Adventures in Bookland: The Cambridge Companion to Bede edited by Scott DeGregorio

Probably the definitive single volume looking at Bede, his life, work and influence. An array of scholars examine what we know of his, generally uneventful considering the turbulence of the times, life and place Bede in the context of those times, when the first heroic generation of missionaries to the pagan Anglo-Saxons had died and the church was decided what it was and what it would be. How could an institution founded by a man whose refusal to take up the sword in his own defence find resonance and a home among a people so devoted, at least in their upper echelons, to violence, as passion, past time and purpose. There is an interesting contrast with the Romans and Romanised peoples in southern Europe. The Empire had fielded a professional army (it continued to field a professional army in defence of its eastern iteration in Constantinople), allowing for a separation in the state and the people between the civilian and the military. Indeed, this contrast endured in Italy, so that the city states there, during their interminable wars, generally preferred to employ mercenaries, condottieri, rather than calling on the citizenry or the nobility to fight. But in the north, among the descendants of the tribesmen who had settled in France and Britain, the elite fought. Indeed, the nobleman, the knight, was defined as a man who fought, a warrior. How to find purchase in a society like that?

One way was for a heroic religion, one marked by feats of spiritual daring that matched the feats of physical heroism and endurance that called forth songs from the scops. Such had been the approach from many of the Irish monks, men more than a little mad with God, who would as soon cast themselves upon the waves for providence to take them where it would as they would stand to their necks in the Irish Sea, singing psalms and prayers. Such endurance called forth the admiration of warriors. But another way was the way of prayer and study and learning, the new magic of writing that allowed a man and his words to be present where he was not. This was the way of Bede, and doing it, he became the greatest scholar of his age: a remarkably acute and subtle mind. This book is a worthy companion to his study.

Adventures in Bookland: Hitler’s Home Front by Nathan Morley


Life during wartime – in Germany. Hitler’s Home Front is arranged year by year, taking the reader through World War II, briskly covering what it was like to live in Germany during the war. The writing switches nimbly from diary extracts and reminiscences to statistics and overviews, providing a series of snapshots of the war experience for the different layers of German society. The research is fascinating, from the Ferntrauung, weddings conducted when the groom was serving at the front, where he made his vows to his commanding officer and the bride made hers to the mayor, with her husband represented by a steel helmet on the seat beside her, through to the widespread use of government prescribed amphetamines, basically crystal meth, to keep soldiers and workers doing. Recommended for a view of what it was like on the other side.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Double Eagle by Dan Abnett


Is there any theatre of war the Dan Man can’t write? In Double Eagle he turns his pen to air warfare, to the struggle for air supremacy in the 40k universe, and he does his customary taut and expertly paced job. In fact, I propose that the Dan Man should set himself the Stanley Kubrick target. You know how Kubrick set out to make the best film in every genre of film making, from the SF of 2001: A Space Odyssey, through war movies (Full Metal Jacket) and even porn (Eyes Wide Shut), I therefore set the Dan Man the task of covering every theatre of war. So, by my reckoning – and I haven’t read everything he’s written since I actually have a life outside of reading – that means that the Dan Man needs to write books on submarine warfare and naval warfare (of the marine rather than the space variety) to make the full set. Then, it will truly be possible to acclaim Dan Abnett the Warmaster!

Adventures in Bookland: Doors in the Walls of the World by Peter Kreeft


This may be the best front cover I’ve ever seen: it certainly tells the story of what the book is about, possibly even better than the book does itself. The question is: are there doors or is this all there is? Peter Kreeft, a notably clear philosopher, uses this slim book more as a meditation than an exposition, visiting many of the themes he has explored in his previous books – in particular, that beauty is not subjective but the clearest presence in this world of that which lies beyond it. In that sense, the book is not rigorous. As an argument, it will convince no one who does not already think this way. But as a sign… that it might. For, sometimes, people know, without being able to put into words, that there is more, that they are being sold a dud when told to limit themselves to the cares and concerns of this world. They sense it, from the corner of the eye, from intimations of things glimpsed and sensed and felt. This book is about some of these intimations. If you have felt them, then you will know there are doors in the walls of the world. But of course, the only way to know for sure is to pass through the final door, and face death’s blank denial, and see then whatever we see.

Adventures in Bookland: The Provincial Letters by Blaise Pascal


It’s unusual to read a contentious book where one agrees wholly with the arguments the author is making, finds his irony biting and his jokes (written 350 years ago!) still funny, and yet remain glad that while the writer undoubtedly won the literary battle, he lost the theological war. For Blaise Pascal wrote in defence of the rigour of his spiritual brother at Port-Royal, the Jansenist school and convent that, following an Augustinian view of the depravity of human nature, produced as the sculptural expression of their theological view versions of the crucifix where Jesus’ arms are raised above his head, the hands almost touching, to indicate the narrow way to salvation and that few shall walk that narrow path. But, significantly, around the same time as Pascal was writing and the Jansenist controversy was at its height, St Mary Margaret Alacocque, also in France, had visions of Jesus in which he told her to spread the devotion to his sacred heart. The pictures and statues – perhaps the most typical of popular Catholicism – show Jesus with his arms spread wide, open to all. So while Blaise Pascal had by far the best of his argument with the lax-minded Jesuits and their tendency to write off sins – and by way of a side effect, inventing French lettres and paving the way for Montaigne – God answered personally against the Jansenist tendency to restrict the Divine Mercy. But then, God did speak to Blaise Pascal, in fire and light, and answered for him as well, in the Sacred Heart.

Adventures in Bookland: Europe’s Lost World by Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith


It’s there. Under the dark water. Beneath the cold surface. A lost Mesolithic world that once connected Britain to Europe and jutted far up into the North Sea. A low-lying land of rivers and marshes and shallow hills, with a great inland lake. Doggerland, it is rather unromantically called, after the Dogger Bank, which once would have been hills but are now fishing grounds. But unlike other lost lands, it seems to have left nothing at all behind in the way of folk memories, myths or legends. There are no tales of the North Sea flood, nor of the great wave that was unleashed by the Storegga Slide, no cuneiform tablets awaiting excavation that tell a northern version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The land vanished beneath the sea and took its history with it, into the silence there. This book is the, slightly technical, account of the archaeologists who are trying to bring it back from the dark and the surprising amount of detail they can find of the geography of Doggerland. A fascinating book, but probably best suited for those with a working knowledge of archaeology.

Adventures in Bookland: The Return of Christendom by Steve Turley

Growing up in the 1970s, I remember well the proposed doomsday scenarios that haunted the world then. Apart from the obvious fear of all-out thermonuclear war between Nato and the Warsaw Pact, there were confident predictions of a coming ice age and even more confident predictions of world wide famine as population outstripped food supply in a doomsday Malthusian scenario. None of them happened. So I remain somewhat sceptical of confident predictions about the future, even when the prediction is for something I would hope for, as in Steve Turley’s book. The point he is making is straightforward and one that has been taken up by quite a few demographers. To put it simply, religioius couples have significantly more children than non-religious couples, and children tend to follow the religioius persuasion of their parents. So, in a truly ironic example of Darwinian selection, according to this model the religious shall inherit the earth since the irreligious aren’t sufficiently invested in the non-personal future to produce the children that will affect it. The argument is sound, and is also reflected in what appears to be a normal shelf life of an officially atheistic culture of between 70 and 100 years. But as with all such arguments, it depends on current trends continuing on into the future, and… well, events, dear boy, events. Things don’t normally turn out the way we had predicted. So while I hope that Christnedom will return, I treat these predictions as nothing more than signs to a possible future.

Adventures in Bookland: Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne Du Maurier


Let’s be honest now: this is romantic nonsense. Beautifully written and well plotted with all Daphne Du Maurier’s gifts for bringing the Cornish countryside and coasts to vivid life on the page, but the story… Beautiful, headstrong woman caught in loveless marriage with upper-class boor (a marriage entered into on a passing whim), develops major-league crush on rakish (and for almost all the book unnamed) French pirate and then, probably, elopes with him at the end. It’s the female version of James Bond – a wish-fulfilment fantasy to fill a few empty hours.

Adventures in Bookland: In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood

Life deals out its cards skew whiff. Some people struggle, burdened with debts personal and afflictions public. Others get given the full house. Witness: Michael Wood. Not only was he blessed with the sorts of looks that historians, historically, were denied – compare him to Eric Hobsbawn for example – but Wood was also gifted the ability to write with a clarity and enthusiasm that matched his on-screen persona. In Search of the Trojan War is a good example: a scholarly account of the archaeological history of the search for Troy good enough, in its grasp of the sources, to stand comparison with the best specialist work, but Wood also writes it in a way that makes the technicalities accessible to the layman. But then of course, good Hector, prince of Troy and all round decent bloke, also realised, as he coughed out his life’s blood on the plains of Ilium with that peacock psychopath Achilles strutting victory above him, that life doesn’t play fair. Take advanatage of that: read this book.

Eric Hobsbawm
Michael Wood

Adventures in Bookland: Fools and Mortals by Bernard Cornwell


While it looks like a novel and reads like a novel, I can let prospective readers in on a secret: Fools and Mortals is not really a novel. It’s actually a paean, an encomium, a love lyric written by an old man who has fallen in love. Old men who fall in love are always fools, but sometimes that foolishness washes away the accreted knowledge of a lifetime to reveal a silver seam lying under all that conventional knowledge.

That is what has happened here. Bernard Cornwell, who is 75 now, ten years ago fell in love. He fell in love with the theatre, with that strange, uncertain magic that happens, sometimes, when people get up on a stage and tell a story to a group of strangers, uniting them all into a shared world. According to Cornwell’s afterword, he’s been acting with the Monomoy Theatre in Massachusetts for the last ten years and this book is the fruit of that extended love affair. While ostensibly about the travails of Richard Shakespeare, jobbing actor and younger brother of the slightly more famous William, it is really an encomium to the theatre and, in particular, to that group of actors, entrepeneurs, playwrights, theatre goers and nobility who, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries created modern theatre in London. While wrapped up in a story of theft and treachery, Fools and Mortals is really about the extraordinary set of circumstances and people that made this all possible, and it’s a celebration of a sort of miracle in plain sight: the creation of a play that works. Having a wife who works in theatre, as actress and voice teacher, I’ve got some second-hand insight into how remarkable the whole process is and how contingent. If not for a London audience large enough to support the theatre and thirsty for new plays, if not for Shakespeare, Burbage, Marlowe and Johnson and their ilk, there would not have been plays to sate that thirst, and if not for a nobility willing to sponsor and protect the theatres and theatre companies from the censors and puritans of the age, it would never have come together.

Fools and Mortals is a celebration of theatre, of this every day artistic and financial miracle, with a side order of story. The story is fun, but the play’s the thing.