30 novels Christians should read for a faith check before they turn 30

• Voltaire, Candide (1759)
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
• George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947)
• Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
• Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
• Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)
• Peter de Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (1961)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)
• William Golding, The Spire (1964)
• Sushaku Endo, Silence (1966)
• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980)
• Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984)
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
• José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991)
• Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1992)
• James K. Morrow, Towing Jehovah (1994)
• Maria Doria Russel, The Sparrow (1996)
• Jim Crace, Quarantine (1997)
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
• J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)
• Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials (2000)
• Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
• Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (2012)

The 7 best books I read before I turned 25

Krish Kandiah has mandated 11 books every Christian should read before they turn 25, and Andy Goodliff responded with an alternative list. I will give you my own list. How can I resist?

Instead of legislating for the rest of Christendom though, I'll just tell you the most formative books I ever read as a handsome and hopeful youngster. I assume we're only interested here in theological-type reading, so I won't mention other formative literary experiences like reading Dr Seuss and Phantom comics and sci-fi novels and the articles in Playboy magazine.

1. The Psalms. Technically I didn't read this book but I sang it a lot in the church where I grew up, even before I learned to read. It was the best thing about charismatic/Pentecostal singing back in the 70s and 80s: most of the songs were direct quotations from the Psalms (often from the KJV). I never read the Psalms for the first time: even my first reading was already a re-reading of the things I'd heard and sung in church.

2. The Book of Proverbs. I went to a religious primary school where I was subjected to a regime of edifying and disciplinary verses from this book. I often read the book of Proverbs too, and hated it. Then, later in life, I loved it. (But by then it was too late: the book is addressed to the young, i.e. to those who cannot hear it.)

3. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. We had a dramatised musical version of this called Enchanted Journey and I used to listen to it over and over on the old record player at home. My father taught me how to use the turntable and how to turn the record, which is how I got to nourish my young spirit on 1980s Bob Dylan and The Pilgrim's Progress. Later in primary school, the drama group did a production of Pilgrim's Progress. I was too young to get a part but I went to all the rehearsals and, I suppose out of sympathy, they let me be the Sound Effects Technician. What I still love about the book is the plain speech, the realistic dialogue, the journey narrative, and the lifelike novelistic characters. I think it was C. S. Lewis who said that other writers try to create people and end up with types, while Bunyan tried to create types and ended up with real people. In my opinion it is one of the most perfect books ever written in English; there's not a single thing you could change without diminishing it.

4. George Herbert, The Temple. I read and learned many of these poems during my early high school days. My mother was writing a PhD thesis on The Temple and she was always sharing some little morsel from Mr Herbert. I loved the poems because my mother loved them, and because of the plain style. Later I loved them because I discovered that they were true. The Temple is still the most precise and honest account I've ever come across about what the Christian life is really like (not what it's meant to be like: the problem with nearly all other books on this topic).

5. John Milton, Paradise Lost. Another 17th-century writer: you can see that it was a good century for me. After I finished high school I was given a Penguin paperback of Paradise Lost with a Blake illustration on the cover. I was told solemnly, "It's like an acid trip." I had been on some of those but they always left me feeling burnt out and disillusioned with the human race. Milton, who was himself burnt out and disillusioned, enlarged my vision of the human spirit and of the way history bears within itself the secret of divine providence. I liked the book so much I later wrote a PhD thesis about it. It's not my favourite book anymore, not like it used to be. The rhetoric is too high and holy. Really, Paradise Lost was written for angels, not mortals. Perhaps in the next world it will have the readers it deserves. As for me, I have gravitated back towards the plainer speech of Herbert and Bunyan, as well as other plain-style masters like Shakespeare and Hemingway and Julian of Norwich.

6. Augustine, Confessions. A few years after reading Milton for the first time, I read Augustine's Confessions. It produced a sudden change in me, more than than anything else I have ever read. Most books take years or decades to do their magic work upon the soul, but this one seemed to burn right through me and to change my view of everything. I left the Pentecostal church where I had grown up. I might easily have become Roman Catholic if anybody had suggested it to me at the time, of if it had occurred to me that Augustine was a Catholic. I thought of becoming a monk. I started reading theology, devouring thick books as if my life depended on it. I decided to go to university. I didn't really understand it at the time, but I had begun to dwell in the life of the mind (still today the only place I really feel at home).

7. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. This was one of the things I read after Augustine had made me hungry for books and learning. I had never even heard of Calvin, he came to me innocent and free of his own reputation. I chose the Institutes for one reason only: it was the biggest book on the shelf at the Christian bookstore, and I wanted as much knowledge as I could get my hands on. (It was the same thing that would later lead me to read Karl Barth, again an author whose name I had never heard.) I suppose because of all the 17th-century Protestant books I'd read, I found Calvin easy to understand. I could see where he was coming from. What impressed me most about the Institutes was its atmosphere. Calvin seemed to be forever poised in a kind of nervous tension between love and awe. With one hand he is grasped by majesty, with the other he is held by mercy. Calvin meant a lot to me: he was a help to me. He seemed to have an intuition for where the real problems lie. He had a knack for asking my questions before I had been able to put them into words myself. And although he didn't always claim to know the answers, he had a way of searching out the scriptures, opening up lines of inquiry, putting things into perspective and seeing everything in relation to the loving majesty of God.

Milton vs. Shakespeare: Is the Christian faith tragic or comic?

I had the pleasure of giving a short dinner speech at Campion College this week. I compared Milton's tragic vision to Shakespeare's comic vision, and argued that these are two alternative ways of understanding history theologically. The audio is available here.

Living backwards: the conversion of memory

I’m reading Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter with some students this semester. The narrator, Hannah, is an old woman looking back on her life in Port William. Right at the start she says: “This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed…. This is my story, my giving of thanks.”

Normally we think about the Christian life as something that’s lived forwards in time: we want our orientation to the future, our plans and decisions and actions, to be converted to the gospel. But Hannah Coulter has reminded me that the Christian life is also lived backwards in time. It’s also our memories that need to be converted. By any objective measure, Hannah’s life has not been easy. But she is able to look back on the whole thing in gratitude, without bitterness or blame. Her conversion to the gospel is most evident not in anything she does but in the way she remembers herself and tells her story.

It is the same with the first and greatest autobiography, Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine’s conversion totally re-shaped not only his future but also his past. In the act of remembering his own life, he discovers the ever-present grace of God – a grace that was never apparent at the time, as the drama of life was actually occurring, but has now become the hidden meaning of everything that happened. “You have dwelt in my memory ever since I learned to know you, and it is there that I find you when I remember and delight in you…. You have honoured my memory by making it your dwelling-place” (Confessions 10.24.35–25.36). If God dwells in memory, then the past is not fixed and finished. It can be converted. It can be attuned to God’s presence.

The Bible, too, is not just a promise for the future or a revelation of how to live. First and foremost the Bible is an aide-mémoire. It directs itself towards the sanctification of memory – the memory of God’s way with Israel, read backwards through the prism of the death and resurrection of the Saviour. “Keep these words in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6.6-9). We can have a future only if we know who we are, and we know who we are because of memory. I am told that some sufferers of head injury lose their ability to plan because they have lost their memory: the future exists only for those who have a past. 

The last novel I read with this student book group was Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead – another powerful account of the sanctification of memory. In that book, the old narrator John Ames observes that religious epiphanies are often experienced not in the present but in memory of the past. “Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time…. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.”

God dwells in memory.

This is why unforgiveness is such a profoundly damaging spiritual act: for when I harbour resentment against another person, I bar the door against God’s loving intrusion into my memory. I sin against myself, I destroy myself, when I shut God out of my past. And I sin against God when I shut God out of the divine dwelling place, “the fields and vast mansions of memory” (Confessions 10.8.12).

The greatest literary characters and how they work

“The choice of the point of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions” (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 26).

If you asked me who are the four greatest characters in literature, I would say Plato’s Socrates, the Jesus of the Gospels, Boswell’s Johnson, and Don Quixote. The first three all conform to a particular literary type. Let us call it the Revered Friend type. The characteristics of the Revered Friend are as follows:

• he has some particular genius that sets him apart from the common stock;
• he has a circle of admiring friends who enjoy his genius;
• he is depicted in third-person narrative by one of these admiring friends;
• his character is conveyed mostly through dialogue, i.e., through his own speech and his interactions with other speakers.

The distancing effect of third-person narration is absolutely critical to this character type. The reader is drawn into the character’s inner circle and quickly achieves a friendly rapport with the character. That is the effect of a third-person friendly narrator. But because the narrator also reveres the character, the reader is never allowed to get too close. In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ own opinions remain elusive; we hear him questioning others, but we never quite find out what he thinks about it all. In the Gospels, we are drawn into Jesus’ inner circle but we are also kept at a reverential distance. We are reminded that his identity is enigmatic, that his teaching is hard to understand, that he is liable to be misunderstood by the world and betrayed or abandoned by his inner circle.

Again, the reader of the life of Dr Johnson shares Boswell’s friendly point of view, yet the reader also shares Boswell’s awe. We are not allowed to get too close. The third-person narration helps to keep us at the correct distance from the character. In one famous scene, Boswell reminds us that there are parts of Johnson’s character that must remain forever hidden from our view. Johnson’s friends at the dining club have often observed his habit of squeezing oranges into his drink and then stuffing the orange peels into his jacket pockets. In Johnson’s room one day, Boswell sees a pile of orange peels from the night before, all scraped clean and arranged on the table. He plucks up the courage to ask Johnson about it:

Johnson: “I have a great love for them.”
Boswell: “And pray, Sir, what do you do with them? You scrape them, it seems, very neatly, and what next?”
Johnson: “I let them dry, Sir.”
Boswell: “And what next?”
Johnson: “Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.”
Boswell: “Then the world must be left in the dark.”

In a scene like this the reader is drawn into an extraordinary friendly intimacy with the great man: we are in his room; we are observing the subtlest eccentricities of his character; we are hearing him talk about the things he loves (in this case, orange peels). But at the same time we are kept at a reverential distance. The narrator leads us to the brink of revelation, only to conceal the very thing we long to know (in this case, the meaning of the orange peels).

It is the same technique, a hundred times over, in Plato and the Gospels. We are constantly oscillating between the beautiful and the sublime (to use Edmund Burke’s categories), between intimate friendship and astonished awe.

This technique is possible only in third-person narration. Would Socrates have been the greatest philosopher in the world if he had written books? If, instead of the memoirs of the evangelists, we had received a first-person Memoir of the Messiah, would anybody ever have become a Christian? You might love and admire an autobiographer, but you will never end by putting down the book and confessing him Lord. Only a third-person narrative can induce a response of that magnitude. Only a third-person narrator can depict both the beauty and the sublimity of a great personality, so that the reader becomes simultaneously friend and worshipper.

I have mentioned that I think Don Quixote is the only other character who can be set alongside Socrates and Jesus and Dr Johnson. Though Don Quixote does not conform so neatly to the type of the Revered Friend, Cervantes uses some of the same techniques in a comical and ironic way. The narrator is portrayed as a historian and a researcher, rather than as a personal friend of his subject: on the first page he admits that he doesn’t even know Don Quixote’s real name. Yet through the process of telling the story of this delusional knight, the narrator increasingly comes to adopt the perspective of an admiring friend. He loves Don Quixote and regards him as a kind of moral genius, even while regularly reminding the reader that the character is quite mad.

Sancho Panza, the faithful friend and squire of Don Quixote, provides another point of view on the main character. He supplies much of the book’s comedy by the way he adopts the role of an admiring friend in spite of his amply justified scepticism about Don Quixote’s claims.

“What’s the gentleman’s name?” asked the maid.
“Don Quixote de la Mancha,” replied Sancho Panza. “He’s a knight errant. One of the best and bravest the world has seen for a very long time.”
“What’s a knight errant?” asked the maid.
“Are you so green that you don’t know that?” replied Sancho. “Then I’ll tell you, my girl, that a knight errant – to cut a long story short – is beaten up one day and made Emperor the next. Today he’s the most unfortunate and poverty-stricken creature in the world; tomorrow he’ll have two or three kingdoms to give to his squire.”

Modern fiction has also blessed us with some very memorable examples of the Revered Friend. Why does Sherlock Holmes have such a lasting power over our imagination? It is because we see him from Watson’s point of view. We are part of Holmes’ inner circle, and we observe his genius from an astonished distance.

The greatest fictional comedies of the past century, P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, use exactly the same technique. Jeeves is an omniscient butler who finds brilliant and unlikely ways to extricate his employer, Bertie Wooster, from various social crises.

“Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?”
“I couldn't say, sir.” 

The effect of Jeeves’ character depends entirely on the point of view of the narrative. We see Jeeves through Bertie Wooster’s eyes. We seldom know exactly what he is thinking. Even when it comes to matters closest to Jeeves’ heart – the colour of a tie, the selection of a pair of trousers – we are left to infer his opinions from what he does not say. Jeeves is the central actor in every plot, yet we rarely see him doing anything directly. He is a shimmering, mysterious presence, a kind of puppeteer who orchestrates events behind the scenes. His effect on the reader would be impossible if the stories were narrated from Jeeves’ point of view, or if the narrator did not take pains to hold Jeeves at the proper distance so that we never get too close to him.

Some very fine novelists have aspired to portray personalities of genius but have failed because of an imperfect mastery of the Revered Friend technique. One of the few criticisms that I could make of the Harry Potter novels is that they fail to convince the reader of the story's main premise, namely that Harry is a magical genius. All the characters, and especially the villains, keep assuring us of Harry’s genius; every plot hinges on this fact; but the reader is too close to Harry, and too closely shares his point of view, to feel that he is an exceptional person. To keep the story moving along, we are quite willing to believe in Harry’s genius – but we never come to feel it the way we feel that Sherlock Holmes is a genius of observation and inductive reasoning. It might have been quite different, and Harry Potter might have been a great character, if only the narrator had shared Ron’s or Hermione’s point of view instead of Harry’s. Indeed it is no coincidence that one comes away from the novels with the impression that Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore are the richest personalities. They are more interesting characters simply because we see them from Harry’s point of view. They are more lifelike because we see them from the proper distance.

I may be wrong, but I can’t help wondering whether Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels might also have been better if the author had made better use of the Revered Friend technique. Each of the two women, Elena (the narrator) and Lila, regards the other as a “brilliant friend.” But again I found myself having to believe this since the novels never quite manage to show it. The problem, as I see it, is that the narrator is too self-absorbed to depict Lila objectively. Lila is meant to be a deep and intriguing personality, but for the most part she comes across as a function of Elena’s ego. Elena’s life is defined by her obsession with her friend. She gazes relentlessly at Lila, but somehow her gaze is so intensely self-interested that we never get enough objectivity, enough distance, to see Lila properly and so to appreciate what it is that Elena finds so impressive about her.

Perhaps that is no criticism at all, given that Elena’s obsession with Lila is what the novels are all about. But, in fiction, obsession can be depicted in ways that render the object of obsession large and magnificent. Just think of Moby-Dick, and of how the reader comes to share in Ishmael’s enormous fascination with whales and whaling. Ishmael is one of the largest egos in literature, yet we learn far more about whales than we do about him – precisely because his ego is defined by its obsession with whales.

As much as I enjoyed the Neapolitan Novels, my complaint is that the narrator is too much like Ahab and not enough like Ishmael. Ahab's is a narrow and suffocating egotism that leaves no room for anything else, while Ishmael's is an expansive egotism that makes room for everything else, though always on its own terms and within its own peculiar frame of reference.

Or to return to an earlier example, I would have liked the Neapolitan Novels better if Lila had kept orange peels in her pockets and Elena had never quite understood why. But, as it stands, the Elena of the Neapolitan Novels would never even have wondered about the orange peels. She would merely have turned it into a contest by accumulating her own (even bigger) collection of orange peels. Our interest in Lila is deflected; we are left staring into the pockets of Elena.

Lord of the loo: a sermon on Graham Greene

A sermon by Kim Fabricius
   
Without doubt, one of the greatest 20th century novelists writing in English was Graham Greene. He was also one of the most popular: his prose was lucid, his plots were gripping, and as a “writer who happened to be Catholic” (he hated the term “Catholic writer”), he wrote compellingly about the human condition with theological insight as well as psychological depth, exploring the perennial themes of good and evil, sin and salvation, faith and doubt.

One of my favourite Greene novels is Monsignor Quixote, published in 1982 (I read it during my first month as a minister). Called “a fable for our times”, it’s an affectionate pastiche of Cervantes’ 17th-century masterpiece Don Quixote. It describes the exploits of a small-town priest, unexpectedly made a monsignor by the Pope (“what strange stirring of the Holy Spirit,” observes his resentful bishop), as he travels around Spain in his Seat 600, tilting at windmills, accompanied by his ex-mayor friend nicknamed “Sancho” (what else!), who happens to be a communist. As you might imagine, their conversations are, well, interesting, as the churchman and the atheist not only argue but are forced to re-examine their own beliefs.

One of the funniest scenes in the novel finds Father Quixote in a pub toilet with a man who wants to make his confession. “Never before had he heard a confession in such surroundings. He had always been seated in that box like a coffin … [So] It was almost automatically that he took refuge in the only box available and sat down on a closed lavatory.” It turns out that the man is an undertaker who has stolen the brass handles off the coffin in which he had buried a priest that morning.

“Father Quixote thought: How many times I have felt guilty as he does without knowing why. Sometimes he envied the certitude of those who were able to lay down clear rules.… Himself he lived in a mist, unable to see a path, stumbling.… He said, ‘Don’t worry about such little things. Go home and have a good sleep. Perhaps you have stolen.… Do you think God cares so much about such a small thing like that? He has created a universe.… You have stolen two brass handles – don’t feel so important. Say you are sorry for your pride and go home.’”

Then the priest goes back to the bar. “What on earth have you been up to?” asks Sancho. “Practicing my profession,” Quixote replies. “In a lavatory?” “In a lavatory, in a prison, in a church. What’s the difference?”

Good question: What’s the difference? Is there any? Is a confessional holier than a khazi? What, indeed, is “holiness”?

In the Bible, one opposite of holy is “unclean” – like a lavatory. The Pharisees in particular were sticklers about “purity”, moral as well as ritual. They had a defensive notion of sanctity: pollution is contagious. Contact with the visibly sick and the obviously immoral – with lepers, for example, or “tax-collectors and sinners” (Matthew 11:19) – no way! Don’t touch, don’t talk, keep your distance! Hence the fastidiousness and the fearfulness of their faith. Jesus, by contrast, had an offensive notion of sanctity: it is not stain or sin but goodness – but grace – that is catching. Hence the robustness and the fearlessness of his own faith.

The Reformer Marin Luther also had this bold and feisty faith. He once wrote to an uptight upright colleague (Philip Melanchton): “Sometimes it is necessary to drink a little more, play, joke, even commit sin in defiance and contempt of the devil, in order not to give him the opportunity to make us scrupulous about small things.” Yet does not being “scrupulous about small things” – Father Quixote’s “little thing[s]” – doesn’t this sum-up the nit-picking piety of so much church culture, so fussy, prudish, mischiefless, so downright boring – and so obstructive to mission? You’ve heard of “born-again” Christianity: this is “yawn-again” Christianity.

What is holiness? Can God be found in a lavatory? How interesting that Luther claimed that his own theological breakthrough – justification by faith alone – came to him – you guessed it – in the WC! God is Lord – Lord of the loo too!

Perhaps, then, punctilious notions of purity and probity have little to do with real holiness, the offensive holiness of Jesus. Perhaps in focussing on little sins we miss the big ones, the weightier matters of justice, the weightiest matter of grace. Perhaps such a focus leads to defensive strategies of exclusion, as contemporary Pharisees police the borders of the church to keep out “the unclean” and “the unsound”. Perhaps what we often take to be beyond the moral or doctrinal pale has less to do with God’s righteousness and more to do with our own pathologies of rectitude. Indeed one reviewer of Monsignor Quixote (Robert Towers) suggests that “The rejection of [all] dogmatic authority … is the presiding theme of the book.” Not quite: for ultimately the novel’s “presiding theme” is the kindness of God, incarnate in weakness and doubt, in this hapless little priest, yet counter-intuitively triumphant over the malice and corruption of Grand Inquisitors in church and state alike.

Monsignor Quixote will die from wounds received when, shot at by two Guardia, his little Seat crashes. Yet his atheist friend will muse that “the love he had begun to feel for Father Quixote seemed now to live in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long he wondered, with a kind of fear …?” With a kind of faith, be it the size of a mustard seed, we may answer: forever. For God is love, incarnate in Christ, stronger than death, and, yes, eternal.

How fiction differs from film: the problem of time

For the nth time in my life, I have begun to write a children's novel. All my previous attempts have ended in failure, mostly due to certain technical problems that I have been unable to solve. One of these is the problem of representing time.

The peculiar genius of cinema is its capacity to portray the passing of time directly. One can see this with special vividness in films where the action unfolds in real time – films like Rope (1948), Bicycle Thieves (1948), High Noon (1952), and 12 Angry Men (1957). The ability of film to record time is one reason why some of the greatest directors – Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, among others – saw the long-take shot as having an essential importance, as if cinema achieves its full effect when it shows time unfolding in a single shot.

Even a scene depicting boredom can be captivating onscreen. One of the most beautiful scenes in Journey to Italy (1954) shows a married couple driving in a car across Italy, utterly bored with each other's company. The camera shows the passing of houses, fields, and street signs. It shows the sullen boredom on the faces of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders. But it is not boring to watch. We are watching the passing of time, and that is marvellous to behold.

In his classic study on the art of cinema, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky argued that time is in fact the medium of film. The whole artistry of film, he believed, lies in the way it shows things passing through time. The director carves a film from a "lump of time". "Time [is] the very foundation of cinema: as sound is in music, colour in painting, character in drama."

With the novel, things are very different. Fiction cannot portray time directly. Events in a novel cannot unfold in real time. The novel cannot show what the passing of time looks like. Of course, the ability of fiction to portray human consciousness depends on time as a condition. But the novel is sculpted out of consciousness, not out of time. Time is hidden behind the action of the plot.

This distinction between film and fiction might sound philosophical. But it has helped me to find a solution to a technical problem that I have faced whenever I have tried to write fiction. In my attempts to write novels, I kept trying to achieve cinematic effects. If the character is going on a journey, I would describe the journey. If the character is waiting for something, I would describe the waiting. If things were developing, I would try to describe the process. The results are deadening. Process and movement are the stuff of film, but not the stuff of fiction. (Obviously there are exceptions. A novel like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a work of genius precisely in the way it seems to record the passing of time. A novel like this is the exception that proves the rule. Anyway, for present purposes I'm not concerned with works of genius. I'm just trying to figure out some basic techniques for creating an ordinary run-of-the-mill novel.)

It was only recently that this difference between film and fiction became clear to me, in part because I've been watching a lot of early movies from the 1920s and 30s. So I decided to try another children's novel. I've planned this novel simply as a series of scenes plotted along a timeline. I am deliberately trying to pack everything into these scenes and to leave out everything between the scenes. I have renounced (or am trying to renounce) the attempt to describe process, development, and the passage of time. 

The approach I'm trying here is also modelled partly on the theatre, where the gaps between scenes are largely responsible for the creation of suspense. Shakespeare never shows anybody going on a journey: they have either arrived or they are about to set out; or, often enough, you hear about the journey indirectly during another scene. All the action is crammed into a sequence of more or less static scenes, while the passage of time (including all sorts of major developments in character and plot) occurs between the scenes.

I don't know if I'll achieve better results this time. My earlier attempts at novels have all sunk beneath the weight of their own insufferable boredom and indigence. This one is called The Island of Lost Cats. It is modelled on a detective story. It involves a boy, his cousin named Jack, and an island on which all the cats have mysteriously disappeared. 

Review of Robert Clark, Mr White's Confession

The next in my spate of Amazon reviews is a short review of Robert Clark's Augustinian-noir detective novel, Mr White's Confession.

Favourite novels of 50 contemporary theologians

by Kim Fabricius

James Alison: Rivals
Rob Bell: In the First Circle
Wendell Berry: The Good Earth
Nadia Bolz-Weber: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Greg Boyd: God Knows
Douglas Campbell: Deliverance
George Carey: Persecution
William Cavanaugh: Eat, Pray, Love
Shane Claiborne: Revolutionary Road
James Cone: The White Tiger
Charles Coulson: Escape from Alcatraz
William Lane Craig: Persuasion
Kevin DeYoung: No Country for Old Men
Mark Driscoll: Little Women
Peter Enns: East of Eden
Rachel Held Evans: The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year
Austin Fischer: We Need to Talk about Kevin
Billy Graham: The Godfather
Wayne Grudem: Excellent Women
Gustavo Gutierrez: Praxis
John Hagee: Catching Fire
Ken Ham: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
David Bentley Hart: The Line of Beauty
Stanley Hauerwas: A Farewell to Arms
Carter Heyward: Women in Love
George Hunsinger: Alias Grace
Bill Hybels: The Big Chapel
Werner Jeanrond: The History of Love
Robert Jenson: The Long Song
Hans Küng: Pope Joan
Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins: A Confederacy of Dunces
Andrew Linzey: Animal Farm
Diarmaid MacCulloch: The History Man
Alasdair MacIntyre: Waiting for the Barbarians
John Milbank: Talk Talk
Al Mohler: The Poisonwood Bible
Jürgen Moltmann: Great Expectations
Ben Myers: The Wizard of Oz
Alexei Osipov: From Russia, with Love
Joel Osteen: Money
J. I. Packer: The Big Sleep
Ian Paisley: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Eugene Peterson: American Pastoral
John Piper: The Power and the Glory
Peter Rollins: The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub
John Spong: Vernon God Little
Thomas Talbott: Enduring Love
Iain and Alan Torrance: Fathers and Sons
Delores Williams: Black Beauty
Rowan Williams: The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil

On surfing and Shakespeare

There are some things I never discovered until I was in my thirties: single malt scotch, Shakespeare, the Trinitate of Saint Augustine.

For example. The Shakespeare I was made to read when I was a boy – Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew – was all spoiled for me. Even Hamlet is a play that I have never really learned to love, ever since I was forced to read it by an English teacher named Mrs Macey who gave dreary afternoon orations about the archaic words and the imagery of rot and weeds and poison. Harold Bloom has said that Shakespeare will speak to as much of yourself as you are able to bring to him: and at sixteen years of age I was not able to bring very much, so Hamlet was wasted on me. Even when I read it today I am struck by nothing so much as a dull sense of familiarity, like meeting an old classmate you used to know but never really liked.

But then there are the plays I never read until my early thirties – King Lear, Henry IV, Antony and Cleopatra – and they are the great things, the plays that seem to light up everything, quick as stabs of lightning. They speak to more of me, because I had more of myself to bring when I read them.

The other day I read King Lear again, a text whose every syllable seems charged with revelation, bright and burning yet not consumed like the bush that Moses saw, and I was glad I had never read a thing like that when I was a boy, back when I knew nothing of what a grand appalling thing it is to be alive, back when someone like Mrs Macey would have had to explain it to me.

We are always talking about the things we wished we knew when we were young. Important lessons are learned too late, and we feel that everything might have been different, everything better, if only we had learned those things twenty, thirty, forty years ago. But there are some things that it's good you never saw until you had a few lines around your eyes. There are lovely things that grow only in the desert, and there are truths that cannot take root in the fertile soil of youth but only in the harder, drier conditions of a life that has known failure and disappointment and loss and the joys that come slowly.

This week I learned a truth like that, something I might have learned when I was younger, but am glad I never did.

I lay in the sun. I watched. I waited. I paddled. I looked back in fright. I felt the startling huge push. My head was filled with noise. I pushed myself up on my hands. I was very glad and very afraid. From beneath a great weight I dragged my legs up. I wobbled. I tottered. I – stood!

So it was that, at the age of thirty-three, at a place called Moffat Beach, I learned to ride a surfboard.

Almost thou persuadest me...

... to get an iPad. I actually used a friend's iPad for a couple of months, but wasn't that taken by it. But now T. S. Eliot's Waste Land has been turned into an impressive iPad app. If they do Four Quartets next, I'll really be in danger of converting...

On violence and children's stories

My children love adventure stories, and in their games together they often recreate scenes from their favourite stories. In the comfort of the living room, in the darkness of the bedroom, or in the eerie twilight of the backyard, they have been Peter Pan and a lawless crew of pirates, Bilbo Baggins and a ferocious dragon, Aslan and the white witch, a scarecrow and a tin man and a cowardly lion; they have slain giants and battled dwarves and roamed beneath the earth and peered down on tiny cities from a soaring carpet.

There are people – mostly people with PhDs who have never met a real child – who say the old fairytales and adventures are too violent. For my part, I tend to avoid contemporary children’s writing because it is, for the most part, not violent enough. Only an expert could think that what children really need is stories about tolerance, multiculturalism, sensitivity to difference, and all the abominable boredom of what is called ‘life skills’.

Anyone who has ever met a child will know that they inhabit a world of magic, monsters, and mayhem; that their freedoms and fantasies are rambunctious, loud, bright and brutal as an army with banners; that what they really need are tales of giants and dragons, cruel strangers and enchantments, evil fairies and magnificent hordes of treasure, animals that talk and children that thwart their wicked stepmothers. They do not want to know how to be nice to a lonely old woman in the woods: they want to know how to trick her and shove her in the oven. Or if I may speak biblically: they don’t want stories about obeying your parents and respecting your elders; they want a story about the youngest son who sneaks away from home and slays a giant with his trusty sling and five small stones. That is how children learn to navigate the dangerous rocks of that other country, that unimaginable foreign place where adults dwell; that is how they practise their moral agency, how they learn to be free.

Our handwringing educational moralisers not only misunderstand childhood, they also misunderstand the relation between stories and morality. The teenager who brings a pistol to school one day and guns down all his classmates was not reared on the good honest violence of the old adventure tales, but on computer games where acts of violence occur devoid of any human context or any narrative of friendship, bravery, and noble deeds. He was also reared, let us not forget, on a steady diet of sententious animated films, with their paralysing niceties of environmentalism, postcolonialism, tolerance, and Being True to Yourself. Our culture is blighted by the unprecedented mass production of such children’s stories – not by people who know or like children, but by film corporations with their focus groups, their market research, and their cynical cold statistics about what parents want and what they are willing to pay for.

Lately my children and I have been reading The Silver Chair, the sixth book in C. S. Lewis’s thrilling Narnia series. It is a very good children’s book, because it has all those things that children really love: fantastic talking animals, a strange unvisitable country, an unthinkably evil witch, a hideous reptile, ghastly great giants that cook and eat children, brave knights in glistening armour, enchantments of blackest magic, and, most important, the exhilarating absence of adult supervision, adult instruction, adult moralising. It is a good children’s story because it gives you not what children ought to like, but what they actually do like.

Today we read the chapter where the witch turns herself into a gigantic serpent, green as poison, with flaming eyes and flickering forked tongue. The loathsome creature coils its body round the prince, ‘ready to crack his ribs like firewood when it drew tight’. But our heroes rush at the snake with their swords. They strike its neck, and with repeated blows hack off its head. ‘The horrible thing went on coiling and moving like a bit of wire long after it had died; and the floor, as you may imagine, was a nasty mess.’

After we had read this bracing and edifying narrative, my little boy wandered off to talk to the dog, while my two daughters set about re-enacting the scene in the living room. My older daughter dressed up like an evil serpent, while her sister and I took up our swords and pursued the vile creature across the room. The house was soon filled with all the blood and clamour of battle: the serpent’s horrible hissing, the flashing of noble weapons, the appalling sound of that evil neck being hacked in two, the bitter cries of triumph and defeat.

That was when my little boy sauntered back into the room, carrying a handful of sticks and chewing on something he’d picked up from the ground outside. Amid the wild brutality, the vicious hissing and thrashing about, the bloodcurdling shouts and warlike screams, he scratched his head and remarked idly, ‘Oh, are we playing Mums and Dads again?’

Great first sentences

Let me be honest with you for once. Almost nothing in the world gives me greater joy than a book with a good first sentence. I was discussing this with my eight-year-old daughter tonight, and we started rummaging among our bookshelves, looking for our favourite first sentences. For my money, the best first sentence ever written is the opening of Melville’s Moby-Dick. ‘Call me Ishmael.’

Here are some of my other favourites from fiction:

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’
• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye: ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.’
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’
• Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’
• Peter Carey, Bliss: ‘Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.’
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….’
• James Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’ (in Dubliners): ‘He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.’ (OK, I’m cheating: that is actually from the second paragraph of the story – but it’s one my favourite sentences of all time, so I couldn’t help including it.)
• Jorge Luis Borges is a great first-sentence writer. His story ‘The Library of Babel’ starts like this: ‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries.’ And another story, ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, begins: ‘Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.’
• Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away: ‘Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.’
• Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories: ‘There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.’
• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: ‘Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and reach other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.’ (I know, it's two sentences – but it's damn good!)
• David Lodge, Changing Places: ‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’
• Anita Brookner, The Debut: ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.’

Scholars are not usually very good at giving their books a delightful first sentence (since most scholars believe boredom is a sign of intellectual seriousness). But there are some notable exceptions – for instance, C. S. Lewis begins his great book A Preface to Paradise Lost with these words: ‘The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.’ And another literary critic, James Wood, begins The Broken Estate: ‘The real is the atlas of fiction, over which all novelists thirst.’

As a rule, theologians are hopeless at this sort of thing (as James K. A. Smith observes in a recent post). But again there are, thank God, some exceptions. I’m thinking for instance of John Milbank, who has some artful and memorable opening sentences. Theology and Social Theory famously begins: ‘Once, there was no secular.’ And The Word Made Strange: ‘Today, theology is tragically too important.’ Stanley Hauerwas also has a good opening line to his recent memoir, Hannah's Child – evoking the tradition of the novel, he begins: ‘I did not intend to be “Stanley Hauerwas”.’

Karl Barth is of course legendary for his artful prefaces (he is, as a matter of fact, one of the real masters of the preface genre). His finest moments always come later in the prefaces, but he still has some cracking good first lines:

• CD I/2: 'It is not we who can sustain the Church, nor was it our forefathers, nor will it be our descendants.'
• CD IV/2: 'I am sorry to have disappointed those (perhaps not a few) who had counted on taking this continuation of the Church Dogmatics with them on their summer or autumn holidays.'

And then there is the incomparable G. K. Chesterton, who begins his autobiography with this marvellous sentence: ‘Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’ (OK, technically that was two sentences: but who’s counting?)

Anyway, my daughter also chose her own favourites from various children’s novels:

• J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan: ‘All children, except one, grow up.’
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’
• Kate Forsyth, The Puzzle Ring: ‘Hannah Rose Brown was not quite thirteen years old when she discovered her family was cursed.’
• Tony Davis, Roland Wright, Future Knight: ‘These days it is considered rude to chop a man’s arm off with a battleaxe, even when you don’t like him.’
• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’
• C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: ‘There was a boy called Eustance Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’

Which makes me think that we theologians could learn quite a lot from children's fiction.

Gifts: a love poem

Here's one of my favourite love poems, by the Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonucal. In contrast to all the tedious, unimaginative hype that surrounds Valentine's Day each year, this poem portrays something quite wonderful and quite essential about the nature of romantic love:

Gifts

‘I will bring you love,’ said the young lover,
‘A glad light to dance in your dark eye.
Pendants I will bring of the white bone,
And gay parrot feathers to deck your hair.’

But she only shook her head.

‘I will put a child in your arms,’ he said.
‘Will be a great headman, great rain-maker.
I will make remembered songs about you
That all tribes in all the wandering camps
Will sing forever.’

But she was not impressed.

‘I will bring you the still moonlight of the lagoon
And steal for you the singing of all the birds;
I will bring down the stars from heaven to you,
And put the bright rainbow into your hand.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘bring me tree-grubs.’

Milbank, Egypt, Cyclone Yasi, and the Latin American labyrinth

John Milbank's second Stanton lecture, on Immanence and Life, is available now. He's also written a more popular piece for the ABC on Recovering Trust in a Labyrinth of Solitude. To my surprise, I discovered from this piece that Milbank and I have been reading all the same books lately: he discusses Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Roberto Bolaño. To be honest though, I don't think he's right about any of them: who would describe One Hundred Years of Solitude as a document of "meaningless secularism"? You might as well call The Arabian Nights a nihilistic book. The reference to Octavio Paz is dubious too, since Paz's labyrinth of solitude isn't a denial of love, but an account of the conditions which make love possible. In fact, Paz's The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism is one of the most striking and beautiful things you could read in defence of erotic love.

Speaking of literature, the new issue of Literature and Theology is devoted to the theme of poetry and belief, with articles on Blake, Shelley, Hopkins, Stevens, Auden, and others.

And while you're over at the ABC, see also Waleed Aly's piece on the uprising in Egypt. And if you've been following the news of the Cyclone Yasi this week, here's a great slideshow with some photos of the aftermath. (Why do we find it so soothing to see photographs of natural disasters? As a boy, I always loved cyclones – they're a regular source of excitement for children growing up in the tropics. Each time, we waited eagerly for the news that our school had been blown away.) Anyway, I especially like this photo – thank God the books weren't damaged!

Happiest Moment: Lydia Davis

Yesterday I was reading the The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Picador 2010). She has some exquisite stories, including some that are no more than a single paragraph. Here's one of my favourites – a tiny, perfect, intricate little story titled "Happiest Moment":

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

Poetic Graffiti: clerihews on ten modern Christian poets

by Kim Fabricius

Well folks, it's been too long since our last series of clerihews. So for those of you who have trouble reading poetry (or would like to be able to talk about poets without reading them), Kim has now produced a convenient abridged version. Here are ten clerihews on modern Christian poets (five of them dead, five living):

W. H. Auden
Sure liked his Gordon’s;
Of course the intoxicated sod
Was also drunk on God.

Wendell Berry
Is very, very
Farmy.
And some would say barmy.

T. S. Eliot,
Just for the hell of it,
Paraded his Latin and Greek
(The pompous High Anglican geek).

Kevin Hart
Is exceedingly smart;
Writes on God, deconstruction, and sex –
With his ex.

Geoffrey Hill,
Dense and difficult; still,
His poems on our malady
Are such fun to parody.

Elizabeth Jennings
Prayerfully wrote about sinning
And shadows and terror –
Unlike the pope, without error.

D. Gwenallt Jones
Is likely unknown
To those who know little of Wales.
That’s a lot of Theology Fails.

R. S. Thomas
Was furiously famous
As a Welsh priest and poet.
But “God is love”? You wouldn’t know it.

Archbishop Rowan,
With R. S. and Euros Bowen,
Another Welsh poet and priest,
Alas now sings with Dylan “I Shall Be Released.”

Franz Wright
Sees the light
In the dark in his verse:
The headlights of a hearse.

We had the experience but missed the meaning: a note on misreading

What do you think is the most terrifying work of literature ever written? It's a tough competition. But personally, I'd say The Dry Salvages (1941) from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets would have to be high on the list of finalists. The poem is absolutely relentless, suffocating, unforgiving; I find myself gasping for breath as I read it.

It's remarkable – and instructive – to see how often snippets from Dry Salvages are quoted as though they were positive, affirming sentiments, nice pieces of wisdom to live by. As though Eliot liked us; as though he wanted us to feel better about our lives.

"The river is within us." I've seen these words quoted to incite warm feelings of ecological harmony: even though the line is about our absolute insignificance and defencelessness before the implacable malevolent power of the river, not to mention the infinitely greater and more terrible gods of the sea ("the river is within us, the sea is all about us...").

But probably the most egregiously misquoted lines are the ones that mention life's "moments of happiness":

the sudden illumination –
We had the experience but missed the meaning

This is quoted very often – about 44,000 times on the web, for instance – and it's almost always (even in scholarly books) invoked as a positive sentiment. Learn from your experiences; appropriate the hidden wisdom of the past; discover the meaning of life in those special moments of illumination – that sort of bosh. But Eliot isn't talking about any of that. In this second section of the poem, he sets us up to think that we are about to receive a useful gem of wisdom:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence

This "pattern" of meaning is the theme of the section. And the pattern consists in seeing that the moments of "sudden illumination" are just fortuitous aberrations. It is the "moments of agony" that are "permanent". The real pattern of human experience is disclosed when we glance over our shoulders, peering back behind recorded history into "the primitive terror". It's here that we realise that the only "meaning" of time is its indifferent destructiveness. The only thing that's really stable and "permanent" in human history, the only "pattern" that orders our lives, is the "agony" of time. In other words, our lives are sustained by time's destructive power. An omnipotent malignancy has usurped the "preserving" role of Providence:

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
[...]
The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.

This reference to the apple is often glossed as an allusion to the Fall, where death enters the world through human disobedience. But the really striking thing about this image is the way it reverses the Genesis story: the bite from the apple is not our destruction, but our preservation. The bitter apple is Time – and our preservation in time (i.e., our preservation unto destruction) is the one gift we are granted, a single consoling "bite" from this apple. The only thing keeping us alive is the poison that kills us. Time.

The section ends with a final image, even more shattering. What are our "moments of happiness" like, those experiences of "sudden illumination"? They are, the poem says, like a "ragged rock in the restless waters":

On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

The rock provides a nice piece of scenery on a fine day, and a useful point of navigation for sailors in fair weather. But only the "sudden fury" of the storm reveals its true and permanent nature – "what it always was". We are deceived when, in fair weather, the rock appears to be pleasant or useful; this is merely an aberration from the true pattern of things. Sheer boat-crushing destructiveness is what the rock "always was". If it appears benign for some extended periods, that is like the malignant river in the first section, which appears "patient to some degree" when in fact it is quietly preparing for the next outburst of implacable wanton rage.

So this, mercilessly, is the poem's answer to the question: what do those "moments of happiness" really mean? Eliot sets us up to expect some wisdom about the meaning of life: but while we are waiting for bread, he gives us a stone.

What do the moments of "sudden illumination" mean, when "we had the experience but missed the meaning"? What is that "pattern" of meaning that we missed? It's simply this: that the happy moments are an accidental anomaly, like the appearance of the rock in fine weather. The "permanence" of life is its agony, even if we only glimpse that truth occasionally, amid storms. Human life – like the ragged rock – remains "what it always was": a "primitive terror". That is the truth about life. And our moments of happiness do not reveal but only conceal this pattern, this meaning.

It's true, of course, that a "hint" of hope is introduced in the last section of Dry Salvages – a hope that blooms into the redemptive pentecostal fire of Little Gidding. And it's true that Little Gidding retroactively alters, even transfigures, our reading of the Quartets, so that Dry Salvages becomes an oblique pointer towards redemption. But by the same token, we're not in a position to receive the hope of Little Gidding until we've first passed through the wreckage and despair of Dry Salvages.

"We had the experience but missed the meaning." Taken in context, the line is as crushingly bleak as anything Eliot wrote. If it is also somehow transfigured by the illumination of Little Gidding, that is only by way of a tremendous internal irony. Looking backwards from Little Gidding, one perhaps sees that the speaker himself has also "missed the meaning". (I don't know whether that's a legitimate reading; I only mention it here as the maximal possibility of a "nice" interpretation of the line.) But even this interpretation could never compromise the earlier poem's fundamental bleakness of vision. Rather it's like the irony of the Gospel of John, when Caiaphas insists that "it's better that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish" (Jn 11:49). An irony like that is no happy ending. It evokes no smile, only a sort of pained redemptive grimace.

There is indeed redemption from the crushing theological terrors of Dry Salvages. But we are saved – if we are saved at all – "as though by fire" (1 Cor 3:15). That is the message of Four Quartets.

Margaret Atwood: the usefulness of writing

For our intermittent series on writing, here's a remark by the great Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. It's from a piece she did a few years ago for the Washington Post:

What is writing for? Writers – unlike dentists, bricklayers and other practical folk – are always being asked why they do what they do; asked, in effect, to prove their usefulness. It's an odd question, because language and mathematics are the two most potent and useful tools human beings have ever invented. Sometimes, as a writer, you forget this. You can get stuck; you can start believing in your own superfluity...

Update: Daniel Hartley has posted an incisive response to this quote.

More theological graffiti

by Kim Fabricius and Ben Myers

Here's a sequel to our recent batch of theological graffiti. This brings it to a total of 75 modern theologians. Phew, I think we need a break (for goodness sake!) from rhyming.

Marilyn McCord Adams:
Her book about Ockham
Was simply stupendous;
Her next book, horrendous.

Ray S. Anderson,
Scholarly parson,
Sent me letters and books from LA.
When he died, I was silent all day.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
Really raised the bar,
From descensus, to drama, to logic – higher and higher –
With a leg-up from Adrienne von Speyr.

G. C. Berkouwer
Spent many an hour
With Calvin; but even more, I think,
With Bavinck.

Leonardo Boff
Attacked capitalist toffs
And proposed the preferential option.
“Denied!” cried the pope, as a Marxist concoction.

Emil Brunner
Would sooner
Die than admit his celebrity status was just part and parcel
Of receiving a Nein postmarked Basel.

George Carey,
Rowan’s snide sniper of an adversary –
Oops! – a mistake:
A theologian? Give me a break!

D. A. Carson,
The evangelical’s evangelical bar none,
Is unflagging in nagging and nagging
About God’s postmodernist gagging.

James Cone
Rose from the valley of dry, black bones
To become a theology professor –
And blaspheme the God of the oppressor.

Peter Enns
Was told by his friends
At Westminster: “It’s not personal, Pete, we love you and all –
Just put on this blindfold and stand by the wall.”

Billy Graham
Was a bit of a ham,
And on hellfire and empire he went way awry.
But he was such a nice guy.

Adolf von Harnack
Rather liked the fact
That all of Europe revered him. Except for one impudent
Student.

John Hick
Is a bit of a ...
Hmm, this one time
I can’t think of a rhyme.

George Hunsinger
Ordered a burger.
The girl at the counter replied:
“Would you like any Frei?”

Nate Kerr
Has caused quite a stir
With his book on apocalyptic.
Tim LaHaye, however, is apopleptic.

George Lindbeck,
Seeing doctrine all in a wreck,
Rebuilt, not wielding a Nietzschean hammer,
But a Wittgensteinian grammar.

Alister McGrath
Writes so very fast,
Making colleagues look word-shy and shiftless,
With his output so prodigious it’s ridiculous.

Brian McLaren,
Not to be mistaken for Rick Warren,
Is thankfully not purpose-driven,
But likewise, theologically, needs to be generously forgiven.

Jean-Luc Marion
Phenomenally continues to carry on
Semester after semester after semester
About Dieu sans l’être.

Thomas Merton
Peacefully put a healing hurt on
The church and the world as sociopaths.
Then he took a bath.

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin,
His likes unlikely soon to be seen again,
Could say in perfect Tamil,
“The postmodern West has the grace of a camel.”

Rudolf Otto
Got perfectly blotto
And saw – how delightful, how luminous! –
That the whole world is smiling and numinous.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Opened a can
Of Worms when he divorced Luther
And moved in with Byzantine (who was older, but cuter).

Clark Pinnock
Had his third glass of arrack,
Then made his friends a bet:
He’d dream up a doctrine even God doesn’t know yet.

John Polkinghorne
Dawkins wishes had never been born.
“Science too takes tacit faith,” the physicist bookishly barks.
“Or don’t you believe in quarks?”

James K. A. Smith –
Is he giving or taking the pith
With his je ne sais quoi
Of Calvin and Milbank and Jacques Derrida?

Dorothy Sölle:
Prophetic, poetic, mystical, holy.
McFague and Moltmann: Frau Wow.
Gollwitzer and Barth: Frau Cow.

George Steiner,
Not exactly a whiner:
But occasionally given to dark ruminations
On how paperback printing destroyed civilisation.

John Stott
Writes a helluva lot
As the pope of the world’s evangelicals,
But his Shine-Jesus-shine’s not electrical.

Kathryn Tanner
Shouted, “Hosanna!”,
Prayed the Agnus Dei,
Then wrote Christ the Key.

Ernst Troeltsch
Happened to belch.
He said, “Pardon me, sirs, this whole situation
Has a sociologically sound explanation.”

Kevin Vanhoozer
Went with some friends to a boozer
In Boston.
He promised to say not a word about Austin.

Miroslav Volf
Played a round of golf.
His game that day was frankly rotten:
He lost count of his strokes, even God had forgotten.

Will Willimon
Recants and moves on
From a book he once did with Stanley.
He would leave Wesley too, were he manly.