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Post by hibernicus on Feb 11, 2011 13:52:46 GMT
I think what Shane says helps to explain why Williamson has such an enthusiastic fan club among his former seminarians, but under the surface I don't think he is a nice man at all. He strikes me as a monster of vanity, who treats his whimsies as divinely-revealed truths and believes in his heart that he alone is enlightened and the mass of mankind are mere ignorant sheeple. I daresay Nero was quite charming in his private conversations.
Fr Joseph O'Leary's essay is more interesting than I had expected, given his long record of heterodoxy and sneering at everyone who disagrees with him (on Catholic blogs). It says something about a certain 60s mindset in Maynooth.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 15, 2011 12:50:07 GMT
I think Williamson is best understood if we distinguish between eccentricity and singularity thus; the true eccentric does not think of himself as eccentric, he unselfconsciously behaves as he thinks proper in the light of his habits and beliefs. The pursuer of singularity does so consciously; he deliberately adopts opinions and modes of behaviour which are at variance with those commonly received and he does so not because he necessarily believes these things or thinks them true/important, but because he wishes to see himself and to be seen by others as a superior person. There are of course different ways of engaging in these pursuits, and taking up holocaust denial (as Williamson and his friend David Irving - who likes to assert his superiority by sneering at his neo-nazi admirers when he is interviewed by non-nazi journalists, just as his lies about Hitler and the Holocaust are a means of making himself feel powerful by gulling those foolish enough to believe his lies) is one of the worst.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 15, 2011 13:12:07 GMT
A few belated points about Robert Hugh Benson, LORD OF THE WORLD and DAWN OF ALL: (1) About the theologian-heretic in DAWN OF ALL: It was not in fact the case that throughout the Constantinian era the penalty for heresy was death, even when it was assumed that heresy deserved temporal punishment. Nestorius, for example, in the fifth century was exiled to a distant monastery (and Nestorius is a good example since he always maintained he had been misrepresented, as the character in DAWN OF ALL appears to do). Given that the theologian in DAWN OF ALL continues to maintain that he is a faithful son of the Church, detention and continued persuasion might be thought to be more appropriate in the circumstances. Benson assumes that the High Middle Ages represent the closest approximation to an ideal Christian society and their practice is therefore the example to be followed. (2) This high valuation of the later Middle Ages at the expense of the patristic era is also seen in one of the casual asides in LORD OF THE WORLD, whereby it is revealed that the Pope has summarily abolished the Eastern Catholic rites and imposed the Roman rite on the whole Church. Even granted that this represents a response to an emergency situation, Benson seems unaware that it might have any disadvantages (e.g. alienation of the Eastern-rite faithful, either to Orthodoxy - if it still existed - or to unbelief in reaction to what they see as the arbitrary abolition of what they held sacred). Benson simply and uncritically reflects the widespread belief of his time that the Roman rite was self-evidently superior and the abolition of local uses an unalloyed good. (I might add that I have seen the same view - the idea that the abolition of local uses in France and Spain in favour of the Roman rite was an unalloyed blessing - put forward by an ICKSP priest in some recent articles in CATHOLIC VOICE. This is very dangerous ground, both because the centralisation of liturgical authority in Rome was one ofthe things that made possible the remarkably harsh and arr ogant manner in which the TR/EF MAss was suppressed after 1969-70 and the NO/OF imposed, and because opponents of the continued existence of the TR/EF often use similar arguments about the need for liturgical uniformity in favour of their views).
(3) The weakest point in LORD OF THE WORLD, it seems to me, is the hero's formation of a new religious order called the Order of Christ Crucified. We are told that it is approved and spreads within remarkable rapidity and that its members play a prominent and heroic part in the wave of persecutions and martyrdoms inaugurated by Antichrist - but the action described takes place within a period of MONTHS. How could the Order's constitutions be approved and disseminated, and members undergo their spiritual formation in the numbers presented, in such a short time? Comparison with the Jesuits (who appear to be the model Benson has in mind) will bring this out. I suspect that Benson has been carried away in his emotional identification with his hero, wishes to exalt his role even more than the plot requires, and thus makes him a major religious founder on a par with SS Benedict, Francis, Dominic and Ignatius although Benson is utterly incapable of portraying such a person. The hero's foundation of the Order of Christ Crucified also serves a plot function in that it accounts for his summons to Rome and speedy ecclesiastical preferment. One problem that this raises is IMHO that the qualities of such a founder are generally incompatible with high formal ecclesiastical office - St Alphonsus Liguori, I believe, was not particularly successful as a diocesan bishop.
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Post by assisi on Feb 16, 2011 20:31:15 GMT
Just a quick reference to another apocalyptic novel 'Father Elijah - An Apocalypse' by Canadian Catholic writer Michael D O'Brien.
This book has many similarities with Robert Benson's 'Lord of the World': a protagonist wrestling with his faith in a hostile secular world, a wise and suffering Pope and an antichrist who influences by charm, seduction, intelligence and intellect. Unlike 'Lord of the World' O'Brien's 'Father Elijah' is not set in the future but in 1999, where the Church sees it's followers gradually moving over to the 'neo-monism' of the President/Antichrist.
The book itself is entertaining, a good story and has good passages of theological discussion, particularly the argument about good and evil, belief and disbelief that arises between Father Elijah and an old evil dying Polish Count Smokrev.
There are some slightly contrived literary devices such as the wise cracking English Monsignor who is a foil to the serious minded Father Elijah and the baggage he carries (Fr Elijah, a convert from Judaism lost his family in the Holocaust and would later lose his wife) but all in all I would recommend this as an entertaining and intelligent read.
As regards the apocalyptic suggestion of the novel O'Brien refers to his version in his introduction:
"For John (author of Revelation) the 'end times' begin with the Incarnation of Christ into the world, and there remains only a last battle through which the Church must pass".
If I had to choose between 'Lord of the World' and 'Father Elijah' I would plump for 'Lord of the World' as I thought it the more original of the two and it had a better ending. To be fair to O'Brien, the 'Father Elijah' novel is one of a series of novels - Children of the Last Days - he has written and may be better judged in the context of these other novels.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 17, 2011 22:04:12 GMT
I have read FATHER ELIJAH - it has a significant emotional punch at first reading but how much of this is due to the subject matter? The stronger points include the discussion of the motivation of the forces of Antichrist (they see themselves as advancing an universal ethic and spirituality and justify their murders and/or mistreatment of opponents on the grounds that the latter are holding back mankind's spiritual progress by blindly clinging to outmoded particularisms. If you think this sounds like a hostile view of Hans Kung's major intellectual/spiritual project, you might be right.) THe weaknesses include the fact that the hero does not come across as sufficiently Jewish - any Jew who converts to Christianity will be seen by many fellow Jews as having gone over to the traditional persecutors of his people (I can think of instances of Jewish converts to Christianity whose records are fully as illustrious as Father Elijah's who experienced such attitudes) yet this perception never seems to impinge on Fr Elijah at all (even to dismiss it). It also has the weakness of a novel based on headlines, which is that it is rapidly outdated by events. In FATHER ELIJAH John Paul II is Pope during the last days, with Cardinal Ratzinger as his faithful shadow - this has certainly been outdated by events. (Perhaps this is addressed in the novel where the young Elijah discusses life and faith with the Polish Catholic who is sheltering him during the Holocaust.) Here is a link to a review of another CHILDREN OF THE LAST DAYS novel which gives a plot summary and discusses its relationship to traditional apocalyptic beliefs and contemporary American politics. John J Reilly has reprinted it in a selection of his very interesting essays, which you can buy from XLibris.com by following the links on the page. www.johnreilly.info/eots.htm
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 17, 2011 22:54:47 GMT
I have just seen the new film adaptation of Graham Greene's novel BRIGHTON ROCK. I saw the 1940s version (with Richard Attenborough as the former altar-boy turned murderous gangster Pinkie Brown) some years ago, though I have never read the original novel. I will try to read the novel and post on it in the near future. In the meantime, I will make one point about the two films. The older version was made by people who had a sense of the implications of belief in eternal salvation or damnation, whether or not they themselves believed in it. The newer version does not really have a sense of this, so it ultimately fails to hang together - in particular it waters down the malevolence of Pinkie, and it unintentionally endorses the worldview of his nemesis Ida - even though the central point about Greene's portrayal of Ida is that she is heading for Hell just as much as Pinkie, except that Pinkie realises his position and she does not. [Greene's implied view that this makes Pinkie morally superior to Ida is highly questionable, but seeing the muffed version of her portrayed in the new film makes me realise what a nasty piece of work the older film's Ida - whom I suspect is basically Greene's Ida - really is, and how completely the new film fails to grasp this.]
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 18, 2011 23:08:03 GMT
I have been thinking a bit more about the reasons why the new Roland Joffe film of Graham Greene's BRIGHTON ROCK has gone off the rails (compared to the older Boulting Brothers film; I have not read the novel though I know a little about it). The odd thing about the new film is that it maintains albeit in a much-diluted version the Greenean sense of damnation, but what it completely misses out is the Greenean sense of God's grace which is intimately connected to Greene's emphasis on human depravity. At the end of the story the gangster Pinkie Brown, who has seduced a girl because she could give evidence about a murder he committed, has died a horrible death after trying to murder her under cover of a supposed suicide pact. The girl, who thinks he genuinely loved her, and has decided that if the man she loved has gone to Hell she wants to go there too, is eventually persuaded by a representative of the Church - an old priest in the novel, a nun in the 1940s film - that if he really loved her this might have opened a channel of grace and allowed his last-minute repentance, and that she can help him by repentance and prayer for his soul. In the novel it is implied that she is about to discover that he did NOT really love her, and that she would have damned herself for an illusion; in the first film an accident leaves her with the illusion that he did really love her, but it is implied that this represents divine intervention to preserve her from damning herself as Pinkie wanted. In the new film there is no sense that the Church might play a mediating role in transmitting grace, or even that grace is necessary - the representatives of the church are portrayed very unsympathetically, and though it is perfunctorily suggested that the accident which keeps the girl from discovering that Pinkie really loathed her represents divine intervention, this is seen only as a means of maintaining some personal happiness; there is no sense that it might help to get her right with God, or that it is important to do so. Part of the reason behind this, I think, is that the dominant narrative of modern popular culture is liberation or self-empowerment through liberation from external constraints and obligations- Prometheanism. Pinkie is portrayed in conjunction with the developing youth culture of the early 1960s, as if to say that had he only lived a couple of years later, had he not been constrained by poverty, all would have been well - that he can be seen as one of the last victims of a decaying old order which is about to be swept away by the tides of history. (A bit like the girls in the film THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, even). This glosses over the extent to which Pinkie is a cold-blooded multiple murderer, sexual sadist, and wife-torturer. (Indeed,. one might even think of Pinkie's psyche as resembling that of a certain type of clerical sex abuser; such people also tried to bind their victim to them by a perverted form of religious mysticism, a sense of shared guilt, and belief that they were initiates of a dark mystery which only those who experienced it could understand.) The original story on the other hand is Faustian - it postulates a transcendent moral order (which Pinkie believes in as much as anyone else, though he rebels against it). Similarly, the way in which the film portrays Rose's crisis of faith is pretty perfunctory - a few scenes of her praying in church, without even noting what she is saying - and the portrayal of the morning after their wedding night is clearly meant to imply that she experiences the loss of her virginity solely as an act of personal liberation into sexual maturity and not at all as a mortal sin burdening her with guilt and fear of damnation (the character in the novel apparently regards it as both at the saem time). BTW, one interesting touch. In the new film Pinkie says he was a choirboy, but in the older film (and I suspect in the novel as well) he says he was an altar boy and once wanted to become a priest. The latter implies a much more intimate connection to the central mystery of the Mass (it also accounts for the fact that in the novel and the original film Pinkie has a habit of quoting small phrases of Latin, which he would have picked up as an altarboy; the Latin is completely dropped in the new film, possibly because a contemporary audience would be less likely to understand it, though in theory it ought to go quite well with the idea of Pinkie as shaped by an old order about to collapse. I suspect the real reason though is that the audience and probably the makers fo the film do not grasp the concept of there being something essentially mysterious about Catholicism. In Rowan Joffe's [the director, son of Roland] introduction to the novel he expresses bewilderment at Pinkie's quoting Latin - the idea that he could have picked up Latin phrases as an altar boy never occurs to Joffe because the Latin Mass is so far outside his experience.) [My blunder - the foreword is actually by JM Coetzee though the basic point that Pinkie's Latin catchphrases were picked up at Mass still stands)
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Post by assisi on Mar 4, 2011 21:51:29 GMT
A nice little short story worth checking out is ‘Death in Jerusalem’ by William Trevor. I came across the story in the ‘Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories’ edited by William Trevor himself – I presume he sees something in this short story as it is the only one of his in the collection.
I rate Trevor as a good writer and a keen observer of human character. He has a reputation of writing about people on the verge of society, the lonely, the alienated, and the insecure. This short story is indeed sad and poignant. It involves two brothers, one a colourful priest conducting tours of the Holy Lands with a liking for a drink and the other the solid brother who stayed at home with his mother in Ireland. When the priest eventually talks his brother into a trip to the Holy Lands something happens at home. ..
When I was looking into Trevor’s life and background I came across a transcript of an interview Trevor did with John Tusa of the BBC. An interesting excerpt:
JOHN TUSA : ...Protestant parents, though one coming from the North, one from the South. Does this make you, in the Irish context does this make you a Protestant writer?
WILLIAM TREVOR : No I don't think so no, I don't think so, I don't think writers belong anywhere in terms of religion or indeed terms of nationality. I, I think we just write. I don't feel writing about, about Ireland is because I know Ireland so terribly well and I like doing it through the other end of the telescope, as it were, not doing it on the spot. I would find it very difficult if I lived, still lived in Skibbereen I think to write about County Cork and that sort of thing so I, it's easier. I, I can't explain any of it, it's, and I don't really want even to think about it very much, but I certainly don't think that I could be called a Protestant writer in any sense.
JOHN TUSA : I'll try it the other way round, do you think that you would be a different writer if you had been a Catholic, an Irish Catholic?
WILLIAM TREVOR : No I don't think so. I think I would have been, I would have been quite, I think I would have been very similar. I think one of the things which you do as a writer is you, you have to get into the, literally into the skin of your characters and I, I creep into the skin of many a Catholic in my time, in my writing, and I, I have great sympathy with the Catholic Church incidentally. I'm, I'm more of a Catholic than a Protestant now if I'm anything at all, and I don't, I don't really feel those divisions any more than really I feel that in literary terms the division between Ireland and England. I, I'm a huge admirer of English literature. I read it all the time. I just don't, I just don't feel they're there. I feel that writers, writers of fiction do belong in a no man's land some place and I, I certainly feel I do.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 11, 2011 12:22:56 GMT
Several of Trevor's recent stories depict very sympathetically the sufferings of priests who are falsely accused of child abuse or who feel that their whole ministry and life has been overshadowed/discredited/called into question by the crimes of their confreres, and suggest that the survival of the Church of Ireland as a minority offers hope for the Catholic future. That said, the impression I get from Trevor's writing (and I have read a good deal of it) is that he is fundamentally an atheist whose theme is unredeemed and absurd human suffering, and he sees religious belief as good when it offers people an anodyne to bear that suffering. The possibility that it might be more than an anodyne is implicitly ruled out, perhaps because he feels that to do so would be to deny or wish away the reality of suffering. I haven't read his more recent books (over the last 10 years or so) so perhaps he may have changed a bit - but even if he has not he is still a fine writer.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 8, 2011 10:41:57 GMT
A couple of belated thoughts about FATHER ELIJAH and DAWN OF ALL: (1) I suspect the heretic theologian in DAWN OF ALL is inspired by Fr George Tyrell. Tyrrell was a very sensitive spiritual guide and was genuinely loved by many of his penitents and colleagues, who were bewildered at his slide into heresy; Benson might have met Tyrrell himself and would certainly have met people who knew him, and this would account for the strongly sympathetic portrayal of the heretic. This, of course, makes all the more chilling Benson's conclusion that the only right and proper way to deal with such a person is to put him to death.
(2) One point that ought to be emphasises in discussing FATHER ELIJAH is that its portrayal of John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (not by name, but everyone can tell who they are) appeals to the "naive monarchism" of many conservative and traditionalist Catholics. "Naive monarchism" is a phenomenon often found in peasant societies ruled by monarchs; the peasants assume the king is all-wise and all-just but his good intentions are frustrated by evil ministers and by local aristocrats and noblemen, and it is not unknown for peasant revolts to present themselves as rebelling in the name of the king against his evil advisers. In the same way, FATHER ELIJAH presents a loving, orthodox and benevolent Pope who is nonetheless surrounded by evil advisers within the Curia who have taken over the vital channels of the Church administration and purge orthodox clerics and papal loyalists therefrom, so that the ordinary faithful are cut off from the Pope and from each other whiel the Pope is powerless to exert his will or to asist the ordinary faithful. This is very much how most conservative and many traditionalist Catholics see the Church and it hass a good deal of truth in it - the liberals are extremely successful at taking over the Church bureaucracy and repllicating themselves within it while excluding or forcing out those who might think differently, the modern Popes have generally had considerable personal accomplishments and virtues, and it is right to revere the Papal office. Nonetheles it is an oversimplistic and idealised view, projecting perfection onto the Pope. The Radtrad view of the Papacy begins with a realisation of this - that the Pope is after all responsible for the governance of the Church, that it is his appointees in many instances who have messed up etc - and they respond by going overboard in the other direction and demonising the Pope. The sedevacantist view that the Pope is not really a Catholic is an extreme example of this - they still assume the Pope must be perfect, therefore if he is not perfect he is not Pope. Malachi Martin's Pope fiction is avariant on this in that he ostentatiously praises the Pope while insinuating that he deserves only contempt - that charlatan thus preys on the conservative traditionalist''s uneasy awareness of the difference between their idealised view of Popes as perfect and the awareness that they are not in fact perfect in every way.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 8, 2011 11:12:53 GMT
Here is an interesting article about the increasing lack of serious treatment of religious belief in European art cinema, by Philip Jenkins - as always worth reading to get a sense of what's going on in the world: EXTRACT If the Vatican ever tore itself away from its present troubles long enough to compose a similar list [to its 1995 recommended films list], I wonder if its clerics could find a comparable range of offerings. The question resonates far beyond the world of film trivia. Some 50 or 60 years ago, the great filmmakers treated religious themes seriously and placed those themes firmly on the cultural landscape. These auteurs created brilliant studies of Christian sanctity, and sometimes presented the churches and their clergy in heroic roles (like the indomitable Resistance priest in Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Open City). While these films might have been critical of orthodoxies or hierarchies, they presented Christianity as something demanding respect and inquiry [even if the auteurs themselves were finally unbelievers like Ingmar Bergman or Luis Bunuel, and concluded faith was untenable or misguided, they nonetheless saw the question as important - HIB]. Faith mattered. But what would a culturally literate person take from European films made in the past decade or so? One major problem is the lack of films that address mainstream or institutional religion as opposed to general "spirituality." Looking only at films with a particular ecclesiastical setting, one finds a simple and almost uniform message: the church is a model of organized hypocrisy, dedicated to the repression of individual freedom, above all in sexual matters.... [Cites examples of perverted clerics in various recent films, including THE MAGDALEN SISTERS] The apparent evils of Christianity are not confined to explicit sexual abuse. Churches also conspire to rape the mind. The Danish production Worlds Apart (2008) describes a teenage girl brought up in the Jehovah's Witnesses faith but ostracized when she tries to live the life of an ordinary young European. As a study of life in a strict religious sect, the film is excellent, but it stands out as one of the very few treatments of everyday Christian life of any kind in contemporary Europe. [It seems from this that the film is bleakly straightforward about the emotional cost both to the individual psyche and in terms of broken family ties and friendships involved in leaving a rigorist sect, as compared to films such as the British SON OF RAMBOW and the Northern Irish THIS IS THE SEA in which characters who have been brought up in the ultra-strict Exclusive Brethren abandon it almost instantly on exposure to modern popular culture without any apparent doubts, guilt, or ambivalence - HIB] In Europe, far more than in the U.S., religion appears in cinema as a problem, and the solution to that problem is usually liberated sexuality. Consider the 2000 film Chocolat: it was set in a grossly repressed Christian village, and the two adjectives are close to synonymous.
If modern Europe has produced major Christian films, their settings are so exceptional that they can have little relevance to ordinary religious practice. One personal favorite of mine is the 2006 Russian film The Island, a biography of a fictional Orthodox monk, a charismatic saint of immense spiritual power. ... Equally neomedieval was Into Great Silence, a visually stunning 2005 documentary about the lives of French Carthusian monks. The recent Vision explored the life of Hildegard of Bingen. Like The Island, these films were critically acclaimed, but what does that reception say about contemporary attitudes to faith? Religion, it seems, may be a vital and transforming force, but it is the preserve of highly trained mystics dedicated to life apart. Religion is a matter for trained professionals. Ordinary people are firmly being told: don't try this at home. [This might be applied to OF GODS AND MEN as well; one feature which the everyday piety of the Algerian Muslims and the life of the monks have in common is that the everyday viewer will not see these as something which might be emulated in their own world but as something exotic - HIB.] END
www.faqs.org/periodicals/201102/2277062181.html
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Post by assisi on May 13, 2011 10:37:34 GMT
Anthony Burgess, English novelist and lapsed Catholic, although best known for ‘Clockwork Orange’, wrote what is considered his ‘magnus opus’ Earthly Powers in 1980. At over 600 pages in length you might want to take time to decide whether this is going to be worth embarking upon; my view would be that there are probably better uses for your time.
The novel is the story of the old populist author Kenneth Toomey looking back at his life, touching on the two world wars up until his final old age back in England. As a homosexual he describes the relationships he has had in his life – the opening scenes of the book encompass much of these relationships, the bitchiness and vitriol of the younger partner towards the old author as the younger man grows tired of the older man. At one point Toomey states that all such relationships are doomed to failure. Indeed this is one of the negative factors of the novel, the cruelty of these interchanges are ugly but are expressed in the erudite and learned language of Toomey (Burgess was considered a polymath) – but the graphic allusions, puns and double entendres, although clever in their attempt at humour, cannot hide the underlying despair of the situation.
One of the constant threads in the novel is Toomey’s encounters with an eventual in-law, the priest Carlo Campanati who is destined to become the Pope. Campanati is portrayed as a gambler and a sensualist who loves his food and drink. As he grows older he develops into a populist and ‘progressive’ Pope. However in the novel Campanati’s religion is shown to be over optimistic and comically misinterpreted in Africa. Religion again raises its head in the latter half of the novel as Toomey’s niece is kidnapped by a Waco style sect in America led by a charismatic madman who tries to kill all his disciples as he make his escape. In the novel Toomey doesn’t see salvation in Religion. Neither does he see it in his homosexual relationships. He encounters the evil of Nazism first hand. He falls foul of most of his own family as well as his inlaws. His lifestyle is unsettled but priveleged as he lives in England, Malta, USA, Italy, Asia and North America as a monied Englishman. He is rarely without a drink in his hand.
It is worth mentioning again the style of this novel. Burgess use of language is classical, erudite and full of multilingual references. For example He will describe in detail what is on the menu during a scene in a restaurant. There will be references to philosophers, historical figures, cultural and social movements. There are semi humorous references to the other literati that he meets during his life including Kipling, ‘Jimmy’ Joyce, Hemmingway and Somerset Maugham. Some of this comes across as quite dated now. But it is hard to avoid the feeling that this type of writing is an indulgent vehicle to demonstrate Burgess’ intelligence and wide reading, rather than it adding anything substantive to the novel itself. In fact it is harder to pick out the more meaningful and observant passages from this novel simply because of the tendency of Burgess to fill the books with quips.
If there is anything positive to come out of the novel it is probably to be found in the recurring reaction Toomey has to words such as home, duty and faith. These simple words reduce him to tears when they are mentioned in the novel. His brother Tommy, who dies before Toomey, is alluded to in saintly terms because of his simplicity and humour and lack of cynicism. Toomey’s only lasting love in the novel is a platonic love for a Doctor in Malaysia who dies quite young. Is Burgess saying that the circus of Earthly Powers such as fame, power, politics, careers, sex, family dynamics , food, alcohol etc. that the protagonist Toomey experiences in abundance, is not fulfilling and satisfying? Is he also saying that any proximity to happiness and virtue to be found resides in a more simplistic life where the values of faith, duty and home predominate? Probably so, but you get the impression that Burgess and his protagonist Toomey will always be destined to follow the paths of the Earthly Powers.
Finally, if as a Catholic you are looking for inspirational works, then I would not recommend this book.
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Post by hibernicus on May 20, 2011 14:57:10 GMT
An interesting minor point - a HBO series based on the fantasy novels of George RR Martin and made in Northern Ireland is currently being screened. Martin is often praised as resembling Tolkien. Having browsed the novels I would say the man has talent but I would certainly not recommend them (largely because of graphic sexual content). He does make a valid point in his portrayal of the dark side of mediaeval politics and mediaeval warfare - Tolkien was after all a professor of mediaeval literature, which is about the ideals mediaeval man subscribed to rather than the way they actually behaved, and much idealisation of the Middle ages is based on assuming everyone subscribed to codes adn beleiefs which were promulgated precisely to try to restrain the actual behaviour of knights and nobles (think of football hooligans with swords and very little legal restraint, and the result is uncomfortably like certain features of mediaeval life...) I might add that tolkien was not a naif - he had been a soldier in WWI, he was in a long unhappy marriage, he lost his parents when he was young, he was a great linguist whereas martin is a mediaeval history buff & TV scriptwriter (and it shows...) I might add that the black/white, good/evil imagery of Tolkien can be and has been perverted by fascists and racists, though Tolkien himself would not have liked this The big difference though really struck me when I saw that Martin has often expressed the view that the big mistake in LORD OF THE RINGS is Gandalf's not staying dead. This is not just a literry issue, because it reflects a fundamental difference in how they see the universe. Tolkien, though in many ways a very sorrowful man, lived in hope of the resurrection; Martin's unvierse is ultimately one of despair. This is the difference between Christian hope and modern atheism, and yet modern Ireland, and the modern world, is rushing to reject that hope and embrace that despair. It's like the point I made in my post on the new BRIGHTON ROCK movie - the makers seem to feel even more revulsion at grace and hope than at the possibility of Hell. ADDENDUM - I have since discovered that George RR Martin is a former cradle Catholic turned militant atheist, apparently as a result of Comparative Religion a la Joseph Campbell and discovering the difference between idealised images of the Middle Ages and their reality. I suspected this was the case from various signs - for example, one of the more rebarbative characters in the series, who has a habit of burning people alive as a sacrifice to his god, uses an emblem resembling the Sacred Heart.
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Post by assisi on Jun 6, 2011 20:46:13 GMT
I always had Dean Koontz categorised in my mind as a poor man’s Stephen King having read one of his books alongside all the early Stephen King works. He has written many novels but ‘Odd Thomas’, the first of a series of four dealing with this character, is worth a read.
As regards Catholicism Koontz Wiki entry says:
Seeing the Catholic faith as a contrast to the chaos in his family, Koontz converted in college because it gave him answers for his life, admiring its "intellectual rigor" and saying it permits a view of life that sees mystery and wonder in all things. He says he sees the Church as English writer and Roman Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton did. Koontz notes that spirituality has always been part of his books, as are grace and our struggle as fallen souls, but he "never get on a soapbox".
In Odd Thomas Koontz doesn’t preach yet the novel is clearly told within a broad simplistic Catholic perspective. The character of Odd Thomas can see the dead and other spirits and the story flows from this. He is a person with a dubious gift but one that he uses to bring justice and to try to save others.
The novel itself is an easy read and is told in a laconic and casual way, and like much of his rival Stephen King’s work, is set in the small town America of diners, cars, fast food, beer, guns, shopping malls and rock music. In these small towns you invariably find the decent working people of good character alongside the solitary psychos so beloved of the States.
As stated before, Koontz doesn’t preach but the character of Odd Thomas expresses the occasional inner thoughts, for example:
Most people desperately desire to believe they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous.........
This is an entertaining and enjoyable horror story if you like that genre. The good news is that the book is due to be filmed as a movie in 2012. The bad news is that the Director’s previous movies include The Mummy and Van Helsing which would tend to mean that the movie adaptation will concentrate on the special effects.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 21, 2011 20:04:20 GMT
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