There’s not many books out there that tell the history of Sri Lanka, and none that do it so succinctly. So I must compliment Mr Newmont on first writing his history and, secondly, doing such a good job of it. The first half of the book is a brisk run through the country’s ancient past. Those unfamiliar with the hydraulic and architectural wonders achieved by Sri Lanka’s ancient kings will learn enough here to whet their appetite to learn more.
The second half takes us from the first western colonists, the Portugues, through Dutch and British rule, to the final chapters that do an excellent, and fair, job of giving the history of Sri Lanka’s post-independence travails. A great introduction to the subject.
I’m fortunate enough to count Al, his wife, Marie, and son, Jared, as friends. They also all three appear in this book, which is essentially Al’s memoir of his life, mainly as a pastor and minister. It’s been a privilege to know all three of them, both for their friendship but also for their disabusing me of some stereotypes that I had long held.
In London, as in the rest of Europe, there’s a sort of horrified fascination with America that pervades our media and public life. The BBC will send plane loads of journalists to cover US presidential elections while barely mentioning the presidential elections in France – which probably affect us even more than what happens in America. But amid all this coverage, one thing remains true: the barely disguised contempt with which America’s Bible Belt Christians are portrayed.
Now, I must confess to falling prey to this stereotype myself. But then, I met Al, and Marie, and Jared. Al is actually a Protestant pastor. While we haven’t specifically talked politics, I’m sure he’s socially conservative and probably politically Republican too. He even, I found out in his book, hunts! You’d be hard put to find someone who ticks more of the stereotype boxes.
Yet Al, and his family, are the very opposite of the ignorant, uncivilised, parochial stereotype of Protestant American Christians that we get served up all the time in Britain. They have more advanced degrees between them than most families have relatives and so far as parochial is concerned, they’ve travelled more than me – and I’ve been to a lot of countries. As a family, they love learning, in all its forms, and they also sponsor and help others wanting to learn.
They are, in fact, what a truly civilised family should be. Yet they are white American Christian hunters (for goodness sake, I learned that even Marie, one of the kindest ladies I’ve ever met, enjoys hunting!).
So while I thank them for their friendship, I also thank them for removing the blinkers of prejudice from my gaze.
You’ve gone with the family for a picnic into the countryside. You park the car, walk a mile or so to a scenic spot, lay out the picnic…and then the heavens open. At first you try to tough it out but there’s no sign of the rain abating and, sooner rather than later, you give up and trudge back to the car, damp and hungry. But, of course, in the rain and confusion, you didn’t clear up as you might have. A sandwich box fell out of the bag. A glass bottle was left open on the floor. Some paper, some plastic wrappers, some of the food that you’d started eating and maybe even an old MP3 player, forgotten in all the confusion.
You pile back into the car and resolve, on the way back, to try a country pub next time. But as you drive away, the creatures that live around that scenic spot look out from their hiding places. They look around, checking that you’ve gone. Then, some of the bolder ones, creep forward and start investigating what you left behind. A sparrow makes off with the crumbs from the sandwich. A bee discovers the spilt Coke and gorges on sugar until it collapses in a sugar faint. An ant crawls into the open glass bottle and gets stuck there, the sides too smooth for it to climb back out, while its comrades wave their feelers at it from outside, entirely unable to rescue it.
That’s the premise of the Strugatsky brother’s novel – only we’re the ants, the bee and the sparrow. Aliens, so far beyond us that they don’t even notice we’re here, land on earth, spend a short time here, and then leave – leaving stuff behind. Some of it is dangerous, some useful, some incomprehensible.
Science fiction is a literature of ideas and this, at the time wholly original idea, is perhaps the best attempt to describe what a real alien visit might be like. As such, the novel is almost extraneous to the idea, serving largely to showcase the idea. The idea itself has proved very powerful, entering the SF vocabulary. The novel from which it came is suitably indeterminate because the visit was indeterminate: true to the idea perhaps slightly less satisfactory as literature. But, in SF, the story serves the idea, not the other way round.
Folk tales. Stories told by people and then retold and retold, and told again. Sadly, many of these old stories are teetering on the edge of forgetting, the old aural culture that kept the stories alive itself being on the edge of oblivion. So it’s just as well that story tellers such as Malcolm Green have been collecting these stories and writing them down, that they not be lost entirely.
What’s particularly interesting is how some narratives recur, modified to suit local settings but still telling essentially the same story whether that be in Cornwall or Northumberland. One good example, which Green includes in his book, is the tale of the young man selling a horse who is taken under the hill and sees there sleeping knights and great treasures and, on a table, a sword and a horn. He is told to either draw the sword or sound the horn. If he chooses correctly, then all the treasure shall be his. But should he choose wrongly, then the sleeping knights will wake and he be pursued by them.
What’s interesting is that some versions of the story have the young man drawing the sword while in others he sounds the horn but whichever he chooses, he is always wrong. So, should you find yourself under a hill, surrounded by sleeping knights and glittering treasure, and faced with this choice, then the only way to win seems to be not to play the game at all: I’d suggest pocketing a few diamonds while buying some time and then asking for the way out!
The stories are excellently told; a worthy addition to any library of folk tales.
This is strange. It’s a full-length epic poem about Jason and the quest for the golden fleece – only it’s not really epic and hardly ever heroic. The clue might be in the metre in which the poem was written: rather than the heroic metres of Homer or Virgil, it was written in a metre that was generally reserved for hymnody and lyric. So maybe Apollonius never intended to write an epic, but rather a long lyric or hymn. Indeed, most of the content is actually travel, long descriptions of where the Argonauts go, with the descriptions often being stripped down to list of places visited.
As for Jason and his argonauts, they are the less heroic bunch of heroes ever put into metre. Presumably other earlier versions of the legend (which have sadly all been lost) painted them in a more epic light; surely they must have done because it’s hard to see how this bunch of perpetually moaning adventurers could have come to be seen as among the greatest of the Classical heroes if this is how they behaved in all the tellings of the story. Indeed, Jason does little more than complain and have repeated fits of fear about what lies before them throughout the story. The accomplishment of the quest is mainly down to Medea, who is nevertheless berated for betraying her psychotic father.
It’s not as if the rest of the Argonauts are any braver and more resolute than Jason. They too go into palpitations at the prospect of any danger. The only exception is Heracles, but he is removed from the quest early on and the rest have to carry on without him, carried to the successful conclusion of the quest largely by the efforts of others.
It really is a very strange epic. Excellent translation by the wonderfully named Aaron Poochigian though.
To say this is a book about gardening is like saying The Odyssey is a book about travel. Yes, there’s a garden in it, and much practical information and knowledge of plants, soil, weather and fauna, but that’s merely one strand to a book that is a veritable tapestry of interweaving narrative threads. Among them are the history of Morville, the history of gardens and gardening, the monastic hours and monasticism, life as a newcomer to a village in Shropshire, the turning of the seasons, the turning of the heavens, splinters of autobiography and shards, like shattered glass, of the lives of two parents who imprinted their lives and passions, for good and suffering, upon their daughter.
As an exercise in writing, it’s close to perfect, both in its command of language and in the weaving together of these different narrative threads into a single story. In its emotional impact, particularly in the ways that unthinking comments from parents can sink a soul, it’s devastating. No one reading The Morville Hours is ever likely to forget that passage when, slipped casually into conversation, Swift’s mother says that giving birth to her daughter ruined her life. But these fragments of soul glass are counterbalanced by the serenity of the hours of prayer, the cycle of the seasons and the labour, always renewed, always new, that is the garden itself.
It’s hard to believe but in the early decades of the 20th century there were regular public debates between four of the greatest writers of the era: HG Wells, Bernard Shaw, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. They would travel around the country, pitching up in church halls and town halls, and conduct public debates on the great issues of the day. Wells and Shaw argued for the progressive nostrums of the era, Chesterton and Belloc for Christianity and tradition.
What a gloriously challenging prospect that must have been – and how different from the dumbed-down discourse of our own time. Reading this collection of short stories by Wells reminded me of this peripatetic show of intellectual fireworks – and also taught me why Wells was a better writer than philosopher.
For Wells was, philosophically, an early example of progressive materialism, a subscriber to most of the most pernicious nostrums of his day, from eugenics to scientific racism, all under the guise of progress. Wells saw himself as an intellectual and these debates presented him as such.
But the stories show that his strongest intellectual faculty was his imagination, not his intellect. And, as such, this means that his stories are wiser than his philosophy. For his imagination went far beyond the material limitations of his philosophy, as well as undercutting and revealing its limitations. The Time Machine, not included here, with its invention of decadent Eloi and Morlocks, and the bleakest ending in fiction showed the limits of material hope better than Chesterton or Belloc could manage in debate. The stories here play with ideas and explore them imaginatively, achieving in the best of them a terrible, profound wisdom of vision.
That was the tragedy of Wells’ life: his imagination was the source of his vision but his intellect attempted to constrain it to the limits of his philosophy. His last work, the despairing Mind at the End of its Tether, showed his recognition of the futility of his intellectual enterprise. But his stories are better than his philosophy and many of the best are in this collection.
I think Susanna Clarke is the most interesting writer writing today. Her work prefigures and encapsulates the struggle to re-enchant a world drained of enchantment, and how that struggle starts in myth and folklore and ends, well, in a rediscovery of ancient, half-forgotten stories. But because of that journey, Clarke imbues the new old stories with some of the cold, star glitter of the tales of faerie and wizards that she first wrote about in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
This is a Christmas story, a slight tale in itself but one written with an exquisite command of language and turns of phrase that demand the reader pause and ponder before moving on. It’s the sort of story that bears reading and reading again, like Piranesi, her masterpiece. It combines some of the poignancy of Wilde’s fairy tales with the deep mysticism of place and nature that constitutes a deep aquifer of the whole idea of England and Englishness.
From what I have read, Clarke struggles with health problems. We are fortunate to have had the stories she has written but I hope very much that her health will allow her to write more in future. I, for one, am eager to see where she wanders.
The title isn’t strictly accurate; just as often people hear, smell, feel or sense angels as they see them. What’s fascinating is the range of experiences, the way they have affected people and how often they contradict traditional ideas of angels and how often they confirm those ideas. However, none of the experiences reported in here match the deep strangeness that the Bible reports of angels, where they can appear in human guise but equally can take the form of vast creatures covered in eyes and fiery wheels, also eye covered.
As a curious aside, the author of this book, Emma Heathcote James, went on to found a successful soap company, called the Little Soap Company. It’s not clear whether she has kept up her interest in angels.
These are three different books but I would urge you to read them all, one after another. It won’t take long; so far as text is concerned, you can read each book in less than an hour. But you will take longer because you will want to take time looking at and lingering over the exquisite line drawings that illustrate exactly how people in the past built a Roman city, and a medieval cathedral and castle.
I don’t think they are still in print but it really is worth hunting these down in second-hand bookshops. I think I learned more about classical and medieval architecture than from any other books – certainly so far as the practical aspects of building a city, a cathedral or a castle is concerned.
