The Free Thinker

Book Review: The Princess and the Goblin

Audiobooks open up to me a realm of books I wouldn't usually read, including this children's story by George McDonald, written in 1872.  George McDonald was C.S. Lewis's guide through Heaven in The Great Divorce, the Virgil to his Dante if you will, and C.S. Lewis expresses gratitude to McDonald in his autobiography for his influence on his life.

The fantasy genre has evolved a lot since then and sometimes McDonald's world and story seem naive to people who have read J.R.R. Tolkien or even The Chronicles of Narnia. Though there is a dash of suspense and horror, one always feels invited to laugh at McDonald's goblins in a way one could hardly dream of laughing at the Nazgul. Nevertheless, the book has enough of the magically unexpected, the whimsically mysterious, the intimations of real-life meaning to stay interesting. 

Most interesting of all is the role of belief at several points in the story, and especially at one point, when-- at the risk of spoiling the plot-- a character is rescued from death trapped in a cave, by someone who, knowing nothing of the person's captivity, follows an invisible string first into the cave and to the exact spot, and then out of the cave.  The rescued person is ambivalent at first, then disbelieves in the existence of the invisible string.  Later, however, someone points out that he has no account of how the rescue could have occurred at all, so maybe he ought to believe the story he is told.

I think this parable contains a lesson both for those Joyless Moralist would call "modernists"-- or at least a subset of them, scientific-material atheist evolutionists etc., who dismiss religion; that must not be exactly what JM means since she considers me a modernist, but I suppose scientific materialists are a subset of what she calls modernists-- and for a certain type of conservative/traditionalist Christian inclined to be dismissive of modernity. 

It is a fact that we have all sorts of good things that mankind lacked a few centuries-- reliable food supplies in greatly increased quantity and quality and at far lower prices in labor terms, near-universal literacy, longer lifespans and cures for countless disease, far greater scientific and geographical knowledge, cheaper and more comfortable and abundant clothing, indoor climate control, better communication and transportation that allows us to communicate with distant relatives and tour the world's natural and man-made wonders-- and also that we are spared many horrors of the past-- we (in the West at least) no longer suffer high rates of infant and child mortality, no one lives in slavery or serfdom, there are no Inquisitions and very limited religious persecution, aristocracy and class and caste systems are gone and there is probably less economic inequality, child labor has been nearly eliminated, and war and violence are far less likely to affect most of our lives than in the past.

Why? Somehow, we've been led out of a dark cavern, but how, we don't really know. What we can see is (a) that this burst of progress occurred in the wake of Descartes and the Enlightenment, and (b) that it was primarily the work of a Christian civilization. The Christian civilization existed for centuries without achieving the breakthrough to economic growth and liberal democracy, so anyone who enjoys the benefits of modern civilization (anyone in America, for example) ought to be prepared to give some credit, at least tentatively, to the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment did not play a role, why did the breakthrough to modern economic growth and liberal democracy occur just then? On the other hand, it is precisely and uniquely in the Christian civilization of the West that the breakthrough occurred. The contribution of non-Christian regions of the world has, frankly, been minor (though European Jews contributed a lot) and those regions have had patchy success at best even in mimicking what the West has achieved.  Proper epistemic scruples, then, compel wise "modernists" and Christians each to give the other provisional credit for the amazing prosperity and freedom which a part of mankind has, in the past few generations, suddenly come to enjoy.

Leave it to me to spoil a charming children's story by drawing out lessons for historiosophy and geopolitics.

Book Review: A Bend in the River

I just finished reading V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River.  Wow.  This book is fascinating in several distinct ways.  First, it represents the point of view of a group of people statistically rather small, but important out of all proportion to their numbers, and whose existence confounds many of our assumptions about economics: the market-dominant minorities, the topic of Amy Chua's book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.  Chua shows how market-dominant minorities exist throughout most of the developing world: the Jews in Russia, the Chinese in southeast Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, Mexico, and many other places, and so on.  I went to Africa (Malawi) shortly after reading this book and was amazed at how prevalent they were.  In Malawi, every commercial operation larger than a street vendor seemed to be run by some kind of foreigner.  There were Indians, Chinese, Europeans, and Arabs.  They didn't live at all on the level of the people.  In the midst of one of the poorest countries in the world, I would say their standards of living were comparable to the West.  Only, to use economist-speak, the composition of their consumption bundles was very different.  I remember a place called the Four Seasons Nursery, run by some people that we met at the church.  It was beautiful.  A home and a business in one.  Plants and carved objects for sale.  A large piece of land located near the "City Center."  A cafe.  There were fountains.  What an idyll!  Servants.  One could deceive oneself into thinking they lived better than the very rich in the United States.  But there was another side to it.  To order a book from Amazon took weeks.  The community was small-- that was how we so easily became close enough to be their guests-- and there was little to do.  We stayed in a guesthouse where there was a pool, a beautiful lawn, and in the interior I remember an exquisite German model village.  But the reading material!  A few shelves of mediocre novels was all they had, and yet I seem to recall some hint in a conversation that made me guess that collection meant a lot to the South African housewife who lived there with her German husband... For after all, what else was there to do?  The children of these people went to private schools.  I saw the government schools myself-- no windows, no electricity, no desks and chairs, up to a hundred and more pupils in a classroom in the early grades before most of them dropped out-- and I certainly would have done the same.  Yet what a signal of being an aristocracy, what a way to set oneself apart!  A betrayal of a certain ethos of democracy.  And the insecurity.  Dogs trained to attack only black people.  Electrified barbed-wire fences around the compound.  It looks peaceful enough during the day; indeed, perhaps naively, an incautious foreigner, I even went on night walks through the shantytowns, along a nearby road under the moon, along hidden paths where you would sometimes stumble into a patch of oddly-placed corn...  But I felt they must know something I didn't.  The white people, or most of them, knew how to choose their words; they didn't speak of the Malawians with hatred, but they took precautions and set themselves apart.  I met Indians who were franker in their antipathy: "these people, they're animals... if you give them your little finger they'll bite off your arm."  Something like that.  Raised in the politically-correct West, expressions like this filled me with shock and horror, which I tried for politeness's sake to repress.  Yet the same people who spoke this way would treat me with a warmth and hospitality that in the West I might not feel entitled to expect even after years of acquaintance.  The color of my skin was, no doubt, a sufficient ticket to the company of those who got this knightly treatment, but if it were racism, then why Indians and whites get along so well, and why did old British-Africans send away for mail-order brides from Japan?  It was, rather civilization and all that comes with it, but it's hard to articulate what that is.  Education certainly, but not just that.

Anyway, I'm distorting Naipaul's book by bringing in too much of my own experience: it's not that Naipaul's observations were the same as mine, but rather that the novel fascinated me because I wanted to see the world from the perspective of these people.  Naipaul's character is a member of an Indian community from the east coast of Africa, people who had "their backs to Africa."  For most of the novel, Salim is living in a town at "a bend in the river" in a nameless African country (Francophone, and an exporter of copper), far from his community, and yet he is still part of his community.  He is not a runaway; he is following the ancestral trade of his community, running a shop.  In economist-speak, he has a form of human capital that the local people lack: book-keeping, organizing stock, looking for bargains.  Salim buys the shop from another member of his community who had left it behind after the town was burned in a rebellion; buys it cheap, without ever having seen it, by an oral contract that could hardly be enforced by any state; and this is a striking example of the kind of collective human capital that the community had.  Almost a miracle of enterprise, which however that community takes for granted; but at the same time, there is a mistrust, a narrowness of the bonds of affection.  Salim would never, for example, start a charity to help African children.  It is not the enterprise but the frustration that one feels.  The book is, by the way, a reminder that what really matters are people, not countries, and that the world invented in the 20th century where everyone has a state and a nationality is a moral distortion which has victims.

That's one of the fascinating things about the novel.  The other is the depiction of how an African state evolved from a post-colonial malaise-- a bit anarchic, but closer to the African past, even with an odd sort of innocence about it-- through an establishment of a new government and a fragile and transient economic boom, to a new and subtler horror of a presidential personality cult.  One sees the dream and the tragedy of the "Third World" unfold.  It would be an exaggeration to say that A Bend in the River is to Africa what 1984 or The Gulag Archipelago is to the Soviet Union, but it is a fine expose nonetheless.

Book Review: In the Country of Last Things

Dystopian novels are fictional in more than the usual sense.  With an ordinary realistic novel, non-existent but possible characters are woven into a world that is not recognizably different from the real one.  If one were not familiar with the conventions of the genre, it would be difficult to prove that the events depicted did not actually occur.  Paul Auster's recent novel The Brooklyn Follies is of this kind.  Did a retired insurance salesman live move to Brooklyn in 1999?  Did he have a nephew named Tom Wood, who dropped out of grad school at the University of Michigan after an abortive dissertation on Melville?  Did Tom work for a bookstore owner named Harry Brightman?  Did they travel in Vermont and stay at a place called The Chowder Inn?  Presumably not, but one would have to know Brooklyn, or the University of Michigan, or Vermont quite well to know the claims to be false.  By contrast, a reader knows that 1984, or Brave New World, or the Paul Auster novel I just read, In the Country of Last Things, are false, not because they're novels, but from general knowledge.  It is fiction not at the micro but at the macro level: not just the characters, but the worlds are imaginary. 

So what's the point?  These are not pleasant worlds (though about Brave New World there might be some disagreement: I'd guess that a few readers have thought the shallowness of Aldous Huxley's dystopia was a price worth paying for the unlimited sex).  1984, Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength are meant as warnings against a trend or ideology the author thought was a looming threat.  Orwell's is best, and Lewis's worst, partly because they were, respectively, most and least right about the threat, but each of the books is, in a way, a call to action: This is what awaits us if we go down that road! Don't be seduced by the clever reasonings, the inspiring phrases.  It's time to FIGHT, time to stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop'!  Significantly, each novel is set in the immediate or distant future.

Auster's novel doesn't feel like a call to action, and is not set in the future, but, seemingly, in an unnamed foreign country.  It is a country where no children are born-- in this Auster anticipated P.D. James's more acclaimed Children of Men-- and seemingly where no production takes place.  The government is nasty and senseless but not totalitarian; they seem to have no particular ideology; and the actions they do take-- building a sea wall against a supposed threat of invasion, which only keeps out the foreign charity ships; prohibiting burials because bodies need to be used as fuel-- seem to have motivations appropriate to a state.  "Imagine there's no countries... nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too."  "Imagine no possessions..."  There is money in "the country of last things," but no property: "housebreakers" can take people's homes at will. 

One sometimes feels that Auster's dystopia could be a lot of Third World countries at the time of writing, 1987-- fortunately, it's harder to think of places that are like it now-- but sometimes it also has a slightly supernatural, or metaphysical, flavor.  The narrator begins, for example, by talking about how the weather is so unpredictable.  That's not so different from a lot of normal places, and maybe they just notice it more because so many people are homeless and shoes and decent clothes are so hard to find... but it suggests, too, that this may be a depiction of hell.  Sometimes I was reminded of the depiction of hell at the beginning of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce.  Ultimately, Auster's purpose was in writing the book is still mysterious to me.  He doesn't seem to imply that contemporary America is headed this way.  It doesn't appear to be a call for, say, more foreign aid.  I don't think he's just saying "Be thankful for what you got," either, but that takeaway may be one way, at least, to turn this strange little book to one's profit.

America's Heroic Age

It's been a long time since I've read a book that affected me as much as Lonesome Dove, the 1985 cowboy saga by Larry McMurtry.  To try to convey it, I'll borrow from Alasdair MacIntyre, who writes a little about "heroic ages" in After Virtue:

In all those cultures, Greek, medieval or Renaissance, where moral thinking and action is structured according to some version of the scheme that I have called classical, the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories.  Where Christianity or Judaism or Islam have prevailed, biblical stories are as important as any other; and each culture of course has stories that are peculiarly its own; but every one of these cultures, Greek or Christian, also possesses a stock of stories which derive from and tell about its own vanished heroic age.  In sixth-century Athens the formal recitation of the Homeric poemswas established as a public ceremony; the poems themselves were substantially composed no later than the seventh-century, but they speak of a very much earlier time even than that.  In thirteenth-century Christian Iceland men wrote sagas about the events of the hundred years after A.D. 930, the period immediately before and immediately after the first coming of Christianity, when the old religion of the Norsemen still flourished.  In the twelfth century in the monastery of Clonmacnoise Irish monks wrote down in the Lebor na hUidre stories of Ulster heroes, some of whose language enables scholars to date them back to the eighth century, but whose plots are situated centuries before that in an era when Ireland was still pagan...  Such narratives provided the historical memory... of the societies in which they were finally written down.  More than that they provided a moral background to contemporary debate in classical societies, an account of a now-transcended or partly-transcended moral order whose beliefs and concepts were still partially influential, but which also provided an illuminating contrast to the present.  The understand of heroic society -- whether it ever existed or not -- is thus a necessary part of the understanding of classical society and of its successors. (After Virtue, 121)

What hit me as I was reading Lonesome Dove is that America's Wild West is the equivalent of Iceland's tenth century, of the Ireland of Cuchulainn, of the Homeric age in Greece and Troy.  The cowboy remains a romantic figure, the symbol of an ethos, the symbol of America to some.  Fifty years ago the Western was a popular film genre; nowadays it seems to have gone out of fashion, partly because Hollywood is dominated by a liberal value system that rejects the cowboy ethos, though that ethos still has a constituency in the heartland.  When I was a kid, the cartoon "Pecos Bill" was a family favorite.  Narrated by Robin Williams, it is a hilarious retelling of the old Western tall tale about a man who was raised by a wolf and grew up to be a Herculean cowboy who ended up lassoing a tornado (the two wrestled and dug the Grand Canyon).  Though Robin Williams pulls it off, it's hard to bring the old myths to life.  The Greeks could still half-believe in their gods and heroes, but America is too Christian and too scientific to regard a Pecos Bill or a Paul Bunyan as anything but a joke-- even if myth is sometimes the garment of truth. 

Lonesome Dove at once demystifies the Old West and brings the myth to life. 

Book Review: The Brooklyn Follies

I just finished listening to The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster.  There are a few distractions associated with the fact that it's by, and has the flavor of, a liberal New York atheist Jew.  Barbs about the 2000 election are just weird, but some of what seem to be digs at heartland Christianity are more substantive. And certainly someone with, say, traditional Catholic or Orthodox views on sex will not feel at home with all the homosexuality and, to a lesser extent, casual sex. This is not a major complaint, but I don't think it would hurt if novelists tried to hold themselves to more conservative standards. Auster obviously reveres lots of great writers from the past. If they didn't fill their novels with that stuff, why does he have to?

At bottom, though, the book's themes are wholesome: family, the ability of life to renew itself through hardships and setbacks, love.  The plotline is full of surprises, of whimsical twists and turns so that it is never dull.  Auster manages to pack in enough variety of experiences and impressions, with a thread of wacky adventure, that I found myself surprised that I couldn't accuse him of lack of realism (except possibly the chapter about the Reverend Bob).  I would sometimes think Is the world really such an interesting place? Well, yes, it probably is!  And yet the characters are really pretty ordinary people.  It's an uplifting novel-- the narrator (who may or may not be the main character, it's hard to say) goes from weariness of life to loving it-- without it being at all maudlin about it.

This may be the most recent novel I've ever read in my life.  It is bookended by the 9/11 attacks.

Friends' Last Parting

From War and Peace.  Prince Andrei, on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, where he will be mortally wounded:

“Ah, my dear boy, life has been a bitter thing for me of late. I see that I have come to understand too much. And it is not good for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. … Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added. “But you are getting sleepy and it’s time I was in bed too. Go back to Gorky,” said Prince Andrey suddenly.

“Oh no!” answered Pierre, gazing with eyes full of scared sympathy at Prince Andrey.

“You must be off; before a battle one needs to get a good sleep,” repeated Prince Andrey.

For Andrei, life is embittered when his betrothed, Natasha Rostov, betrays him, falling briefly for the hedonist seducer Anatol Kuragin.  Andrei is of a brooding yet noble disposition; Pierre, warm-hearted and affectionate, though credulous and weak; it is a friendship of opposites.  If I remember the novel correctly, they never see each other again.  "It is not good to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" is one of Tolstoy's brilliant moments, when he seems to sum up a whole life in one heartbreaking phrase.

UPDATE: More, from after Prince Andrei is wounded on the field of Borodino:

The doctor bent close down over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he made a sign to some one. And the excruciating pain inside his stomach made Prince Andrey lose consciousness...

After the agony he had passed through, Prince Andrey felt a blissful peace, such as he had not known for very long. All the best and happiest moments of his life, especially his earliest childhood, when he had been undressed and put to bed, when his nurse had sung lullabies over him, when, burying his head in the pillows, he had felt happy in the mere consciousness of life, rose before his imagination, not like the past even, but as though it were the actual present...

“My God! How’s this? Why is he here?” Prince Andrey wondered.

         

In the miserable, sobbing, abject creature, whose leg had just been cut off, he recognised Anatole Kuragin. [Anatol was the man who tried to elope with Prince Andrei's betrothed, Natasha, ruining Andrei's happiness.] It was Anatole they were holding up in their arms and offering a glass of water, the edge of which he could not catch with his trembling, swollen lips. Anatole drew a sobbing, convulsive breath. “Yes, it is he; yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully bound up with me,” thought Prince Andrey, with no clear understanding yet of what was before him. “What is the connection between that man and my childhood, my life?” he asked himself, unable to find the clue. And all at once a new, unexpected memory from that childlike world of purity and love rose up before Prince Andrey. He remembered Natasha, as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and slender arms, and her frightened, happy face, ready for ecstatic enjoyment, and a love and tenderness awoke in his heart for her stronger and more loving than ever. He recalled now the bond that existed between him and this man, who was looking vaguely at him through the tears that filled his swollen eyes. Prince Andrey remembered everything, and a passionate pity and love for that suffering man filled his happy heart.

         

Prince Andrey could restrain himself no more and wept tears of love and tenderness over his fellow- men, over himself, and over their errors and his own. “Sympathy, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies; yes, the love that God preached upon earth, that Marie [Andrei's Christian sister] sought to teach me, and I did not understand, that is why I am sorry to part with life, that is what was left me if I had lived. But now it is too late. I know that!”

I remember that the first time I read War and Peace, I wanted to find the takeaway, as it were.  It eluded me, because each of the two philosophically-inclined heroes, Pierre and Andrei, seem to take away quite different lessons, even if both of them are in a sense Christian.  Is it realistic?  Are people's lives punctuated by these moments of emotional-philosophical insight, where chains of thought combine with circumstances to transform the soul in a moment, to give it a new outlook and new purposes?

Anyway, it's a brilliant novel.

Sorry for the hiatus.  I'm in San Diego visiting family and haven't followed my normal routine.  But I just wrote Chapter 4 of my novel, in case anyone's interested.  Here's an excerpt:

"Checkmate," said Lionel.

I knocked over my king. "Yup...  Wow...  You're better than you used to be."

"I think harder than I used to.  I'm more careful.  I don't let my desires get the better of me.  I think it's habits of minds I picked up as a businessman."

We were silent for a while.  The neighborhood was asleep.  Behind the row of houses opposite was the orange glow of a few streetlamps. Overhead, a full moon shone halfway up the sky.  The wind rustled in the leaves.

"Mike, can I ask you something?" said Lionel.

"Sure, go ahead."

He waited for a while and looked at me.

"Do you believe in God?"

This is where the novel gets theological.  I guess I get my idea that theology belongs in a novel from the Russians.  The justification for that, I guess, is that belief and unbelief in God has to do with more than arguments, it has a context of character and life.

Another Chapter

Here's Chapter 3 of my novel.  So far I have at least one assiduous reader; she keeps requesting the next chapter.  I have no idea whether my style is enjoyable or irritating.  There is a lot of story in this novel-- indeed, this chapter could almost be a novel in itself; sometimes there is a lot of story in a single paragraph.  I wonder if the style comes across as telegraphic at times.  But I have no idea.  At the least, I hope to get the storyline down.  My plan was for the novel as a whole to run to about 12 chapters, give or take a couple, so I'm a significant part of the way there, though well short of the halfway mark.

"Jolly Autumn"

To Autumn by William Blake (in honor of the first day of fall)

O Autumn, laden   with fruit, and stainèd
  With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
  Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
  And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
  And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
  Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

`The narrow bud   opens her beauties to
  The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
  Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
  Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
  Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
  And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

`The spirits of   the air live on the smells
  Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
  The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
  Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
  Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
  Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

I love that image of "Jolly Autumn" singing about all the seasons.  We don't just see what he looks like, we see what the world looks like to him.

Review: Across the River and Into the Trees

Hemingway's late novel Across the River and Into the Trees calls to mind the phrase "gone to seed."  As a dandelion losing its fluff, or a spawning salmon, is still recognizably itself, yet it has a look of being spent-- this novel (which I recently finished listening to) is Hemingway gone to seed.  An old soldier in the US Army, his health failing, is spending the last days of his life in Venice, where he is in a love affair with a 19-year-old countess.  A doomed love, for he is about to die.  It's not morbid, not a meditation on death.  It's a meditation on life, and death looming in the background brings life into sharp relief. 

The trouble is that that's all that happens.  Chapter after chapter, the conversation, the old war-stories, the scenes from the city.  No suspense.  No plot, really.  And Hemingway, or rather, Hemingway's philosophy, is not good enough to make a plotless novel compelling.

The narrative pace of Chapter 2 of my novel is much faster.  I think I'll try naming chapters.  Chapter 1 will be called "The Birthday Party."  Chapter 2 is "Youth."  If you haven't read it, here's the Prologue.  In a way, the Prologue and Chapter 1, though important, are scene-setting.  In Chapter 2 the story really begins.