Book review

Book review: Memoirs of St Peter translated by Michael Pakaluk

21 February 2025
Edoardo
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Memoirs of St Peter translated by Michael Pakaluk

The Gospel of St Mark is the shortest, roughest, rawest of the Gospels. It’s written in Koine Greek, like the other Gospels, but it’s significantly less polished than the Greek of the other three Gospels. It’s now generally agreed by scholars to be the earliest Gospel to be written.

In this new translation, Michael Pakaluk keeps the original roughness rather than smoothing it out as most translations do. He retains the tense switching, where the Gospel moves in the same scene from the past tense to the present tense and back again. He includes the breathless ‘and thens’ and ‘immediatelys’ and the other connectives. And in doing so he demonstrates well his basic point: that this Gospel is the written record of Peter’s own account of Jesus’s life and death.

In 1977, the actor Alec McCowen, one of the greatest actors of his generation, stood on stage and recited all of Mark’s Gospel, from memory, at the University Theatre in Newcastle. He went on to tell the story at the Riverside Studios, the West End and Broadway. It took about an hour and a half.

Peter, telling his tale to listeners sitting around him, would have taken about the same length of time. Speaking as the witness to these events, he often omits his own name where the other Gospels name him. He includes the actual Aramaic words Jesus spoke. And the whole text is suffused with the sense of breathtaking urgency that comes from someone who watched this all unfold without the slightest notion of how the story would play out.

As such, it’s a way of reading the Gospel in a manner as close as is possible to those first hearers, sitting clustered around the big fisherman telling his story with the same astonished urgency with which he first witnessed it.

Book review: The Mysteries by Lisa Tuttle

17 February 2025
Edoardo
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The Mysteries by Lisa Tuttle

People go missing. People go missing all the time. In most cases, they are found again quickly. But some disappear.

Most of the disappeared are people who chose to disappear; people who walked out of ther lives. I suspect most of us, at some point or other, have faced that temptation: the open door, the road ahead, the train journey or the plane flight: a chance not only to leave a life behind but also the opportunity to become someone else entirely.

Most of those who disappear fall into this category. Then there are the tragic cases, the people abducted, kidnapped and killed. Many of these are found, eventually, their remains allowing a measure of closure to those that mourn them.

But there are other disappearances. Disappearances that stud the tales and folklore particularly of the ocean swept shores of northern Europe. In these stories, people walk out of this world, wittingly or not, into another realm that runs somehow parallel and somehow perpendicular to our own.

Otherworld, the land under the waves, the land of the living, Faerie, Avalon; these are just some of its names and, according to these tales, some of the people who disappear do so because they find the door to this otherworld.

The Mysteries is about people who disappear – and the people who search for them. It’s a story of loss and finding, weaving a detective story into a fairy tale and a fairy tale into a detective story. It switches from Turnpike Lane (an area of London which, I can attest, is about as far from Faerie as it’s possible to get) to the shores of Loch Sween in Scotland, which I can also confirm lies on the border between this world and… somewhere else.

It’s a story of losing and finding, and the perils that come with both. If you have ever walked down a suburban street at night when no one else is moving and the light pools around the street lamps and it becomes clear that it would be all too easy to turn onto a street in a different city entirely; if you have ever walked lost in mist on a hillside to suddenly find a stone standing in front of you, cold dripping from its face, then this is a book for you.

Book review: Walker, R.N. by Terence Robertson

15 February 2025
Edoardo
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Walker R.N. by Terence Robertson

The subtitle tells the book’s theme: the greatest U-boat hunter of the battle of the Atlantic. Frederic John Walker, inevitably nicknamed ‘Johnnie’ after the brand of whisky, was a captain and commander of the small boat squadrons, largely consisting of corvettes and frigates, that were given the task of protecting Britain’s merchant-fleet convoys from German U-boats. Churchill famously said that the Battle of the Atlantic, that long, cold, patient, largely silent conflict that was fought on and under the ocean, was the only battle that kept him awake at night with worry.

Johnnie Walker did as much as any single individual to win the battle. From his revolutionary tactics, where he turned his patrol vessels into the hunters, seeking out and destroying the German submarines, to his unflagging devotion to duty that kept him on the bridge hour after hour, day after day, Walker led the way.

The book is, in some ways, a military hagiography. There’s little in the way of criticism but then, there was little criticism warranted, particularly when you reach the end and read how Walker’s devotion to duty quite literally drove him to an early death. Walker worked himself to death, dying in 1944 when the battle was mostly won but the war not yet over. He also lost his younger son during the war.

The Walker family, like so many others, sacrificed so much that we might live. It is good to remember, and honour, him. And it’s also a thrilling read, conveying well the cold and tension of the long nights when the corvettes searched for the wolf packs, knowing that at any moment a torpedo might come barreling towards them.

Book review: The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

15 February 2025
Edoardo
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The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

OK, you could write a shorter history. It is possible. But if you did, it would be of the nature of here’s the Romans, long bit where nothing much happens but there’s a lot of fighting, Renaissance!, another long bit where there’s a lot of fighting, Risorgimento!, Fascism (hiss! boo!), fashion. What Ross King does particularly well in this book is fill in the bits where, apparently, nothing much happens apart from a lot of fighting. In this, he’s helped by Italy having a lot of really interesting history. So if you want to learn more about the history of Italy, and in particular the bits apart from Rome and Renaissance, then this is a good place to start.

Book review: The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights by John Steinbeck

13 February 2025
Edoardo
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The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights by John Steinbeck

Don’t lend out the precious books of your childhood – at least, not if you expect to get them back. I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of books that, having lent out, have been returned to me. Unfortunately, one of the books that I ‘lent’ was this one, in a fine hardback edition. I have no recollection to whom I lent it but, if you should happen to read this…I was going to say, please give it back. But now, that’s no longer necessary. For as memory turns back to the books that most formed me, I have started searching them out and rereading them.

The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights was one of those books. I must have read it before I was ten and long, long before I read any other books by John Steinbeck. As a bookish teenager, I borrowed Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and other Steinbeck novels from the school library (imagine having a school library that stocked such books!); impressive, immersive books, worthy of a Nobel-prize winner.

But none of them moved me – made me – as much as The Acts of King Arthur. Reading the introduction to this new edition, I learned that Steinbeck was given a copy of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur as a child. Rather than being repelled by the strange version of English in which it was written, he found it fascinating, relishing the aura of age and faerie that lay in the very words on the page, complementing the tales the words told.

As an adult, Steinbeck set about retelling Malory’s Arthurian legends but, sadly, he never completed the task. However, after his death, what he had written was published. It is remarkable. Undoubtedly the best retelling of these stories I have ever read. Steinbeck finds the language to set his stories in the same semi-legendary world in which Malory wrote, a world suspended between our own and the realm of quests and wizards and giants and dragons, a world where the temptations and virtues of chivalry are laid bare in a way that makes it, for a child such as me reading it, an invitation to emulate those virtues and follow those ideals.

It really is the most wonderfully written book but what sets it apart is the deep wisdom that supports the words on the page.

Having read Steinbeck’s version of Malory, I set about reading the original myself, both volumes in the old and much missed Everyman series. While I enjoyed the original, I must admit that I preferred – and prefer – Steinbeck’s retelling. If you’ve not read this book, do so. It will transport you but, more importantly, reading it will make you a better person.

The Road by Jack London

28 January 2025
Edoardo
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The Road by Jack London

Jack London, who died when he was only 40, packed more life into those few decades than most people could manage – or endure – in twice the time. He was a gold prospecter, a sailor, a tramp, a hobo, a journalist, a writer and a war correspondent.

The Road tells of London’s life on the road, as a tramp and a hobo, riding the trains, cadging meals off kind families, following the signs left by other travellers on the road, signs that told whether a town had good pickings or a mean sheriff inclined to throw vagrants in jail.

Among the many fascinations of the book is London’s ambivalence: it was a hard life and often brutal but its freedom clearly appealed greatly to London. His views, as expressed in his later works, were clearly influenced by the social Darwinism of the time, which viewed life as essentially an amoral struggle for survival. But bound with this was a deeply romantic view of freedom and the possibilities available to a man around the next corner or over the next hill. The two come together in The Road, a celebration as well as a requiem for a way of life that could only be spawned by poverty.

I presume that Cormac McCarthy read London’s book before writing his version of The Road. It strikes me that there would be an interesting thesis to be had from comparing and contrasting the two stories.

Book review: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

19 January 2025
Edoardo
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The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

This is a very fine addition to the canon of historical detective stories set in exotic locations – but, if you’re like me, you will have finished reading The Janissary Tree with one question uppermost in your mind: surely eunuchs can’t have sex?

Yes, the novel gives a wonderful sense of the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, when a gentle cloud of futility descended over the great city that was once Constantinople and the pashas settled into civilised and genteel inaction. Its hero and his friends and rivals are finely drawn, vivid creations, providing further insights into this strange world.

But could a eunuch really have sex? Because that’s exactly what Yashim the Eunuch, the detective hero of the story, does, and with a particularly beautiful Russian noblewoman at that. Which, so far as I had thought (although admittedly I hadn’t thought much on it), rather ruined the point of creating a eunuch in the first place. Surely, I thought, the point of castrating men was to ensure that they could not interfere with the women of the Sultan’s harem, or any other women for that matter. But here was Yashim doing exactly what I had always supposed was impossible for a eunuch to do.

So, having finished the book, I looked further into the matter (well, did some Google searches, to be honest) and the answer appears to be: maybe. Could be possible, or then again it might be impossible. Pretty well par for the course for internet research. So, dear reader, I leave the question in your hands: do you think it is possible for a eunuch to have sexual intercourse? (Although I do encourage you to read this excellent detective story as a means towards starting your research.)

Troubled by Rob Henderson

8 January 2025
Edoardo
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Troubled by Rob Henderson

As a child, Rob Henderson was in the running for the I’ve-had-it-worse-than-you cup. His mum was a drug addict. Father unknown. Shuttled through various foster homes. Adoptive parents split up, using him as their battleground. Small town America, little to no money, and zero prospects.

The children Henderson grew up with didn’t have much in the way of choices; for most, it resolved to drugs or crime. Henderson, however, took the only other real option: enlistment. He joined the US military.

As with many others, the military began to give Henderson some of the structure his chaotic home life had always lacked. Couple that with a formidable natural intelligence, and Henderson began to make his way out of the milieu into which he had been born. On leaving the military, he was able to enrol in college where his intelligence finally had an outlet. Henderson excelled. After completing his degree, he went on to do a Masters at that most Ivy League of American universities, Yale.

Henderson had arrived among the intellectual elite. The people whose parents and professors made the policies that affected the people he had grown up among. And, basically, he discovered that they were completely clueless. They had not the slightest idea of the effect of the ideas they espoused. Almost all his peers came from intact, two-parent families but all of them argued that there was no reason to say that was better than single-parent families. Their other ideas similarly championed personal and sexual freedom and licence, while they themselves generally belonged to conventionally moral families.

In short, they lived morally conservative lives while espousing complete libertinism.

And they thought this was the right thing to do, not because of its effects on the poor but because it brought them status among their peers. Henderson slowly realised that, as markers of their own status, his peers at Yale were propounding luxury beliefs, a set of ideas that marked them out as different from other, lower-status Americans.

Social status is something that goes deep into our evolutionary past. It was literally a matter of life or death. Now, though, to signal status, when everybody can own a Rolex or an indistinguishable replica, something else is needed because luxury goods don’t do it. The marker for superior social status today is not what you have but what you believe. And who cares what effect that has on people who can’t buy their way out of a husband leaving home or an addiction leading to the loss of a job?

Well, Rob Henderson does and his evisceration of our current ‘elite’ is as measured and savagely polite as any I have read. Read this book. It might be the most important of the last ten years.

Book review: The Shroud by Ian Wilson

3 January 2025
Edoardo
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The Shroud by Ian Wilson

Is it? Is the long linen cloth held at Turin Cathedral the actual burial shroud that his grieving followers wrapped Jesus’s body with after his crucifixion?

That’s what this book sets out to answer and, basically, its answer is, “Yes, it is.”

For myself, I think the case is both weaker and stronger than the one Ian Wilson presents. It’s weaker historically: it’s very hard to get from the Shroud’s first verifiable appearance in the historical record, in 1355 in the unlikely setting of Lirey, a village in France, to the original shroud via its presumed preservation after the Resurrection, through centuries of Roman persecution, then to Constantinople as a holy relic and then a long hiatus after the Sack of Constantinople in 1203 before its eventual reappearance in France.

However, the case is stronger for the image itself. None of the proposed techniques for producing an image like the Shroud come close to the image itself. There were no artists at the time capable of producing an image of this nature. And no contemporary forger would have put the nails through the wrists, for all crucifixion scenes of the time assumed that Jesus had been nailed through the hands, not the wrists.

So the Shroud remains a mystery. If it is a forgery, then it’s forgery would be almost as miraculous as if the Shroud were, indeed, the burial cloth of Jesus. If it’s genuine, then… Everything changes.

Book review: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley

3 January 2025
Edoardo
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The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley

Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach, laments the long withdrawing roar of the Sea of Faith, the tide of belief slowly receding.

But the thing with tides is, they go out and then they come back in. And, less obviously, tides go in and out at different times in different places. In Britain, religious belief has been in decline for the last half century or so. The same is true of much of Europe. But elsewhere, notably in Africa and China, the opposite is the case.

Justin Brierley has been hosting a podcast where he brings together notable atheist and religious thinkers and has them talk, in a civil and constructive manner. And over the decade or so he has been doing this, he has seen, as have I, a distinct change. The millennarian stridency of the New Atheists has lessened to an appreciation of the human value of shared religious belief: no less an atheist than Richard Dawkins now accepts the cultural value of Christianity to the England that he loves.

Other thinkers, such as the historian Tom Holland, have highlighted how the entire foundations of even the most secular Western thought are built upon Christian foundations. The concern for the victim that underlies much modern thought comes entirely from the Christian view of the sacrificial value of the pure victim that is Christ himself.

Apart from Tom Holland, other intellectuals are coming round to the idea of the value of Christianity, such as Niall Ferguson. Outside intellectual circles, it’s interesting to note the increasing number of Premier League footballers who put faith at the centre of their life, privately and publicly, such as Bukayo Saka, as well as celebrity conversions such as Russell Brand.

All these suggest that we may have reached the turning of the tide. Combine this with the fact that atheist and agnostic couples have significantly fewer children than religious couples, and it suggests that the 21st century will see not the death of religion but its rebirth – even in the supposedly secular West.