The Last Anniversary -- a quintessentially Australian book

The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A quintessentially Australian book.

While reading it I was reminded of other Australian novels I have read, like The Slap, The Glade Within the Grove and The Only Daughter. Of these stories one could say, "only in Australia".

Is this a recommendation?

In a way it is. I think that if you enjoyed any of those books, you will probably also enjoy this one.

I've never been to Australia, so I'm not quite sure what makes me think that all four of them have a uniquely Australian "feel", and I'm rather hoping that some of my friends who have lived in both Australia and South Africa might be able to tell me!

The Last Anniversary is set mostly on an island near Sydney, whose inhabitants are all connected with a single family whose lives were shaped by an event that took place in 1932, when two teenage girls discovered an abandoned baby whose parents had apparently disappeared without a trace. The girls grow up and turn the story into a lucrative business, which involves the "baby", named Enigma, and now grown up, with her children and grandchildren. Tourists visit the island to learn about the ancient mystery, especially on the anniversary of the discovery of the baby and the vanished parents.

One of the original sisters dies and leaves her house to the ex-girlfriend of one of Enigma's grandchildren, Sophie Honeywell, who moves to the island, the first outsider do so without joining the established "family". Her arrival changes both her and "the family".

The story explores marriage, family life, and the meaning for family, relationships within a close community, and with outsiders.

There were a few puzzling anachronisms that looked as though they might be clues to the mystery, and turn up later in the story, but they didn't. 

1. The abandoned house is said to be kept in the condition it was in when the baby was found, in 1932. This includes a half-completed crossword puzzle, with a Bic pen that was being used to write the words. But Bic pens were ballpoints, and ball point pens were only invented after the Second World War. So clearly the pen could not have been used on the crossword in 1932. 

2. The sisters tell of growing up on the island and their care-free lives, but there father had been wounded in the First World War and was never the same, and he wouldn't stand up for God save the Queen. But if that was in the 1930s, when they were growing up, it would have been God save the King.3. They speak of their mother dying in the same period, of pneumonia, and say she needed a dose of antibiotics, but went to hospital too late. But most antibiotics before 1935 were for treating syphilis, not pneumonia.

I thought something might be said about these in relation to the mystery, but it wasn't. 

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The Wizard Knight (not a book review)

The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn't a review.

It's a few thoughts inspired by reading The Wizard Knight and discussing it with a few people in an online forum for discussing theology and literature, most of whom were a lot more familiar with the work of Gene Wolfe than I am. I think that in order to write an actual review, one would need to have read the book at least three times.

It's a story about an American boy who goes for a walk and gets lost in the woods. He plucks a branch from a tree of a kind he has never seen before, and finds himself in a different universe. In a cave he meets a woman called Parka who has too many teeth. She gives him a magical bowstring to turn the branch he plucked into a bow, and gives him a new name, Able of the High Heart. He wanders around trying to find his way home, and meets a man, Bold Berthold, who had a younger brother called Able, and assumes that Able of the High Heart is his brother returned, and takes him in and tells him something about the world he is in, Mythgarthr, which has three worlds above it, and three below. In the one immediately below, Aelfrice, Abel meets an Aelf, or Dryad, Disiri, who kisses him, and he falls in love with her. She makes him grow up quickly, and he wanders around Mythgarthr, with occasional excursions to Aelfrice below and Skai above, seeking to become a knight. In a battle with a dragon he acquires a sword, Eterne, which he uses as a knight, serving Arnthor, the King of Celidon, the country he first arrived in, joining an embassy to the country of the giants in the neighbouring kingdom to the north, which likes to enslave humans, and engaging in battles with the cannibals who live on the eastern border, the Osterlings.

I suppose it could be described as a kind of picaresque fantasy. It has some echoes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass, in the sense that the protagonist encounters a lot of strange magical characters, and in both books, on a first reading, one barely scratches the surface of the story.

Able of the High Heart acquires as pets a talking dog and a talking cat, and some hangers on, including a sailor, a crippled peasant (or an agricultural worker living with disability, if you prefer), an ogre and a couple of Aelf maidens who are into shape shifting.

Among the similarities with Alice in Wonderland are the talking animals and the changes in size. We know that Alice Liddell was about 7 years old when Lewis Carroll (Revd Charles Dodgson) told her the story, and in the story the protagonist who shared her name kept growing and shrinking. Able of the High Heart seems to be about 11 or 12 when he comes to Mythgarthr and Aelfrice, and suddenly becomes a mature adult, whose voice has broken and he no longer fits his clothes. Though he doesn't grow or shrink physically thereafter, he still feels like a boy inside, and often behaves like one too. His pet dog, however, can apparently change size at will.

In reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland one discovers new things on each re-reading, and I think The Wizard Knight is like that too. I would like to be able to reread it in an annotated edition, like The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. 

Some additional comments (may contain spoilers)

My comparison with Alice in Wonderland is because, on a first reading, neither book seems to have an interpretive framework or a goal. There is a series of seemingly unconnected events, which gives them a dreamlike quality. Alice wanders through Wonderland with no definite goal, encountering strange characters who interact with her in various ways. Abel wanders through three worlds and more and develops the vague ambition of becoming a knight. His main goal seems to be to find Disiri again, having fallen in love with her, but very little of what he does seems calculated to achieve that goal.

It is possible, on reflection, to interpret some parts of the story allegorically. The three kingdoms of Mythgarthr that we are told about -- Celidon, inhabited mainly by humans, but with a ruler who is part dragon; the land of the Angrborn (giants) who enslave humans; and the cannibalistic Osterlings -- seem to be engaged in perpetual and inevitable conflict. One could see the giants as an allegory for governments that rely on brute strength and projection of power to cow and defeat their opponents, and perhaps the cannibalistic Osterlings represent capitalism in seeing human beings as merely a resource to exploit. But it would need a second or third reading to test such a thesis.

So my final word is, if you want to read The Wizard Knight, be prepared to read it twice. As soon as you finish it, go back to the beginning and start again, making notes on the characters and events as you go. Then, perhaps after an interval of a few weeks, read it again. 

  

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Creation Sunday

Here's an interesting development in Christian liturgy and worship:

Churches worldwide are coming together to adopt a major new Christian festival: the Feast of Creation, also known as Creation Sunday.

From 2024-2025, all the major Christian denominations and networks gathered for two ecumenical councils in Assisi, Italy. Through this time of prayer, discussion and friendship, they have agreed to mark the first Sunday in September as a day to celebrate the Creator God and the mystery of creation in Christ. From Eastern Orthodox, to Pentecostals, to Roman Catholics, to Mennonites, Anglicans and more, the world’s Christian traditions are uniting around the conviction that celebrating, praying for and protecting God’s creation is essential to the Christian life.

You can read more about that here.

In the Orthodox Church 1 September has long been regarded as the beginning of the Church Year, and it begins with Vespers the evening before, during which the Church sings:

O Christ our God, Who in wisdom didst fashion all things,
and out of nothing hast brought them into being,
bless the crown of the year, and preserve our city unharmed;
and make our faithful glad by Thy power,
granting them victories over their adversaries,
through the Theotokos bestowing upon the world great mercy!

V. We shall be filled with the good things of Thy house; holy is Thy temple, wonderful in righteousness. (Ps. 64:5)

In South Africa (and other southern-hemisphere countries) 1 September is also marked as the beginning of spring which makes it seem even more appropriate for a celebrations of creation. 

But there is also an almost forgotten aspect of creation celebration, not mentioned in the linked article, that perhaps deserves to be remembers as a small part of southern African church history. The idea of Creation Sunday goes back a long way before 2024, or even 1989. In southern Africa (and possibly other places) Anglicans were observing Creation Sunday from 1969. 

Creation Sunday was observed on the Ninth Sunday before Christmas, which usually fell towards the end of October. In the 20 years or so that it was observed, it helped to shape the Christian experience and outlook of a generations of Anglican Christians at least, so it might be interesting, from a church historical point of view, to collect oral histories of the way in which people remember observing it, and reflecting on how it shaped their understanding of the Christian faith and the created world.

Since I was one of those whose Christian experience was influenced by Creation Sunday, I'll record some of my experiences of it, and invite others to do the same.

In 1969 the Anglican Church in Southern Africa introduced some alternative liturgical texts to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and with it they introduced a new lectionary. The litugrical texts were in three parts: Office 1 and Office 2, which replaced Morning and Evening Prayer. Office 1 was intended to be the main Sunday service, and could be followed by Holy Communion. Office 2 was a stand alone service. Three scripture readings were provided for Office I, and two for Office 2, in a two-year cycle, beginning with the ninth Sunday before Christmas. 

Though the compilers of the new lectionary denied that they were establishing a new liturgical season, in effect they did. Creation Sunday marked the beginning of the church year.

Each Sunday had a theme, with the scripture readings fitting that theme, and in my experience, hymns and sermons were also often chosen to fit that theme. The preacher would choose hymns, especially those preceding and following the sermon, to fit the theme of the preaching, which usually followed the Sunday theme. 

In the nine Sundays before Christmas the dominant theme was the  Old Testament reading:

9th Sunday before Christmas -- Creation
8th Sundy before Christmas -- The Fall
7th Sunday before Christmas -- The Covenant of Preservation: Noah
6th Sunday before Christmas -- The Election of God's People: Abraham
5th Sunday before Christmas -- The Promise of Redemption: Moses
4th Sunday before Christmas -- The Advent Hope

Though both years in the cycle followed the same theme during this season. there were different scripture readings for odd years and even years. For Creation Sunday the readings for the main Sunday service (the Eucharist, if celebrated) were:

Odd Year: Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-25; Rev 4:1-11; John 3:1-8
Even Year: Gen 1:1-3, 24-31a; Col 1:15-20;  John 1:1-14

And for the Offices (Office 2 before 1975):

Odd Year: Job 38:1-18; Acts 14:1-17
Even Year: Proverbs 8:1, 22-31; Rev 21:15-27

These were from the Anglican Liturgy 1975 lectionary, which had been slightly modified from the earlier 1969 version. 

I give this in some detail because no one born after about 1985 would have any memory of it at all, and it probably had no part in their Christian experience. What follows is some of my experience of celebrating Creation Sunday in that setting. 

In 1970 and 1971 I was in Namibia, and we were feeling our way with the new lectionary, and exploring its possibilities. In 1971 I introduced it to the congregation at St Michael's, Katutura, Windhoek, where the services were mainly in Kwanyama, with a little bit of Herero thrown in. The new liturgy was not yet available in those languages, so we introduced the lectionary only, and some time was spent on explaining the Sunday themes, and the relation of readings to the themes and so on.

St Johns Church, Malvern, 1972

In 1972, having been deported from Namibia, I was serving in the white English-speaking parish of Queensburgh, near Durban, South Africa. It had three small churches, which had separate services on Sunday mornings, but combined for Sunday evenings, and so we planned to have a special evening service for Creation Sunday at St John's Church, Malvern. It would normally have been Office 2, but as Office 2 could be used  in either the morning or the evening, it had no real connection with the time of day, so with the permission of the Anglican Bishop of Natal we used an evening service of our own devising, loosely based on Orthodox Vespers, which is, in a way, a daily celebration of creation.

St John's Church, Malvern

 

In the service we sang Psalm 104, as in Orthodox Vespers, followed by the Great Litany. The scripture reading we used was Job 38, and followed that by a reading of the creation of Narnia from The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis. with the singing stars. This was in turn followed by a hymn Stars of the morning so gloriously bright. We also read some paragraphs from Fr Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World on the relation between Vespers and creation. 

I included some pictures of the church, which are also historical in a way, because the church was later demolished to make way for a shopping centre car park.

In another Anglican parish in the Durban area Creation Sunday was also celebrated in a special way. In the 1970s there was a movement on Durban churches called "Flowers through the Church" and church members who were skilled at flower arranging would put their work in a church, and people would be invited to come and see them. 

St Martin's Church in Durban North was planning to have such a "Flowers through the Church" event, and chose to have as a theme the Nine Sundays before Christmas, one for each of the Sundays, and ending with Christmas itself. Visitors were given a leaflet with a brief explanation, and the collect (theme prayer) for eachSunday, to pray at each one, so they went round the church beginning with Creation Sunday, in a manner similar to the Stations of the Cross.

In such ways as these, Creation Sunday became a kind of annual landmark in the lives of many Christians and parishes, and at evening services on Creation Sunday there were sometimes guest preachers who spoke on the need for care of the environment and related topics.