Tag Archives: Christian writing

Australia’s greatest temperance novelist: Matilda Jane Evans, aka Maud Jeanne Franc

27 Sunday Oct 2013

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matilda-evans

Matilda Evans caught my attention when I was reading a history of Baptists in Australia. A brief profile talked of her significance as the first woman to have a novel published in South Australia (1859). In all, she published fourteen novels. She was a deaconness and married to a Baptist minister. I discovered a full-length biography of her had been published in 1994 – Our Own Matilda by Barbara Wall (Wakefield Press).

Alas, Matilda is a difficult biographical subject. Despite extensive research, Wall was only able to uncover a few letters written by her, and just one photograph. If she kept a diary, we do not have it. But even if she had kept one, I doubt Matilda could ever become a compelling biographical subject: Wall does her best to redeem her and the conventionality by which she lived and wrote, but can only do so much. A number of Matilda’s novels were temperance novels; all of them were favourites for Sunday School prizes, safe novels which inspired piety and respectable living. Of course, I’m missing Wall’s main point here: she takes to task the generations of male critics who have ignored or trivialised Matilda’s writing for these reasons. Wall insists – rightly – that the novels are fascinating social documents, providing insight into South Australian colonial life and the attitudes of her time. Yet from her own argument, Matilda’s writing will be of more interest to the historian than the literary critic.

The book is of interest to me for its insights into biographical method. What is the biographer to do when the subject does not reveal themselves? Wall attempts to fill the gaps by speculating on the basis of Matilda’s novels, drawing parallels to places and incidents to reconstruct Matilda’s likely experiences, fleshing out the bare facts provided by education records, obituaries and newspaper ads. It is a dangerous method, likely to be dismissed as invalid by some critics, but it seems fruitful and her suggestions reasonable.

Yet somehow, the analysis never quite brings Matilda and her world alive. As an example – and I probably place too much weight on death scenes – but for me they should usually be one of the stronger moments of the biography; there should be a way to convey some of the significance of a person’s life in their death, or at least to show how their death fitted their life. The death in this biography only shows the ordinariness of Matilda’s life and the lack of information about her:

She died on Friday, 22 October 1886, of peritonitis, and was buried on the following Sunday…

I’m sure the historical record can yield no more than this, so what more can I ask of the biographer? I’m not sure. But perhaps it could be juxtaposed with an analysis of how Matilda saw death in her novels. Perhaps something of the place of death in Victorian-era Australia. Perhaps some background on death by peritonitis at that time. Perhaps even some more speculation about the circumstances of her death, drawing on social histories of death. Perhaps none of this would work; I’m only trying to anticipate method when I come to write a biography of my own.

Matilda Evans is perhaps not so neglected as Wall fears – there is another book looking at her literature; a thesis written on her and two other S.A. women writers, and an entry for her in Australian Dictionary of Biography. Abebooks reveals that her books (which remained in print right up until the 1930s) are worth hundreds of dollars. Our Matilda itself is an excellent piece of research, and a good analysis of her life and literature, aware of the shortcomings of Matilda’s writings while open to their significance.

Some Thoughts on Alister McGrath’s Biography of C.S. Lewis

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

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I’ve just finished McGrath’s C.S. Lewis: A Life, a book in which  my interests in biography, theology and literature converge.
I’ve had an uneasy relationship with Lewis. I was brought up on The Chronicles of Narnia. The crude 1970s cartoon version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was the only video provided for children to watch at several church camps when I was young. For my eighth birthday, my parents bought me the set of books in a boxset (not a common thing; I didn’t own that many books as a child – it was always the libraries); they were a precious possession, and I enjoyed them a lot – although never quite as much as I perhaps felt I should. I went onto to read the Space trilogy as a teenager, but avoided his Christian writings, probably partly because of one over-zealous youth group leader who had only ever read C.S. Lewis and made him sound incredibly dull to me by steering every conversation back to him. Lewis was also just too obvious a choice for me with my dual interest in theology and literature. Yet a couple of years ago, I was blown away by the brilliance of The Great Divorce, one of the best books on eschatology I have ever read, and since then my interest in him has been strengthened.
McGrath’s research is excellent and he is insightful in telling the story of Lewis’s life. Yet his style is precisely wrong for his subject, and it is a failing which drags the book down for me. The problem is one of over-clarity, not only over-simple, pedestrian prose, but constant signposting of every transition (too many ‘to which we now turn’s at the end of each section) and repetitions which grow tiresome. It may well be an attempt to make the book as readable as possible, and it probably succeeds in doing that, but although McGrath writes of the poetry in Lewis’s writing and its beauty, there is little of it in this account of Lewis.
Lewis was long dead before I began reading him; his work comes to the present generations as an established whole. It was of so much value to learn of the development of each book chronologically, of how each book emerged from a particular period of Lewis’s life. The hodge-podge of Lewis I’ve had in my reading – from late works to early works and in between and back again – muddles the sense of a mind not fixed with one position but developing and changing. For example, it was interesting to learn of how his two books on suffering – The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed – were written at very different times of his life, one a theoretical apology, and the other an emotional account of his own reaction to his wife’s death.
I knew so little of Lewis’s life before reading this biography, and the complexities of it were gripping. I found myself wishing McGrath was just a little more interested in scandal, although he certainly presents the scandalous aspects in a plain-spoken way. Lewis had the strangest relationship with a wife-mother figure, Mrs Moore. I’m sure others have explored it in greater length, and McGrath gives an adequate account, but it is bizarre and seems to have been so crucial to the type of life he lived. McGrath presents Lewis’s eventual wife, Joy Davidman, as a conniving woman, and it is another strange story. McGrath minimises the attempts to get inside Lewis’s head, but I think he should have tried some more. One of the problems, no doubt, is the reticence Lewis would have shown in print about his unusual relationships with women.
Structurally, it all seems to be over so quickly, but that’s the inevitable experience of a biography which is not the size of a brick. Perhaps it was only a question of how engrossed I was, but the second half of his life seemed to be covered in too little detail, perhaps because McGrath’s attention shifted to Lewis’s published work.
Which brings me to a question of biographical method and structure. The book stalled for me in Part Three – ‘Narnia’. McGrath breaks off his narrative of Lewis’s life to offer a rather basic overview of the themes and significance of Narnia. It seems a contravention of the book’s own internal parameters. I think the book would be stronger as a biography if the discussion of Narnia was more deeply rooted in the biographical, even if that meant not saying things McGrath regards as important.
My complaints aside, McGrath has deepened my interest in Lewis and written a good popular-level biography. It would be an interesting exercise to compare the companion release, a more academic account of Lewis – but I’ll probably leave that to others.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, second reflections

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

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I don’t re-read many novels, but I felt compelled to re-read Gilead after reading its companion novel, Home. I gave it 8/10 in January last year, but this time, I have recorded it as a 10/10. (Marilynne may wish to put this on the back cover of future reprints, but given she has every second reviewer around the world saying it is a masterpiece, she may not need my commendation.) And indeed, I don’t feel able to add to the wonderful reviewing and criticism already written about Gilead. It is a beautiful novel about living, dying, race and America. And faith. Here are some quotes I took from it.

“When this old sanctuary is full of silence and prayer, every book Karl Barth will ever write would not be a feather in the scales against it from the point of view of profundity, and I would not believe in Barth’s own authenticity if I did not also believe he would know and recognize the truth of that, and honor it, too.” (p.197)

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. (p.236)

But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true. While I was at seminary I read every book he had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read, if I could put my hand on it and it wasn’t in German… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. (p.142)
– I found this particularly interesting. He’s reflecting on how his brother became an atheist while he carried on his father and grandfather’s business of being a preacher. Where does faith come from? Where does a worldview come from? To what extent is it a product of the books you read?

I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. 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. (p.104)

[Book Review] Home: Slow-burning and Wise

16 Monday Aug 2010

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HomeHome by Marilynne Robinson (2008)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Home is a novel about what happens after the prodigal son returns to his father’s house. The setting is the small American town of Gilead and the year is 1956. The father is the frail old Reverend Boughton and his prodigal son is Jack, the alcoholic youngest son who abandoned a girl with a baby in his youth and hasn’t been home in twenty years. The jealous older brother of Jesus’ parable is transformed into the youngest daughter of the family, Glory. She is not jealous, either, but loving to her troubled brother, having returned home after being used for money by a no good ‘fiance’ for years.

It is a slow moving, unadorned novel, and the impatient reader won’t enjoy it or even finish it. Its pleasures are subtle ones, exact prose and slow burning, wise drama as Jack and Glory look warily and wearily for redemption in their own ways and as their father’s health deteriorates.

The characters have a sense of space in their lives, and this gives me another strange pleasure. Jack and Glory find themselves in a quiet town, in a quiet home with no particular commitments anywhere. They live in a kind of long school holiday, filling in their time with gardening, board-games and cooking. They aren’t particularly happy, yet I find myself slightly envying them.

The novel’s relationship to Robinson’s previous novel, Gilead (2004), is significant. Gilead is set in the same town at the same time, narrated by Boughton’s oldest friend, the Reverend John Ames. Gilead is a tale of generations, as Ames looks back on his father and grandfather and forward to his young son. Home is also about family, but is horizontal – a single nuclear family and its aftermath, rather than generations. The overlapping of characters and events between the novels is fascinating. I’m going straight back to re-read Gilead while it’s all fresh in my head.

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[Thursday 3pm #14] The Christian novel : a brief history of falling short

02 Thursday Jul 2009

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This is an extract from a paper I gave this week; you can find the whole paper on my other blog.

It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story.
– N.T. Wright, “How can the Bible be authoritative?”

The kingdom novel is an elusive, mythical creature. We’re not even sure if we have any living specimens. We do have some prescriptions for what it should look like, and numerous rumours of sightings.

One of the problems is that most evangelicals who write novels write inferior popular fiction, romance, science fiction or thriller, usually promulgating popular piety. It’s rare to find any fiction on the shelves of Koorong with profound spirituality or reflecting a thoughtful theology. I’m not a fan of secular popular fiction; evangelical fiction is much the same only with even worse writing and bad theology.

Some theologians have used the novel form to get their message across, and we do at least get better theology from them. Brian McLaren wrote A New Kind of Christian and its two sequels; the theology is good, or at least I generally like it, but as a novel it’s appalling. It is dominated by slabs of dialogue which put ideas in characters’ mouths; the descriptive interruptions feel like filler. The plot, characterisation and prose are all uncompelling. It seems to work for a lot of people, at least for getting across some ideas in an accessible way, but it’s not the novel Wright is describing. Paul Wallis, who lives in Canberra, has done a better job in his recent publication, The New Monastic, which I’m reading at the moment.

There are some good literary novelists who have Christian faith, but they are usually much better writers than Christians. We might think of Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose work often reflected Christian concerns, but who struggled to even believe in God’s existence. He wrote what I regard as one of the great Christian novels, The Power and the Glory, following the fugitive whisky priest travelling illegally around a South American republic, administering the sacraments and comforting the people while trying to escape the police and struggling with his own sins. But Greene’s religious concerns faded from prominence the further he went into his career. A polemical biography (Michael Shelden’s The Man Within) I read paints his faith as a cynical veneer. Adultery seems to have been one of his lifelong hobbies and it’s also a preoccupation of his writing.

Adultery was also a preoccupation of the other great 20th century Christian novelist, John Updike (1932-2009). He wrote beautifully and his short story “The Christian Room-mates” is one of the best pieces of Christian literature I’ve read. He might best be described as a liberal Episcopalian who acknowledged the limits of theological liberalism and admired Barth and Kierkegaard. But his Christian themes, whether liberal or not, feel, in the end feel like the subset of a warm humanism. He is one of the greatest postwar American novelists, but he never wrote the sort of novel Wright was imagining.

Closer to home, we have Tim Winton (1960-), one of Australia’s most important novelists. He was brought up a fundamentalist in the Church of Christ, but as a teenager read John Yoder and Jim Wallis, who influenced him to a social justice faith. On the face of it, this is extremely promising. But if Yoder has shaped Winton’s writing, I struggle to find it in anything he’s published since 1992 when Cloudstreet came out. (I haven’t read his early work yet, which might be where I’m more likely to find it.)

Instead, faith in Winton’s writing is more of a subterranean mood. His writings are often described as ‘spiritual’ – the transformative experience of the boys surfing in Breath or the significance of the Swan River to the characters in Cloudstreet. In the Winter issue of Zadok Papers, Lisa Jacobson writes:

Winton’s writing is infused with his Christian faith, although he is not so much a Christian writer, as a Christian who writes. Dirt Music nevertheless reflects his spiritual worldview, and the novel is imbued with biblical language.

This ‘infusion’ is at the level of spirituality and symbolism, the suggestion of spiritual experience and perhaps even divine encounter in the consciousness of the individual. Jacobson goes on to say:

Winton’s work is steadfastly concerned with a faith swept clean of iconic paraphernalia. This aligns him closely with what Bonhoeffer has called a ‘religious imaginative life’ instead of any clear devotional theme. Rather it displays, as Vincent Buckley says of what constitutes religious writing, a ‘tremor undertow of feeling, indicating one pole toward which the temperament is driven by the facts of living.’

Perhaps in reaction to evangelical fiction, Jacobson and others seem glad that the Christianity in Winton’s fiction remains implicit and mystical. Winton’s achievements are significant, and we should be grateful that one of Australia’s greatest novelists writes out of a Christian orientation. Yet his writing only goes a little of the way toward what Wright is hoping for. What his work doesn’t have – or Updike’s or Greene’s – is a Christian community. I think the best kind of kingdom novel would depict a Christian community.

Appendix: Wright’s Great Christian novel: the best attempts I’ve read

1. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) A novel Barrack Obama lists as one of his favourites.

2. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940); also The Heart of the Matter (1948)

3. Victor Hugo Les Miserables (1862)
No novel is quoted more often in sermons and with good reason; it’s one of the most beautiful stories of redemption written.

4. John Updike, “The Christian Room-mates” [short story] (1964)
The cultural Protestantism and mild faith of a college student is unsettled by the impassioned Christian pacifist he is forced to share a room with.

5. Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (1991)

6. Fydor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
The novel most quoted by theologians, at least its famous ‘Grand Inquisitor’ parable.

7. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) and The Cosmic Trilogy (1938-1945)

8. Mike Riddell, The Insatiable Moon (1997)
The author is a New Zealand Baptist turned Catholic and his novel features a man who may be Jesus returned or may be crazy. Watch out for the new feature film based on it.

9. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

10. Morris West, The Last Confession

Books I haven’t read but should have

1. Madelaine L’Engle A Wrinkle In Time

2. The works of Charles Williams – A theologian and novelist much admired by C.S. Lewis; I have tried unsuccessfully to read several of his works.

3. The works of Rudy Wiebe – the most famous Mennonite novelist; I haven’t been able to get into his rather dense prose.

4. The works of Annie Dillard

[Thursday 3pm #12] Art that never dies?

18 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in death, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing

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I picture a different audience for this, my literary blog, than my theology blog. (Theology students, at least the ones at the library I work at, don’t read novels, except maybe Tolkien, to their great loss.) You, my imagined reader, are probably not a christian. In fact, you probably have a distaste for evangelicalism and for anyone who talks about the bible too much. There are good reasons for this. I am in sympathy with you. I have these two sides of me, that aren’t separate in my mind or soul, but are often separate socially – the literary world and the christian world.

But the two have to come together at the moment, because I’m writing a paper for the Newbigin Group (a theological discussion group) called ‘Beautiful Stories : writing novels for the kingdom’. In this paper, I have to use the framework for building for the kingdom laid out by Tom Wright in Surprised By Hope to talk about how my particular activity – writing – might be thought of as building for the kingdom.

Here’s a blurb on Wright’s book from the publisher:

Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus’s resurrection—the church cannot stop at “saving souls” but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God’s kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.

While you, my intelligent reader, might be most suspicious of Christians who believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, Wright uses the resurrection as the basis of Christian hope and action for justice, beauty and evangelism in the world. (You probably like the first two and not the third.) For Wright (and for me) God’s action in the world is not confined to the saving of some individual souls, whisked off to ‘heaven’ after death. Instead, God is at work redeeming, renewing the whole creation, which one day will culminate in an intervention when everything is finally set right.

You might remember weeks ago me quoting Julian Barnes piece on the fate of all writers:

For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. ‘Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?’ But ‘forgotten’ here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial – or, for that matter, too ponderous, too serious – for a later age. But truly forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point – it must logically happen – a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a writer’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. (Nothing to be frightened of : 225)

Yet the incredible claim that Wright makes is that not all art will pass away. For him, God has given us tasks to do here and now that are part of his/her ultimate plans. Part of the task artists have is to depict the beauty of creation – while taking seriously its woundedness and looking forward to its redemption. The picture he offers is of Christ’s resurrected body, still with the nail wounds in his hands – and not as something incidental to Christ, but as the means by which he is identified.

Wright doesn’t know how God will use art (or anything else) in his/her renewed heavens and earth. We have to do our bit, without yet seeing the masterplan. When the time comes, it will fit into place somehow.

A wonderful, comforting idea. But I can’t help thinking of the practicalities. It’s okay for me, writing literary fiction with claims to seriousness and meaningfulness. What about the genre writer writing another crime novel? Does their novel get forgotten or remembered?

Are novels transformed and redeemed themselves? Do they become what they should have been? Does God take their potential and fulfill it? (What would a novel look like edited by God? If the Bible is the book we have from him/her, God seems less interested in perfection and tidiness than we might expect.)

And who reads them? What form do they take? I hope it’s not anything like Borges’ Library of Babel, where very possible book, every combination of letters has been written; that is a kind of hell.

If you want to hear my paper, you’re welcome to come listen at Vose Seminary, 20 Hayman Rd Bentley on Monday 29 June at 7:30pm. Alternatively, stick around and I will be posting it here and on An Anabaptist in Perth.

Between you and me : a review

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Between you and me / By Amber Fresh (2009)

Let me tell you a secret: the last six years I’ve found it hard to enjoy poetry. Something changed in my brain sometime around 2003. But then there’s collections like this one that remind me how good poetry can be.

Amber is a Perth poet and this small collection evokes a certain scene in Perth so well, of poetry readings, of enduring a session at the Ocean Beach Hotel, of twenty and thirtysomething parties, of Coles carparks and of the inner suburbs.

Her poems have a casual, insightful humour which manages, paradoxically, to also be passionate and intense. Thus in ‘Casual as’:

While you were at the bar
trying to organise some
casual sex
I was in my room
writing a melancholy song for you
and drawing a comic about how we met

…

But that’s because
I didn’t know then
that you were at a bar
making other arrangements

That phrase ‘making other arrangements’ gets me every time I read it – such a brilliant piece of sarcasm and so terribly sad, using that rather old fashioned phrase to devastating effect.

These poems show an ability to express states of mind and stray, strange thoughts that I believed no-one else knew about it. Thus in ‘Did you do it’:

i hit myself in the face
to see what it would feel like

it felt like

did you do it?

Two poems deal in a fascinating way with faith; in “1 Corinthians 6:18”, the Holy Spirit is compared to ‘an X-men girl/ who turns boys to dust/ with a touch of her hand’. It’s an earnest, distinctive take on evangelical experience. In “Jesus is my homeboy”, the poet hears God tells her to take her doona to some people who will need it ‘on the corner of aberdeen and station street’. It’s a poem of quiet faith that doesn’t lose its sense of humour just because it’s talking about God.

The collection hangs together so well. I was left at the end feeling like I’d read a short novel, that I’d experienced a season in the poet’s life. It was a season that felt a bit like the film You and me and everyone we know, with that same quirky take on big questions, a bit like Leunig’s cartoons, and a bit like (I’m not sure why this came into my head) Leonard Cohen’s novel Favourite Game.

You can buy the book at Oxford Books in Leederville (I’m told it’s on the counter) or from Amber herself – amberinparis@hotmail.com. It costs around $15 plus postage.

Christianity as grace and mystery : Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

06 Friday Feb 2009

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Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)

In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Ames has lived in the Iowan town of Gilead all his life. It is a digressive testament, journal-like, added to day by day. It starts out in the past, focusing on the conflict between his pacifist father and his abolitionist grandfather, both ministers of the same church he now pastors. The second half focuses on the present return of his prodigal grandson, Jack Boughton, and Ames struggle to love Jack. In the end, love wins out and Jack confides his secret to Ames.

Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It was twenty-four years since her previous novel and it feels like the sort of novel a writer might spend decades on.

It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) It is a novel which shows a lot of love for people and the world, even in their ugliness and brokenness.

Ames’ grace contrasts with his grandfather’s ‘activism’ and his father’s ‘holiness’. Robinson is contrasting three streams of Christianity – what Richard Foster would call in Streams of Living Water the social justice, holiness and incarnational streams. For Ames’ grandfather, Christianity means justice at any cost, and he steals and shoots to achieve it. For Ames’ father, having no part in evil is what counts, and he leaves the church for a time during the war to sit with the pacifist Quakers.

Robinson privileges Ames’ type of Christianity – a moderate, grace-filled faith of small things. There’s less certainty and more mystery.

There are few novels that are both so Christian and so accomplished. There are evangelicals writing consciously Christian novels which are Christianised popular fiction. There are great writers (Updike and Greene, both now deceased; Winton) with Christian tendenancies or some measure of faith writing novels which have some Christian themes. But there are few writers writing great literature that are so drenched in a Christian worldview.

And yet having said that, I didn’t connect to the novel as much as I wanted to. I think it just comes down to my personal aesthetics of writing, that this isn’t the kind of book I like to read best. Perhaps it’s the lack of particular kind of narrative drive I miss. Perhaps I like less saintly narrators with more ambition and sin to their name.

Last year, Robinson published a follow-up novel from the perspective of Jack. I’m looking forward to reading it.


Reading Madeleine L’Engle’s From This Day Forward

29 Monday Dec 2008

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A memoir of her marriage. In several ways I’m enjoying it, but the first section is awkward. It is too anecdotal; the contrast with the immediacy and feeling of the second section is stark. She’s too removed from the events of the first section and she’s telling it like a grandmother to her grandchildren.

What’s more, she has this habit of defanging whatever she says, reducing it to nothing, explaining it away, leaving me saying ‘why’d you mention it in the first place?’. Eg:

Sometimes on my way home after a show I would be accosted by a drunken solider or sailor, but I would just smile and move out of the way and I never had any real problem. If someone started to be ugly, there was aways somebody else to say, “Is he bothering you?” (p. 36)

Dreadful writing. I believe in you, Madeleine, I believe you’re going to wipe away the bad memory of this sentence and ones like it.

Forms of Christian fiction #3 : the Christian character

13 Saturday Oct 2007

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In this form of Christian fiction, faith is explored through a Christian character. It is this form which most replicates the experience of faith for most believers. We may have insight into the psychology of faith, the type of thoughts it produces. We should also see the social effect of faith, the way the Christian character interacts with others.

Graham Greene’s novels The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory are excellent examples. In both, we have world-weary Catholics plagued by doubt and sin, but trying to follow Christ in their own way. There is a deep sadness and tragedy to both Scobie and the whisky priest; they are existential figures isolated from the rest of the world.

Maybe this is true of the place faith takes us to sometimes, especially if you are the last priest in Mexico on the run from the government. But I wish that a writer of Greene’s brilliance had given us a depiction of a faith that gives life and leads to connection with others. (It is true that the priest connects with the villagers he ministers the sacraments to, but in a distant priest-layperson way.)

The problem is that the individualism of both liberalism and evangelicalism left both types of Christians with the understanding that the primary mode of believing is as an individual – not as an individual-in-community. Christian characters are usually disconnected from other believers. Faith becomes a privatised, inner state of being.

What I think I’m really wishing for is a great novel about the church, which is the next form I’ll write about.