: Requiem
• Sweeney Todd
• Cloverfield

It should be a good couple of months for film.

The Golden Compass will be an interesting one. I’ve heard a fair bit of concern from Christians over it all. Me, I’m looking forward to it. It’s a few years since I read the books, so I’ll have to go for a re-read before I can post sensibly, but I remember being struck by the sheer quality of them. Pullman is certainly writing from a worldview that differs from my own, but every author writes out of their own head. In the interviews I’ve been reading (sorry, linkage escapes me right now), it appears that he’s mellowed somewhat in his tone over the last few years. I will track down the books again, watch the film, dig out some bits I wrote the first time I read the books, then see what I have to say…