Phil Rickman, Charles Williams, and Powers of Evil

Phil Rickman, the British author, died on 29 October 2024 and the Phil Rickman Appreciation Group on Facebook suggested that people read his novel December during the month of December as a kind of memorial tribute to him.

I started rereading it. I first read it about 3 years ago, and found it a rather difficult read -- see my review here. This time I read it more slowly. It is a complex book, five parts with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Don't skip the Prologue! If you are reading it for the first or second time, I recommend re-reading the Prologue at the beginning of each part.

I first came across Phil Rickman when I was browsing in a bookshop in 1999. The title of a book, Crybbe intrigued me, so I took it off the shelf and read the blurb, which made him sound like a cross between Charles Williams and Stephen King, so I bought the book, and was not disappointed. 

I went on to read most of his novels, all the ones I could find, anyway. Somehow they didn't all seem to make their way into bookshops, or else they were sold out quickly. December was published only a month after Crybbe, but it was 20 years before I found it, in a secondhand book shop.

At one level, this is a ghost story. Charles Williams wrote one ghost story, All Hallows Eve, told from the point of view of one of the ghosts. December is told from several points of view, with so many switches that it is sometimes bewildering, but never from the point of view of the ghosts.

In this story five rock musicians have a contract to produce a record in a ruined abbey in south Wales. Four of the musicians are thought to be psychic, and the producers think that this, combined with the setting, should produce an interesting album that will sell well. The story begins with one of the musicians, Dave Reilly, being spooked by the sudden appearance of thirteen tallow candles in the studio and running out to take refuge under a tree. There he has a vision of dying outside a large building, and later the news comes over the radio that John Lennon was killed at that exact time, and he is haunted by the ghost of John Lennon. Three of the other members of the group are also haunted, each in different ways, and the group splits up. 

Fourteen years later they are called back together to complete production of the album, which had been abandoned, and they somewhat reluctantly agree. One of the members, Tom Storey, is approached through his wife's business partner, Martin Broadbank, who organises a dinner party for them to meet.  Broadbank's housekeeper cum concubine, Meryl, who is a spiritualist, and has a vision of most of the people at the dinner party suffering a violent death.

Later in the story Meryl finds herself in the company of Tom Storey, and tries to find out more about his psychic experiences, which, as a spiritualist, she sees as glamorous and exciting. But as events develop she comes to realise that she is out of her depth. She looks at herself in a mirror and

In the glass she sees not the old smouldering allure in the mysterious dark-eyed one who looks beyond the horizon, but plain perplexed apprehension in the unpainted eyes of an ordinary middle-aged woman.

And she longs to be back with Martin, for whom the only unknown forces are market forces. With whom she can safely be a believer in Other Spheres, a confidante of ghosts, and it doesn't matter because she's the only one, an exotic eccentric in a world of businessmen and socialites.

Meryl has been bound up with her perception of "unknown forces" as weird, mysterious, exotic and spooky, and perceives things like market forces as safe and ordinary and part of everyday life. Yet in the story the market forces are perhaps the most unsafe of all. It is market forces that are driving businessmen like Max Goff and Sile Copesake who in this story represent the money behind the music.

Also central to the story is the death of John Lennon, shot to death in New York City on 8 December 1980. But in December 2024, when so many Phil Rickman fans are reading his novel December, another businessman is shot in New York city. Some of this seems to have an uncanny application to Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, alleged to have been shot by Luigi Mangione. As Max Goff and Sile Copesake are to music in December, so was Brian Thompson to health care in everyday life. And Max Goff also makes an appearance in Crybbe.

Phil Rickman hints at a theological point here. Meryl looks for the unknown spiritual forces in all the wrong places, when all along they are right under her nose, the market forces driving the behaviour of the guests at her dinner party.

Another theological point is evident in the case of Brian Thompson. Attacking the flesh and blood representative of spiritual forces is ineffective. Brian Thompson  was replaced in his office the very next day. As St Paul says:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of wickedness in the heavenlies (Eph 6:10-12).

And he says elsewhere that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Flesh and blood oligarchs can be replaced. The real enemy is the spiritual power of the ideologies that drive them.

Dean Koontz comes closer to Charles Williams

Brother Odd by Dean Koontz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Odd Thomas can see dead people. His ability to see dead people has sometimes caused him to get into trouble in the past, which is why he is now a guest at a monastery in the Sierra Nevada of California, hoping to find some peace and tranquillity.

But, because his ability to see dead people allows him to see the ghost of a monk who is thought to have committed suicide, and now occasionally rings the church bells, Odd Thomas also has keys that allow him access to most parts of the monastery and the nearby school for disabled children. Odd Thomas also has the ability to see bodachs, shadowy harbingers of death, whose gathering in the rooms of some of the children in the school suggests that they may be under threat of death. As a snowstorm builds up, and a monk disappears, Odd must try to discern the nature of the threat, so that it can be neutralised.

Dean Koontz has written many books. I have read four of them, and of those four this is by far the best. This one is the third of a series of books featuring Odd Thomas, a young man who has had a difficult life, and earns a living as a cook in a fast-food restaurant in a desert town in the western USA, where he has helped the police chief to solve puzzling crimes with the aid of his ability to see dead people.

I read the second book of the series, Forever Odd, and was not very impressed (see my review here), but was intrigued by the description of this one, and the fact that it was set in a monastery. This setting, I thought, might give me a clue to the worldview of Dean Koontz, and to get an idea of where he was coming from, and what some of his theological presuppositions were, because those discernible in Forever Odd seemed rather strange.

Since the Jonestown massacre of 1978 there has been a tendency in fiction to portray Christian groups and organisations in a bad light. There was a precedent for this in early Gothic fiction of the late 18th and early 19th century, which often portrayed Roman Catholic monasteries in a very bad light, and since Dean Koontz write in a similar Gothic genre, I wondered about that. But his portrayal of most of the inmates of the monastery and its associated school is very sympathetic.

I wondered whether, in view of the religious setting, Brother Odd might be comparable with the novels of Charles Williams whose book All Hallows Eve featured two dead girls.

Koontz uses some of the same ingredients in his novels, so that his books could be described, like those of Charles Williams, as "supernatural thrillers". Some of the same tropes are there -- a supernatural blizzard, ghosts, the temptations of power. In most of Koontz's books, however, the ingredients seem to be clumsily put together, and the theological implications are obscure. Here they are much clearer, and one of the tropes is an interesting analogy with a current concern: just what is the nature of the "intelligence" that we debate about when we talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

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Notes from Underground: 19th Blogiversary Post

Today is the 19th anniversary of the start of this blog. It was named for Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name, and since this morning I read an interesting critique and description of the novel on Facebook, what better way of celebrating the anniversary of this blog is there than sharing it here: 

Classic Literature 

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a groundbreaking work that delves into the darkest and most conflicted aspects of human consciousness. Widely considered one of the first existential novels, this novella, published in 1864, explores themes of isolation, free will, and the human tendency toward self-destruction.

Plot and Structure 

The novella is divided into two parts. The first, “Underground,” is a philosophical monologue in which the narrator, known as the “Underground Man,” grapples with his disdain for society, his sense of superiority, and his scorn for the rationalism and optimism of his time. Here, Dostoevsky presents a scathing critique of the emerging social ideals of the 19th century, questioning the notion of human perfectibility and the idea that rationality alone can guide human behavior. In the second part, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” the Underground Man recounts a series of personal encounters that showcase his intense insecurity, emotional turbulence, and spite. His interactions, particularly with a young woman named Liza, reveal his inability to form meaningful relationships, his desire for control, and his overwhelming self-hatred. His actions oscillate between cruelty and vulnerability, illuminating the tension between his need for connection and his self-imposed alienation.

Themes and Analysis

At its core, Notes from Underground is an exploration of human freedom, especially the paradoxical desire to act irrationally, even to one’s detriment. The Underground Man embodies the tension between intellect and emotion, revealing how individuals can choose to suffer and reject societal norms simply to assert their independence. Dostoevsky’s probing into this psyche reveals the complex motives driving human behavior, from pride to self-loathing, and forces the reader to confront uncomfortable questions about autonomy, morality, and the need for meaning.

Dostoevsky’s critique of utilitarianism and “enlightened self-interest” — the popular belief that people act in ways that maximize their own good — challenges the reader to considenr the limits of rationalism. The Underground Man rebels against the idea that humanity can be entirely understood, or improved, through logic alone. His desire to make choices purely for the sake of rebellion suggests a deep-seated need for freedom that defies logical categorization, prefiguring existentialist thought.

Writing Style and Tone;

Dostoevsky's writing in Notes from Underground is intense, introspective, and laden with irony. The Underground Man’s narrative voice is sharp and caustic, giving readers an unfiltered look at his bitterness ahttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17881.Notes_from_Underground_The_Doublend cynicism. The novella’s fragmented and sometimes contradictory prose reflects the narrator’s chaotic inner world, creating a feeling of immediacy and intimacy. Dostoevsky’s use of direct address, as the Underground Man often speaks to an imagined audience, implicates the reader in his tirades and heightens the story’s impact.

Reception and Legacy

Upon publication, Notes from Underground was seen as a bold and unsettling work. Its exploration of moral ambiguity, psychological complexity, and existential themes has made it one of Dostoevsky’s most studied works. Often cited as a precursor to existentialism, it has influenced countless writers and thinkers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Albert Camus, who admired Dostoevsky’s ability to probe the darker facets of human freedom and responsibility.

Final Thoughts

Notes from Underground is a challenging yet rewarding read that delves into the paradoxes of human nature and the conflicts inherent in modern consciousness. Its themes resonate just as powerfully today as they did in Dostoevsky’s time, as it forces readers to confront questions about individuality, freedom, and the inherent irrationality of human behavior. With its psychological depth, raw emotion, and philosophical insights, Notes from Underground remains a seminal work, essential for anyone interested in the darker corridors of the human psyche.

The book: Notes from Underground.

Why the blog?

I called the blog "Notes from Underground" because it was intended first of all to be a rather cynical and detached view of the world around us, but secondly, and finally, all human observers of human frailty are themselves subject to frailty and so their observations need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The blog started here on Blogger, and you can go and look at the first post if you like. But the people at Blogger kept thinking of ways of making the editor more clunky and difficult to use, and at one stage it became so difficult that I moved it to a different blogging platform on Wordpress, which you can see here, and so most posts between 2012 and 2020 can be found at Notes from Underground on Wordpress.

For several years Blogger and Wordpress were in competition to see whose blog editor would be the clunkiest and most difficult to use, but in February 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic, Wordpress won by making theirs impossible to use, and since then I've done most of my blogging here, clunky editor and all. 

Telepathy and its Malcontents

Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Doro, an immortal being who has lived for thousands of years, moving from body to body of hosts he kills, has a breeding programme which eventually produces Mary, at telepath who has powers almost equal to his own. She discovers, or creates, the Pattern, which enables her to draw others to herself, and creates a kind of community. But Doro seeks to inhibit its growth.

This belongs to a subgenre of the science fiction I read in my youth, most of which was written in the "psi boom" of the early 1950s. These stories featured people who had "psi-powers", such as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, precognition and the like. Mind of My Mind deals mainly with people who are telepathic, and thus able to read other people's minds. When young, this ability is latent but those who have it undergo a rather traumatic transition to become "active", which causes many of those who have the ability to go mad or die.

Over the years the subgenre has broadened and extended to fantasy literature, where characters have a much wider range of "superpowers" available to them, over and above the traditional psi powers.

I was introduced to Octavia Butler's work by Prof David Levey, of the English Department at Unisa (University of South Africa). Before the Covid pandemic we had a monthly coffee klatsch, where we would get together to discuss books, and Octavia Butler came up at one of these gatherings. But it was another five years before I found one of her books in a book shop.

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Western civilisation and Christian values

Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tom Holland's thesis is that the moral and ethical values of Western Civilisation have been shaped mainly by Christianity, and in this book he tries to follow and explain the process by which this happened. He covers a broad sweep of Western Christianity, sometimes illuminating particular historical events and periods as he does so.

I think it is a book that would be useful for most Christians to read; Western Christians, because it is about them and their history; Orthodox Christians living in the West, or in any society where Western values are influential, to help them to understand the society in which they live. It would also be useful for Orthodox Christians not living in the West, because the West is influential even in places where its values are not dominant. It will be useful to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia, especially those colonised by the West, to see what Western values are based on.

For an example of the last point, Holland makes some interesting comments on how the Western concept of "religion" came to be applied outside the West. In a sense the British East India Company applied the concept of "religion" to India. This concept had been shaped by the history of Christianity in the West, especially in the Early Modern period, and it could be said that the British East India Company invented Hinduism as a religion. Holland could, however, have said a little more about how the concept had developed in the West before being applied to India. He does point out that in the premodern period "religion" referred primarily to those who had taken monastic vows or something similar, but modernity has changed this understanding. A useful book on this topic, for those who would like to know more, is ["Religion" and the Religions in the English Enlightenment] by Peter Harrison.

Tom Holland is not himself a Christian, as he makes clear in the last chapter, but he acknowledges that his values are based on Christian presuppositions. In general I agree with most of what he says; I might, however, differ from him over what he does not say.

He appears to give a survey of the history of Western Christianity, but there are significant lacunae. Some of the gaps seem to have things that do not support his thesis, or that might cause readers to modify it. He does not, for example, mention the Great European Witchhunt, in which large parts of Early Modern Christendom appeared to revert to pagan values with regard to witchhunts. He should have at least made some attempt to explain such a dramatic reversal in terms of his theory. For more on this, see my article on Christian Responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery.

Another gap that stood out for me came in the penultimate chapter, dealing with fairly recent events. He describes events of the annus mirabilis 1989, when authoritarian regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa and a wind of freedom blew through the world.

Holland notes that both Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk tended to interpret South Africa's liberation, and that of many communist countries, in 1989/90 in biblical terms, as the writing of God's finger on the affairs of state. loving enemies etc. But Western leaders tended to see it differently. As Holland puts it:

This, however, was not how it tended to be seen by policy-makers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx turned out instead to be closer to a hell emphasised the degree to which the true fulfilment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Confucian, or Muslim, or Hindu. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived (Source: Holland 2019:489)

Secularism, liberal democracy and the concept of human rights are all values which, according to Holland, the West derived from Christianity. I don't quibble with him there. But I don't think they were the values the "policy-makers in America and Europe" thought most important. Those policy-makers included people he did not name, and those who dominated in the 1980s were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose chief values were enshrined in the ideology of neoliberalism, which they had been pushing for the previous eight years and more.

The Neoliberalism they pushed for very strongly, and applied in their own countries, has continued to dominate the world economic system, and may seen as a watered down version of the ideology propagated by Ayn Rand, an atheistic despiser of Christianity and its "altruism". That ideology has been influential in the West since the 1960s, and certainly was held by some people in Reagan's administration, if not by Reagan himself.

In the five years since Holland's book was published, however, events have shown that the West is rapidly abandoning any traces of Christian values that remain.

According to Holland:

That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance and shelter and refuge from persecution:these were never self-evident truths.

The Nazis, certainly, knew as much -- which is why, in today's demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they -- because communism was an expression of concern for the oppressed masses -- rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless society.

But in the five years since Dominion was published, Tom Holland's thesis has been completely overturned. The mass murder precipitated by racism in Gaza in 2023-24 has not been seen as at all abhorrent by Western governments, as can be seen by their frequent protestations of support for the perpetrators. The Western values that Holland says are based on Christianity, like human rights, and concepts like "crimes against humanity" are safely stored away in the musical banks described in Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon.

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Living at the Edge of the World

Living at the Edge of the World - Winter by S.J. Barratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two children from London are sent by their parents to spend a few months with their great-uncle in the Shetland Islands.

Tabitha and Timothy Brown are twins, but though they share the same birthday, their interests are very different. Tabitha is at home in the bustling capital, has a wide range of social media contacts, and is appalled at the prospect of living in a remote rural area with iffy WiFi. Timothy seems on track to become a zoologist, reading up about the flora and fauna of the island before he gets there. Though he does find a few aspects or rural life surprising, he is adaptable and more willing to learn than his sister.

Great-uncle Tamhas welcomes them, and the story is about how they adapt and learn about the local culture, the slower pace of rural life, farm animals, and living in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. They go to the local school, where to the local children they seem like exotic foreigners, but they are not the only ones, and one of their fellow-pupils is a Syrian refugee.

I found it easy reading, and though it isn't very exciting or dramatic, I was interested in its description of how the townies adapted to rural life. It was a little bit rough in the beginning, where some of the dialogue seemed rather stilted and didactic for twelve-year-olds, even if they were trying to impart information, but once into the story it moved more easily.

It reminded me in a way of my own childhood; when I was 7 my father got a new job, and we moved from Westville, just outside Durban, to Sunningdale, just outside Johannesburg. Westville was suburban: no WiFi back then, but we did have urban conveniences like mains electricity and a telephone (landline).  In Sunningdale we didn't have such things. We lived on a smallholding with cows and horses and chickens. So as in the story, we had fresh eggs and milk and butter. But we used paraffin lamps, a paraffin stove for cooking, an icebox for keeping stuff cold, and we had to start a diesel motor to pump water. In my recollection I adapted to the rural way of life pretty quickly, and missed it when we had to leave when I was 13. But that experience made made it easy for me to identify with Tabitha and Timothy in the story.

The problem I found with it, though, is that was billed as an "adventure", but nothing really exciting happens. There are no real villains. It's just about urban kids discovering what rural life is like, and that is partly what makes it seem didactic. There were some points at which it seemed possible that an adventure could happen. The children were told about selkies, the seal people and I thought of Alan Garner's children's stories, where 12-year-old twins go to stay on a farm and have the same experience of rural life, but are not only told about creatures from folklore, but actually meet them.

The book was quite short, however, and the "winter" in the title hints at a sequel, so maybe spring and summer will be more adventurous. Tabitha's transformation seems to be the opposite of the problem of Susan in the Narnia stories, but at least Susan has some real adventures.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

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Cults: what's good and what's bad about them

 In some circles, it seems, the word "cult" denotes something that is automatically assumed to be bad, and some people who make this assumption use it to denigrate groups that they don't like, while others seem to think that the word should not be used at all because they see it as derogatory. 

I find this attitude rather strange, and it seems to be difficult to discuss it. The people who think like this seem to simply take the line "It's a bad word, don't use it. End of discussion," or "it's a bad thing, so I'm just calling a spade a spade."

So what is a cult?

Is it a useful word for describing a bad thing, or a bad word used to indoctrinate people into thinking that something good or neutral is a bad thing?

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "cult" as follows:

cult n. system of religious worship; devotion, homage, to person or thing (the ~ of)

To determine whether any given phenomenon is a cult, therefore, one must determine whether it is a system of religious worship, or whether it involves devotion to a person or thing. These are fairly objective criteria, and it should be easy to determine whether a phenomenon is a cult or not.

When one has established that a phenomenon is a cult, determining whether it is good or bad is far more subjective. That would depend on whether one thinks that what is worshipped, or what receives the homage and devotion, is worthy of it.

For example, there are two books that I would like to read on the cult of the saints. One is The Cult of the Saints by St John Chrysostom, which is a series of sermons on the lives of Christian saints, and the other is The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter Brown.

In both these books the word "cult" is used in its proper and legitimate sense, and it is in no way pejorative. St John Chrysostom, in particular, regards the cult of the saints as a good thing. I too regard the cult of the saints as a good thing.

I do believe, however, that there can be, and are, bad cults. A few years ago I discussed the cults of two unscrupulous businessmen who became politicians, one living and one dead. I discussed the cults of Cecil Rhodes and Donald Trump in the course of reviewing a book called The Cult of Rhodes.

In my view these cults were bad, because I did not think that Cecil Rhodes or Donald Trump were worthy of such homage or devotion. Your view may differ. You may think that one or both of them were saints, or, even if not actually saints, at least worthy of homage or devotion. So opinions on whether the cults of these men are good or bad may differ.

But opinions on whether the adulation of these men, Trump while he is still alive, and Rhodes after he died, constitutes a cult also seems to be a contentious matter.

The word "cult" has, mainly in the 2nd half of the 20th century, been misused to describe "new religious movements", "minority religions" and various other groups of people. A recent book dealing with this misuse is 'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century, and the description on the GoodReads site is as follows:

This book focuses on how 'cult rhetoric' affects our perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs).

'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century explores contemporary understandings of the term 'cult' by bringing together a range of scholars from multiple disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Ranging from the 'Cult of Trump' and 'Cult of COVID', to the campaigns of mass media, contemporary 'cult' rhetoric has become hybridised and is common vernacular for everyday people. The contributors explore these issues by analysing how NRMs have developed over the past decades and deconstructing the language we use to describe these movements.

I can see several problems in the description, but there's no way I can afford to buy the book. and owing to bureaucratic bunglings at the Unisa Library I no longer have access to an academic library so I can't get hold of it that way.

Religious organisations and groups, whether new or old, usually have cults, which they practise, but it is rather misleading to say that they are cults. All Christian bodies, for example, practise the cult of Jesus who is called Christ. Some of them practise the cult of the saints, mentioned earlier.

Cults may be either good or bad, depending on whether you judge the object or person worshipped or to which or to whom homage and devotion are paid is worthy of it. But it is high time we stopped using the word pejoratively, or demanding that it be banned simply because it assumed to be pejorative. 

 

A Game of Thrones for Kids: The Threads of Magic

The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A bit like A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, but for kids. There are some differences, however. Though both are of the sword and sorcery genre, A Song of Ice and Fire has too much sword and not enough sorcery, while The Threads of Magic has too much sorcery and not enough sword. But there is plenty of political wheeling and dealing, power struggles, and back-stabbing, on all sides.

In the city and kingdom of Clarel, the royal family had been taken over by evil being called spectres, though a non-spectral usurper had temporarily ousted the spectres from the royal family itself, but were clearly no better than spectres. The church's leadership, represented by a sole Cardinal, is possibly also infested with spectres, who eliminated their enemies, the witches, a century earlier, and have a team of assassins to ensure they never reappear.

And then there is Pip, a 12-year-old orphan who lives with his older sister Eleanor, and supports them by picking pockets in the Dickensian city. Unfortunately he picks the pocket of an assassin, getting a magical artifact in a jewelled box. He pawns the box and is about to throw away the artifact, the shrivelled heart of Clovis, the heir to the throne and next-in-line for spectreship, had the throne not been taken by the usurper and his heart by a witch when he was seven. And Clovis, whose spirit is trapped in the heart by the witch, wants Pip to keep him.

Oh, and there's a Princess Georgette, whose father wants to marry her off to a neighbouring King for the sake of a political alliance. And there are numerous other characters too, all taking part in this complicated wheeling and dealing political dance, with each party dancing to the music of its own band, playing its own tune, and out of tune and with sudden changes of tempo.

I found it hard to like any of the characters very much. They all seemed emotionally unstable, being kind one moment and nasty the next. The settings seemed inconsistent too -- witches had been eradicated a century earlier, and then one or two appear, and then suddenly they are there in large numbers and have been all along, and even dominate one quarter of the city, and are behind the running of a midsummer festival in which everyone takes part. And at the end of the story, no one seems to know, or care, what happened to the heart that started all the trouble.

While I didn't think it was a great story, I'm glad I read it, because I also write fantasy stories, mainly for kids, and this book shows a lot of the things that one should avoid -- things one should bear in mind when editing one's own writing. 

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A Literary Mystery: Who was Elizabeth Charlotte Webster?

 

More than 60 years ago, while browsing the shelves of the Johannesburg City Library (in the days when Johannesburg actually had a city library) I came across a book with the rather odd title Expiring Frog, so I pulled it from the shelf, and discovered that it was written by Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, and was about a (fictional) community of Anglican nuns in the (fictional) City of Geldersburg, which could have been the whole Witwatersrand or any town or city within it. 

I knew of two communities of Anglican nuns in Johannesburg at that time: the Order of the Holy Paraclete (OHP), who ran the St Benedict's Retreat House, and whose mother house was at Whitby in England; and the Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV). who ran St Mary's Diocesan School for Girls in Waverley (and another similar school in the Diocese of Pretoria). The CSMV mother house was at Wantage in England, and they were sometimes known as the Wantage Sisters. 

The Anglican chaplain at Wits University, where I was a student, was Father Tom Comber, and he was also the chaplain of St Mary's School. Father Comber recruited male university students who lived in the vicinity of the school to function as altar servers in the school chapel on Sundays. Back in those days in the Anglican Church the girls could carry candles in processions as acolytes, but they could not serve within the altar. As servers, we were chastely clad in white albs and amices, and black shoes were obligatory, so our appearance was largely uniform, other than the fluorescent orange or green socks we wore, to the tittering of the girls in the congregation.

In reading Expiring Frog, however, I pictured neither the CSMV nor the OHP sisters, or their dwellings, but rather the Roman Catholic Convent of the Good Shepherd, whose grounds formed the view from our flat in Cheltondale. Expiring Frog begins with Sister Lilian who fed the fowls at the Convent of Serapha of Sicily, and the view from my desk was over a green field on which Friesland cows grazed, which were fed, and for all I knew, milked, by an ancient sister bent over double like the Greek capital letter gamma, carrying two buckets of feed for the cows. The sisters there also ran the Good Shepherd Home, a kind of orphanage, and that seemed closer to the function of the Convent of St Serapha of Sicily in providing a home for fallen women.

I read the book and thought it was OK, but nothing outstanding. I occasionally thought about it and the quite at the beginning, from The Pickwick Papers

Can I view thee panting, lying
On thy stomach, without sighing
Can I unmoved see thee dying
On a log
Expiring frog!

And clearly, in the book, the "expiring frog" was a symbol of the Anglican Church.

The book belongs in a general category of novels about the Anglican Church, its clergy and monastics, by authors like Anthony Trollope, Ernest Raymond and Susan Howatch. One of the best written in a South African setting is one I recently reviewed, A Sin of Omission by Marguerite Poland.

A few years ago I saw a street bookstall selling second-hand books, and found there a copy of Expiring Frog, and bought it, just in case I should ever want to read it again, because I'd never seen another copy anywhere. And it's sat, unread, on my shelves for the last 20 years or so. A previous owner was R.J. (or R.G.) Jabobs. There appears to have been another owner before that. but it has been rubbed out, and I can't read the name. But having the book, with publication details, I was able to enter it into GoodReads, and mark it as read.

But in GoodReads there is no information  about Elizabeth Charlotte Webster. She apparently wrote a couple of other books, one of which could be a different edition of this one, with a different title, and possibly other changes as well, but there seems to be no biographical information about her. Web searches reveal nothing. So who was she? That is something of a literary mystery.

There was an Elizabeth Charlotte Webster who married Richard Anthony Hulley in Trinity Church in Grahamstown, Cape Colony, on 17 November 1880, and her signature in the marriage register looks quite similar to that of the author of the book, and the differences could be explained by the gap of 46 years. But the Elizabeth Charlotte Webster who married Richard Hulley appears to have died in Southern Rhodesia in 1901.

There is also a Wikipedia article:

Mary Morison Webster (1894 – 1980) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet who came to South Africa with her family in 1920. She lived in Johannesburg, where she was an influential book reviewer for The Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times for 40 years. She wrote five novels, including one in collaboration with her sister, novelist Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, and several collections of poetry.

Amazing things I learned at Fairmount School in Johannesburg

Over the last couple of weeks I've had reason to remember various things I have learned, and I'm quite amazed at how many of them I learned in Standard 1 (Grade 3) at Fairmount Government School in Johannesburg. I get the impression that it is now called Summerwood Primary School -- I'm not sure why or when the name changed, but I think it is the same place. 

This morning it was a discussion on English usage. Someone asked whether in English the word "camel" applied only to the two-humped Bactrian camel, and that the one-humped ones were not camels, but dromedaries, as they apparently are in French.

And my mind took me back to the Standard 1 classroom at Fairmount School, where Miss Armstrong (who became Mrs Legger) taught us that there were two kinds of camels: the dromedary camel with, with one hump, which was native to North Africa and Western Asia, and the Bactrian camel of Eastern Asia, which had two humps. But the word "camel" was used for both. 

I was only at Fairmount School for a year and a half, out of twelve years of school, but my most vivid memories of things I learned at school are from the time I spent at Fairmount.

I first went to Fairmount School in the spring of 1948, when we had just moved to a 5-acre smallholding in a place then called Sunningdale, though only a small part of it is still called Sunningdale today, and the part where we lived is now called something else. My father would take me to school in his car in the morning, and I would walk home after school in the afternoon. a walk of about a mile, mainly on a footpath through the veld, or a winding gravel track, which is now tarred and called Summer Way.

My memories of Fairmount mainly concern what Miss Armstrong taught. The only fellow-pupil whose name I can remember is a girl called Jennifer Foulis, who was a year or two older than me, and lived almost next door to the school. I sometimes went to her house and played with her and her brother John after school. I once invited her to come and play with me at my house, and her mother was horrified. It was quite out of the question. I asked why, and her mother said "Because she's a girl." It was quite OK for a boy of 8 to walk a mile over the veld to go home from school, but a girl of 9 or 10, no, not even, or perhaps especially not, when accompanied by a boy.

The Johannesburg municipal boundary was at Sandler Road, about 2 houses from the school, and beyond that was under the jurisdiction of Edenvale (our car had a TDL number plate). We had no mains electricity, and no telephone -- off-the-grid was easy in those days.

Other things I remember from Fairmount School -- the headmaster was E.E. Harrison. I once had to go to his office for not having completed my homework, and he beat me, the first time I experienced such a thing at school. He had a leather-covered cane that appeared to be broken, so held together with leather, so it acted as a kind of flail. The Vice Principal was a Mr van Schalkwyk. 

The school had four "houses" for the purpose of sporting competitions, named after birds: Penguins, Pelicans, Eagles and Cranes. I was rather disappointed to be allocated to the Penguins, as my favourite birds were eagles and sparrows.

Most of the things I remember learning at Fairmount had to do with subjects like Nature Study, Hygiene, and History. In history we learnt about cavemen, pyramids in Egypt and the growth of civilisation in Egypt and Mesopotamia. We also learned stuff from different periods like the invention of safety matches, and at one point I had a mental image of cavemen running around with unsafe matches in their pockets.

In Nature Study we learned not only about one-humped and two-humped camels, but also about monocotyledonous seeds, like mealies, and dicotyledonous seeds, like beans, which we put in damp cotton wool to watch them sprout. Looking back, I think it was quite an achievement to learn how to spell "monocotyledonous" at the age of 8. Miss Armstrong must have been a pretty good teacher.

In hygiene we learnt about the importance of not building "kleinhuisie" toilets on riverbanks upstream of human settlements, because doing that could cause epidemics of various unpleasant diseases. 

Miss Armstrong also introduced us to "Little Golden Books", and my favourites were one about a tugboat and and one about Tootle, the little railway engine that wouldn't stay on the tracks. 

There was another book that had a serious political message. It was about a country with square, round and triangular people, who all lived happily together until the squares seized political power, and decided that everyone had to be square, so they built a machine to force the round and triangular people to become square. Eventually the oppressed round and triangular people revolted, took control of the machine and put it into reverse to restore their own shapes again. 

Thinking about it in retrospect, I think it was a bit of Cold War and post-War propaganda, to warn kids of the dangers of totalitarian systems like Communism and Fascism. 

Of my classmates in Standard 1 I can remember the names of only two, Hilary and Valerie, who shared a desk to my right at the back of the classroom. One day Valerie was missing, and we were told she had been killed in a car crash on the road to Vereeniging over the weekend. We never went to her funeral, and she was just gone.

At one point we were all bussed to Orange Grove Primary School, which was putting on a series of plays. I remember only one, The Monkey's Paw, which was my introduction to horror literature.

I'm sure there will be other things that come to mind, and I'll wonder how I learnt them, and then recall learning them in Miss Armstrong's class at Fairmount School.

A sin of omission: a brilliant historical novel set in 19th-century South Africa

A Sin of Omission by Marguerite Poland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A historical novel that gives one a real insight into the history, with a vivid sense of time and place. The characters are detailed and believable, and this is a classic of South African literature.

An Anglican deacon, Stephen Malusi Mzamane, is on his way to tell his mother, whom he has not seen since he was a small child, of the death of his elder brother. The story of his life, and how he came to this point, is told in a series of flashbacks. He was based at Trinity Mission at Nodyoba, near Fort Beaufort, in the 1870s, where he had to serve alone, without a resident priest.

The flashbacks tell the story of his life -- how he and his elder brother were found starving after the cattle-killing of 1858, rescued by an Anglican priest and sent to school. There he was called to the ordained minister of the Anglican Church, and sent to St Augustine's Missionary College in Canterbury, England, for training. At the college his best friend is Albert Newnham, who is also destined to serve in the eastern Cape Colony. They dream of working together, but this dream is never realised, and circumstances conspire to keep them apart for most of the time.

It is those circumstances, the setting and the people, that put obstacles in their way. One of the themes of the story is their friendship, which should have supported both of them in their ministry, but did not.

One of the themes of the story is the tension between the call to Christian ministry, and the ties of family and cultural background that undermine it. Stephen feels the tension initially with his elder brother; Albert with his wife. But it is part of a wider social setting, and it comes out quite strongly in the book -- the Xhosa-speaking clergy are painfully aware of the tensions between their Christian faith and secular Xhosa culture; the English-speaking clergy, whether colonial or from overseas, are, with one or two exceptions, not aware of the tension between their Christian faith and their own British secular culture.

Of course this is fiction, and the author chooses how to portray such things and write them into the story, but I believe, from my own study of history and experience of church life in South Africa, that her portrayal is spot on. She tells it like it was, and in some ways still is.

Poland portrays the relationship between the Xhosa-speaking clergy and the English-speaking clergy very well indeed, and at times I get the feeling that this could me, because it could be describing my experience, as a South African Orthodox Christian vis-à-vis Greek clergy. 

As a missiologist, I also think that this is the kind of book I would like to have prescribed to my students. Occasionally one finds novels that help to make a missiological point -- another one is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, but I think this one is even better. 

One interesting, and perhaps telling sldelight is that in its submission guidelines Penguin South Africa says it will not usually accept fiction manuscripts dealing with religion, so this one must have been pretty unusual to jump over that hurdle and be accepted.

It is a sad story, but well told, and well worth reading.

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The Magic Cottage

The Magic Cottage by James Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A book that started off in a fairly promising way, but seemed to lose the plot towards the end.

Mike Stringer, a musician, and his girlfriend Midge Gudgeon, a musician, buy a cottage in the New Forest in Hampshire. The cottage, called Gramarye, was part of a deceased estate, and they had to undergo some kind of test by the executors of the will.

Not far away is an old manor house that is home to a community of selfstyled Synergists, led by a man called Mycroft. Members of the community are initially friendly and welcoming, but when Mycroft promises to enable Midge to make contact with her dead parents, a nasty side appears. The local vicar warns them to have nothing to do with the Synergists, and appears to think they are evil Mike is sceptical, both of the Synergists' beliefs and the vicar's fears.

The cottage initially seems to have mysterious healing properties but when the Synergists visit the healing properties seem to be corrupted.

After an interesting build-up the story seemed to fall apart in the end, and seemed designed for a B-movie with spectacular special effects. There was a growing atmosphere of evil, but the bits that were supposed to be really scary at the end weren't scary at all, and were just boring. My mind kept wandering off, or I kept dropping off to sleep.

And one rather curious thing I noticed about it was that it has a surprising number of Americanisms for a book written by an Englishman, and published in England: flashlight where I would have expected torch; sneakers where I would have expected plimsolls or trainers; and braids where I would have expected plaits or pigtails. On the other hand, it had presently meaning shortly afterwards, which I don't think is the way an American would use the word. 

In a way, it had some echoes of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis: a couple whose relationship is deteriorating, and the Synergists had echoes of the N.I.C.E. but the characteristics of their group were largely New Age/Theosophist cliches. There wasn't a contrasting "good" community. It might have been That Hideous Strength as reimagined by Dennis Wheatley, except that I think Dennis Wheatley might have made a better job of it.

Searching for icons in Russia

THE KATERINA ICON by Robert Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amateur versus professional crooks.

A couple of Australian tourists in Russia rescue an old man from drowning, and in gratitude he tells them of an ancestor of his who, during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, attacked a train and stole some icons that had been stolen by the Bolsheviks from the Russian royal family. One of the Australians is of Russian ancestry, and the old man tells him that if he can find the hidden icons, he can keep them, and gives him one of his own family icons, which is said to hold the key to the secret location of the icons.

The tourists, an accountant and a dentist, return to Australia and when they believe they may have found a clue to the location of the icons, decide, after many arguments, to return to Russia and look for them. Their arguments continue throughout the book. First one is keen on the project, and the other is lukewarm, and then the one who was lukewarm becomes keen and the other is sceptical.

Their enterprise is of dubious legality and morality, and thus they need to keep it secret, but they take it in turns to boast about it and to warn against doing so. First one says too much, and the other warns him not to, and then they exchange roles. As a result of this, several others, including professional criminals, become aware of the treasure hunt, and the two amateurs find themselves in serious trouble and great danger again and again, usually because one has done something foolish that the other has warned him against.

The battle between the amateurs and the professionals goes right through the book, and I thought the theme was a little overplayed. The protagonists never seemed to learn from their mistakes, and went on making the same mistakes over and over again, and getting into similar trouble over and over again. One would take precautions that the other would get angry about, or one would neglect precautions that the other would get angry about.

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So much for the review of this particular book, but I have more comments on the theme, since I myself have written a book on a similar theme, or at least with a similar trope -- ikons that went missing in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (I prefer the spelling ikon with a k for the holy images. Icons with a c belong on computer screens). You can see reviews of my book The Year of the Dragon here on GoodReads.There are other and more comprehensive reviews on the Smashwords page, where you can also get a copy of the book. 

Apart from the icon/ikon trope, there are other superficial similarities. In The Katerina Icon the protagonists are two middle-aged men, a dentist and an accountant; in The Year of the Dragon the protagonists are two young men, a lawyer and an auctioneer. In both a woman dies because of the icons/ikons, though the circumstances are different.

But the differences are perhaps more more significant, and it is these that struck me most strongly. In The Katerina Icon, the protagonists are driven purely by greed. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their only interest in the icons is the price they will fetch, nothing else counts. In the story, they are the "good" guys, the characters the reader is supposed to root for, but their values are identical with those of the "bad" guys, who are likewise motivated purely by greed. And one cannot help thinking that these are the values that triumphed at the end of the Cold War. 

The young protagonists in The Year of the Dragon start off in much the same way. The young lawyer has to wind up the estate of a murdered woman, and takes his auctioneer friend along to inspect the property and help him assess its monetary value. But as the story proceeds they gradually discover that there is more at stake, and that the value of the ikons, in particular, cannot be calculated only on the price they will fetch on the market. They come to see that there is more, and that the "more" is actually more important.

So with The Katerina Ikon I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, and put the 4 stars there to compensate for my prejudice in having written a comparable novel, which I thought went deeper than the rather superficial greed displayed by the characters in The Katerina Icon, in which there were really no good guys or bad guys, only winners and losers, and it wouldn't have mattered in the end which lot won or lost. The Neoliberal Revolution at the end of the Cold War ended up much the same as the Bolshevik Revolution as portrayed in George Orwell's Animal Farm -- the other animals looked from man to pig, and from pig to man, and could no longer tell the difference.

Telmarines: the ultimate Whenwes

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've just finished reading Prince Caspian for the fourth time, and this time I read it chapter for chapter with Inside Prince Caspian by Devin Brown, and most of my comments on it will be found in my review of Inside Prince Caspian.

I will add one thing here, though -- that on this reading I was struck even more by how C.S. Lewis got it absolutely right about the notion of white supremacy -- which in Prince Caspian appears as Telmarine supremacy.

Back in the 1960s, when I first read it, Kenya had just become independent, and there was a flood of disgruntled white immigrants from Kenya into apartheid South Africa. They soon became known as "Whenwes" because of their habit of prefacing most things they said with the phrase "When we were in Keen-yah...".

They were also given much air time on South African radio (no TV in those days), especially by current affairs host Ivor Benson, who seemed to have a Whenwe from Kenya every week on his prime-time propaganda show, where they spread the message that the white man should rule, and black people were incompetent and unfit to govern.

One of the things we wondered about was why, if they wanted to get away from black people, white Kenyan immigrants didn't go to a country where there were no or few black people. Why did they come to South Africa, where the majority of the population were black?

It soon became apparent, however, from what they said on the radio, that they could not do without black people, because there would be no one to "clean my carpets, scrub the floors, and polish up the hearth". They needed black people, but only if they were subservient to white rule -- and that is exactly how C.S. Lewis portrays the Telmarines in Prince Caspian -- as the ultimate Whenwes. They were unwilling to stay in Narnia if they were no longer the ruling race, with all others subservient to them.

And C.S. Lewis nails it. He nails it absolutely. The Telmarines are the Platonic ideal Whenwes, white supremacists to the core.

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C.S. Lewis on Christian Nationalism

Christian Nationalism seems to be making a come-back.

Christian Nationalism was the philosophical underpinning for the apartheid ideology of the National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. During that period Christian Nationalism was dominant and all-pervasive. Student teachers at universities were taught that they had to teach subjects like Geology in a "Christian National way". All children in schools were to be taught to be nationalist in their thinking, and nationalism was defined as "love of one's own".

But what is "one's own"?

Many Christian groups in South Africa at that time questioned the Christian Nationalist ideology, and some explicitly and outright rejected it. Christian Nationalism grew out of an attempt to give a Christian flavour to a romantic secular nationalism that had grown up in Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For more on that, see my article on Nationalism, Violence and Reconciliation.

Now Christian Nationalism seems to be making a come-back in certain circles in North America,  in Russia, and in some other places. Many Christians find this disturbing. Those of us who were involved in the struggle against apartheid from the 1950s to the 1980s are aware that Christian Nationalism was not merely a heresy, it was a pseudo-gospel, a false offer of salvation by race, not grace.

It was not merely South Africans who were aware of that, however. C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), a professor of English literature, author, and Christian apologist, was also acutely aware of the dangers of nationalism, and two of the villains of his fiction, Professor Weston of his space trilogy, and the dwarf Nikabrik in his children's book Prince Caspian exemplify the dangers.

Devin Brown, in his book Inside Prince Caspian, makes this clear in the following passage:

The only virtue remaining in Nikabrik at the time of his death was a concern -- it would be hard to call it a love -- for his own kind. Nikabrik allowed this virtue to expand until it became the greatest virtue, erasing all others. In this way he became like another of Lewis's villains: Professor Weston from the space trilogy. Near the end of Out of the Silent Planet, the great Oyarsa, or ruler, of Mars has a long conversation with Weston, trying to understand the reasoning behind the scientist's depraved actions. The Oyarsa maintains that there are laws that all sentient beings know, "pity and straight dealing and shame and the like". He points out that Weston is willing to break all of these laws except "the love of kindred," which he notes "is not one of the greatest laws." As this law became the only law and principle for both Weston and Nikabrik, it became bent and distorted and, in the end, led to evil, not good.

The "love of kindred" that Lewis talks about there is the "love of one's own" that the Afrikaner nationalists of South Africa's National Party gave as the definition of nationalism. And "own kind" was a nationalist mantra. It was the rationale for apartheid. People must live among their "own kind". They must go to school and church with their "own kind". They could only play games and sports with their "own kind". There were government departments and legislative bodies arranged according to "own affairs". And there were laws against "improper interference" in affairs that might concern everyone, and were not regarded by the government as "own affairs".

The "own kinds" were defined by law: White, Black, Coloured and Asian. And those took precedence over everything else. Christians could not see their fellow Christians as their "own kind". Own-kindedness was determined not by faith, but by race. So, under "Christian" nationalism, Christians were expected to sell their heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world (cf Genesis 25:29-34). 

For those who may be concerned about the viral spread of Christian Nationalism in the 2020s, therefore, there are remedies. Perhaps you can inoculate your children against the virus of Christian Nationalism by reading C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories to them, and noting the lessons to be learned from the failings of Nikabrik.

When they get older and become interested in "Young Adult" stories, encourage them to read Out of the Silent Planet and note the failings of Professor Weston.

And don't forget the words of Balthazar Johannes Vorster (1915-1983), who became South African Minister of Justice in 1961 (when he turned South Africa into a police state), Prime Minister in 1966, State President in 1978. But back in 1942 he said (when his country was at war with Germany, Italy and Japan):

We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call the anti-democratic system dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa, Christian Nationalism.