Saturday

Ian McEwan

There has to be more to life than merely saving lives.

Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in--you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto--think small.

And it's at this point he remembers the source of his vague sense of shame or embarrassment: his readiness to be persuaded that the world has changed beyond recall, that harmless streets like this and the tolerant life they embody can be destroyed by the new enemy--well-organized, tentacular, full of hatred and focused zeal...The world has not fundamentally changed.

This is the first book I have read by McEwan and it will be my hopefully be my last. I was captured by the middle quote above about thinking small--the idea intrigued me, but Saturday is far too big in its dusty boldness to be concerned about anything small. McEwan's writing is good enough, and the book flows wonderfully well with moments where you will be flipping pages faster than philosophical quips go through the main character's mind--which is fast.
I almost felt this was a tired attempt at coming to terms with all the baggage we seem to have developed for ourselves in our modern age--McEwan fills pages with interesting and witty ponderings on such topics as the war in Iraq, terrorism, materialism, and even a little bit of poverty and socialism. But I never felt that McEwan believed there to be any answer hidden behind all this. He clearly wants there to be an answer, but he simply cannot get beyond the wonderful sense of melancholy his jaded view offers up. There are moments where he shamelessly indulges in deep fits of self-loathing mixed with self-pity--afterall we are such a screwed up world, it is almost dramatic. McEwan, like the vast swath of modern western humanity lusts deeply after anything great. Give us great accomplishments, great good, great sadness, great tragedy, give us great bad even, only do not for the love of life, give us normalcy.
McEwan seemed to be writing a novel about the normal lives of people who think about the same things you and I do, but he couldn't help make the father a philosophical neurosurgeon parent to a famous and young poet daughter and an equally famous and young blues musician son. Did I mention their grandfather was a distinguished and cantankerous poet himself? Aiming for normalcy in thought, McEwan couldn't resist grandeur in fact.
But for all that, McEwan still had his brilliant moments. Such comments as: "Only at work is he single-minded; at leisure, he's too impatient" and "For the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack" are so perfect--they were the deciding factor in whether or not I wrote about him here.
Saturday pissed me off. Maybe an older mind would recognize the weariness in McEwan's voice, I confused it with an exuberant attempt to imitate that dark world-worn experience which is so in vogue--and which also happens to be a lie.

Jesus the Heretic

Conrad Noel

The commonwealth of God’s dreams and our desires was some day really to come to us all here, and we must be impatient to bring it to pass. If we waited complacently until we departed this life, it was unlikely that we should be fit to inherit it hereafter, and especially unlikely if we were comfortably off, and not extremely uncomfortable and impatient about the misfortune of the workers for which our class was largely responsible.

I am not very knowledgeable of church history, but reading Jesus the Heretic has inspired me to learn much more. Noel discusses many aspects of the early church (basically everything from the very beginning when Peter was still alive to the split of the Reformation), and in doing so he raises many questions about the changes the church has gone through and the current state it is in. While he is very optimistic, he points his finger at many a damning characteristic. For example he briefly discusses the change in the church's attitude towards interest--something which is difficult for modern day Christians to discuss, seeing as our economy functions off of this concept. Originally and for a long time after that, the church viewed taking interest on a loan as mortal sin. Noel posits that the only reason the church changed its view was out of selfishness. Not something many of us would want to hear.
He also gives quite a bit of space to the idea of socialism (as it existed in the 1930s) and how he feels it to be particularly compatible with Christianity. I have some issues with how he argues, but there is a certain urgency in his argument especially with concern to the poor and poverty. He has a defensible, if radical (by our standards) view on what the Kingdom of God truly means and how we as Christians enact it right now.
There is a large portion of the book, somewhere in the middle, that is devoted to issues specifically pertinent to his pre-WWII world. But these chapters still hold interest for current issues since he philosophizes quite a bit about things like pacifism and programs for peace. And I will warn, some of his ideas sound wacky: he has a slightly different view of the Soviet Union than we who have seen it fall apart and been influenced heavily by such books as The Gulag Archipelago, and Noel also submits an idea for "air mines" which will make you laugh. But I don't feel that these moments of what might be called foolishness are any more serious than our own inability to predict the future. Give Noel some grace for still being human, he's a good deal more human than many of the philosophers and theorists we have today.
In Jesus the Heretic there is also much to do with relations between the Anglican and Catholic churches and some talk of how to resolve their differences and once more unite the churches. Noel's optimism and enthusiasm for Christian unity is something that will rub off on you. He says, "The divisions of Christendom cause great scandal to the world, and the reunion of the Church is urgent" but he is under no illusions about faults of Roman Catholicism--particularly when it concerns the power of the pope and what he sees as too-much-Romanism in the Catholic church. He will give you some moments for pause in thinking of Roman Catholic tradition.
But my favorite thought from the book was this; speaking of the Kingdom of God, Noel says, "It is to be sought not only beyond death but upon this earth, and its essential property is social righteousness." We haven't any excuse to be sitting around waiting for the Second Coming, we're supposed to be doing everything humanly possible to prepare this place and maybe more.

The Long Walk

Slavomir Rawicz

When I first heard about this book, I could not believe it. When I read it, I had no difficulty believing it--but only because it is told so bluntly. Someone told me of this story about a Polish political prisoner in Russia right before World War II broke out. The man, Slavomir Rawicz, with five other friends and one tag along walks his way out of Northern Siberia all the way to India.
Think on this for a while.
They leave the prison camp in the middle of winter because it is the only time they have to escape. They are already malnourished and suffering from the heavy labor they have been working at. They are ill-equipped--I'm sorry this is an understatement--they have nothing. Only small bits of food, horrible clothing, in short, they should all have died.
But they don't.
Rawicz retells his story of marching through the snowy Siberian forests, along lake Baikal, into Outer Mongolia, across the Gobi desert, into the high Himalayan plateau and finally through the Himalaya themselves to India. By far the most incredible part of the story is their endurance in the Gobi desert. Talk about hell...
But Rawicz has such a matter-of-fact voice in relating his story, you would think he were doing nothing more adventurous than going for a hike or maybe just talking a walk in the neighborhood park. The man is flirting with death, going for weeks without food, days without water, suffering the worst the elements have to cast down on him, and he simply says they kept walking. The quiet title does justice to this book.
On a different note, there has been some controversy as to the authenticity of the tale, which Rawicz vows to be a truthful account of personal events. Several famous mountain climbers have commented on the impossibility of these escapees' feat as well as the fact that the amount of time given for certain portions of the journey are simply impossible. And the little bit about the yetis in the Himalaya is of course bound to spark criticism. Damn people don't understand that the Yeti is real...
But do not let this last little disclaimer taint the book for you. Whatever the case, Rawicz is a man to be admired.

Madame Bovary

Gustav Flaubert

No matter: she wasn’t happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust? But why, if somewhere there existed a strong and handsome being—a man of valor, sublime in passion and refinement, with a poet’s heart and an angel’s shape, a man like a lyre with strings of bronze, intoning elegiac epithalamiums to the heavens—why mightn’t she have the luck to meet him? Ah, fine chance! Besides nothing was worth looking for: everything was a lie! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse; every pleasure, its own surfeit; and the sweetest of kisses left on one’s lips but a vain longing for fuller delight.

There isn’t a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn’t thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary’s heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

If a man were to rewrite Don Quixote, and this man were French and alive some 500 years later, he probably would have come up with something very much like Madame Bovary. Eyes that are always seeing a dreamworld, hearts which are always grasping after the only thing which is truly unattainable--unattainability itself: this is the stuff which composes both novels.
I'm tempted to start some sermon-like thing about never being content and the modern disease--something that would go on for paragraphs about always wanting what we do not have only because it has the magical property of not being ours. But I am not sure I wouldn't be indulging in a little of the thing I'm criticizing.
If you like a story which is mostly depressing, Madame Bovary is the thing for you. There surely is not much to redeem any of the characters, save perhaps the hope of the blind man who Flaubert describes with such clinical relish. The story begins with such happiness, maybe even joy, but it does not take one long to realize that the beginning was the high point--from here on out it's a downward spiral.
As you read about the adulterous Madame Bovary's slide into complete betrayal of her husband and child, you will be surprised by very little--only if you step back and think will you notice how terrifyingly smooth is her slide. She moves from pleasant young wife to seasoned woman of the world to suicidal slut without some violent action or dramatic event shaking her off her placid course. It is as simple as being alive.
I wonder if Flaubert shouldn't have ended with some warning such as: Beware! This could be you! But at the same time, the novel is about much more than that. Though I neglected him above, I wonder if Charles Bovary is not a very hopeful character indeed. Sure his life is ruined, he is cuckolded, betrayed, bankrupted, broken, driven to madness, and finally killed by his wife, but how wonderfully he deals with it all. Most of the time he is oblivious--and though it may seem this way, it is not because of a lack of love. He loves his wife to a fault; he loves her as a goddess rather than a human, but his love is entirely human. His adoration of her while she lives, his sorrow while she dies, his anger when he finds she has betrayed him--these are all passions any heart is capable of, although most characters in novels fail to embody them.

De Profundis

Oscar Wilde

It seems a very dangerous idea. It is—all great ideas are dangerous.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation for the extraordinary amount of suffering there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

When I began this book, it was mentioned to me that it many deep things in it, things to ruminate upon for hours years. When I was halfway through, I scratched my head because I had not really seen anything that was worth thinking about. I thought perhaps I was not looking hard enough or in the right way.
But there is no denying that the majority of this letter--it is really one long letter to Wilde's former friend and lover--is a very personal complaint. It made me more than uncomfortable, as if I were witnessing some domestic scene which would have been best acted out behind closed doors. There is something very personal about this letter, personal enough to wonder why you are reading it.
There is a story about this letter which adds much to its understanding. First, you would do well to acquaint yourself with the circumstances of Wilde's imprisonment and the scandal surrounding it, but that is your job. I read that when Wilde wrote this in prison, he was only allowed one sheet of paper at a time. He composed the entire 80-plus printed pages letter being only able to write one page at a time. When you read it you will notice how smoothly it flows and how he makes references to things which he has already said. I heard that he never saw the entire letter together. Wow.
But just as I was tiring of his seemingly endless list of complaints against his friend--who to judge from this letter alone was a genuinely selfish fiend--I found a gem amongst all the dreary if eloquent fluff. The only problem is I still cannot tell whether this gem is real or spurious.
He launches, seemingly for no reason, into a sermon about Christ which points out more aspects of Christ and Christianity than I have seen in one place in a long time. I think part of what was so revolutionary for me was that he seems to be an agnostic and yet has a very deep faith in Christ. Understand that all I say here comes only from the understanding I gained of Wilde from this work. I am not relying on anything else I know about his life, nor any of his other works that I have read.
This sermon has such amazing statements as the one on love above, several on poverty, and this:
"But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection." I do not understand this statement. It is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of the sermon on a whole. The other reason is that he seems to move from this sermon back into another lengthy complaint against his friend. I could not quite justify his complaints against his friend with this sermon.
But there are things here which will refine you if they do not break you. So persevere through all of Wilde's sadness and outrage, but be careful--don't let your opinion of him disarm you, his words still carry heavy weights.

The Decay of Lying

Oscar Wilde

Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterizes modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

Wilde's small dialog on the title's subject is what you would expect--a very witty and intellectually stimulating conversation on the nature of art. Actually, it should probably be Art. But if you take some time with it, I think there is more going on than the above quotes imply. First of all, Wilde was cagey enough to not put the most damning words in his own mouth. He invents a dialog in which he could just as easily be the unwitting man who does not understand this idea of lying as the liar himself. This is the first warning sign: when an author is unwilling to let you know where he stands, be careful lest you believe what he says.
But these warnings are to be intensified when we are dealing with such a subject as lying. It is the same case with Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost, he is the deceiver, so when we hear him talk we have to wonder if he has stopped deceiving yet. So with the brilliant argument composed by Vivian in Wilde's dialog. We have to wonder: if a man is in such admiration of lying and liars would he have any qualms about lying for persuasive purposes?
These questions in our minds, the Decay of Lying is an adventure. I have only read it once, I don't think I got half as much out of it as I will when I read it again. It purports to give us a logical argument for deceit and yet there were times when even Wilde did not sound as if he believed the words he was giving to his characters. It was difficult at times as well since Wilde referred heavily to his contemporaries--some of whom have been buried by the drifting sands of time.
If you feel like a close encounter with very heavy but deft sarcasm and a good deal of cynicism, I would refer you to this little piece. If not, you might read it anyway, but it won't make you very happy--unless it converts you.

Pastures of Heaven

John Steinbeck

When they saw it was a beautiful baby, they did not know what to say. Those feminine exclamations of delight designed to reassure young mothers that the horrible reptilian creatures in their arms are human and will not grow up to be monstrosities, lost their meaning.

"Helen, every man must some time or other want to beat a woman. I think I'm a mild man, but right now I want to beat your face with my fists." He looked into her dark eyes and saw that he had only put a new tragedy upon her, had only given her a new situation to endure.

The people of the valley told many stories about Junius. Sometimes they hated him with the loathing busy people have for lazy ones, and sometimes they envied his laziness; but often they pitied him because he blundered so. No one in the valley ever realized that he was happy.

Once again, I am in awe. There are times when the thing you read is no longer a set of black lines on white page, no longer words and symbols of images far away, no longer even vivid pictures of good things going on right before you; instead the words become a mirror into your own self--a picture of your heart which only you would have recognized in the first place. Steinbeck has an uncanny knack for catching what is in your heart exactly and then sending characters out dancing before you, clothed in your deepest being. It can be startling, but it always makes you surge forward with the recognition of yourself.
Pastures of Heaven is like some less frolicking version of Tortilla Flats and Cannery Row. Yet, it is by no means dark. The word I think which summarizes it best would be solemn. With Steinbeck's usual attachment to the earth and its hearty biology (which no human is free from) is especially present. And as he tells the half melancholy, half joyous stories of the inhabitants of this blessed valley, you cannot help but walk beside the characters.
There are many memorable persons who haunt this book. Every chapter, though linked tightly to all the others, is the story of a separate family in the valley. And every family has its separate burdens, desires, dreams and struggles. I cannot do justice to all, or even one, but cannot help but mention the chapter on Junius and his son. I have never seen a more idyllic portrait painted of poverty and wisdom. While I am almost sure such an existence could never be, Steinbeck has me doubting my certainty.
There is a deep meaning in this tale which I do not yet understand. I think I could just barely smell it, see its shadow coming around the corner. There is something about being content, something about peace, something about living with the world. And it is strange that it takes words of heaven to speak of this. Heaven is what it is. As long as we are refining it, molding it, shaping it to be ours, we will not ever reach it.

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles

Port laughed abruptly. "And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

And Port had said: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that."

I read The Sheltering Sky because a professor recommended it as one of the best books of this century. I cannot say that I agree with this professor. However, give me fifty years and I may be brought round to his point of view. The Sheltering Sky is a very tired book. Had it been only this, I might have had much more respect for it. Instead, it grows frantic in its exhaustion and in my mind spoils it all.
Bowles writes well and he notes a good deal about life which is often felt but rarely said. The book reads fairly smoothly and is believable...something you will no doubt be surprised at by the end. But there is also something very dirty about it. I cannot put my finger on it, but Bowles is too disgusted with life to remark the disgusting aspects of it. He tries, I think. There are many disgusting scenes, many dark and revolting thoughts in his characters minds, but Bowles the author is too present in these thoughts. I do not mean to say that he peaks out from behind his characters, like an actor breaking character in the middle of a play; instead it's something like a play in which all the actors have the same mannerisms and give away the fact that there is really only one actor up there.
And I could not bring myself to accept the ending. Without spoiling it, it was too outrageous to believe. I enjoy outrageousness in stories, but Bowles is too caught up in disliking it to allow for the amount in his story.
There is a large portion of The Sheltering Sky though which I do not believe I am qualified to address: love. More than anything, I got the feeling that this book was about love and the contortions people go through in its name.

The Wayward Bus

John Steinbeck

Back in the bus he had felt, in anticipation, a bursting orgasmic delight of freedom. But it was not so. He felt miserable. His shoulders ached, and now that he was relaxed and stretched out he wasn't sleepy. He wondered, "Won't I ever be happy? Isn't there anything to do?" He tried to remember old times when it seemed to him that he was happy, when he had felt pure joy, and little pictures came into his mind. There was a very early morning with chill air and the sun was coming up behind the mountains and in a muddy road little gray birds were hopping. There wasn't any reason for joy, but it had been there.

And another. It was evening and a shining horse was rubbing his lovely neck on a fence and the quail were calling and there was a sound of dropping water somewhere. his breath came short with excitement just remembering it.
And another. He road in an old cart with a girl cousin. She was older than he--he couldn't remember what she looked like. The horse shied at a piece of paper and she fell against him, and to right herself she put out her hand and touched his leg, and delight bloomed in his stomach and his brain ached with delight.
And another. Standing at midnight in a great, dim cathedral with a sharp, barbaric smell of copal smarting his nose. He held a skinny little candle with a white silk bow tied about it halfway up. And like a dream, the sweet murmur of the mass came from far away at the high altar and the drowsy loveliness drew down over him.

I find that when I read Steinbeck, I tend to quote large chunks of him. This is well though, for if anyone were ever worth quoting it is this man who knows so well the human heart. Perhaps the one thing which keeps drawing me back to Steinbeck is this ominous feeling I get during certain descriptions of his--I feel as if he were described my inmost soul, those feelings that you think are yours and yours alone which no one else ever sees. Steinbeck knew his own heart well enough to capture simply and accurately on paper the feelings, the great wellings of emotion that every person is subject too.
The Wayward Bus is less well known than other books he has written but still deserves acclaim. It operates off such a simple and beautiful plot, one would have thought it never needed telling--indeed many of the stories Steinbeck tells never actually need or even deserve telling; it is the manner in which he goes about telling them that makes essential stories about life--there is a small bus station in the middle of a large valley of farmland. Few characters mingle here and there is the daily run which the bus driver must make down to the town. Who would have imagined such a story could become an intriguing, gripping, even startling tale?
Reading The Wayward Bus is like shoving your hands deep into moist dirt and pulling up handfuls of the stuff to let it crumble away and be ground into your fingers. Steinbeck is one of the few authors of the twentieth century who has not forgotten that he is dust and to dust he shall return. Steinbeck has a more intricate link with the soil, the leaves and bugs than any other writer I have read. It shows in his writing--his characters are often more primeval than we find in our day.
The Wayward Bus is a quick read and it will be pleasant. It can be a long read and teach you more than pleasantries. Be careful though, Steinbeck might turn you into a dryiad or a fawn, or worse, a man who can feel the dirt and smell it and take joy in this.