Khanya blog has moved
This blog has moved
In future I will be blogging at:
Notes from underground
This is because since February 2020 WordPress has become extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to use. For details see here: Notes from underground: Reviving an old blog because WordPress is broken.
I originally started blogging at WordPress because the Blogger editor was broken. Now it has been fixed, and WordPress is broken. If the people at WordPress ever get around to fix I may return to blogging here.
Fortunately the existing posts can still be read, so I will still refer to them from time to time, and links to them from other sites should still work.
Back in the USSR
I’ve just finished reading two books on Russia, well, actually the old USSR, set 30 years apart — one in the 1960s, and the other in the 1990s when the USSR was falling apart.
One was Journey into Russia by Laurens van der Post, and the other was The Golden Horde by Sheila Paine.I read them together because I wanted to get a picture of how life in Russia had changed from when it was under Bolshevik rule, and immediately afterwards. I myself visited Russia in the 1990s, roughly at the same time as Sheila Paine, but didn’t travel more than 100 km from Moscow, and wanted to learn what other parts of the country were like, in part as background for a book I am writing, a sequel to my children’s novel Of wheels and witches, and partly because I enjoy reading travel books.
Journey into Russia and The Golden Horde are both travel books written by foreigners, from a British point of view. Laurens van der Post was originally South African, but had become thoroughly Anglicised by the time he wrote this book, though he uses his African background to compare Russian and Western culture as he experienced them.
Laurens van der Post wrote at the height of the Cold War, when media propaganda in the West tended to present the USSR in the worst possible light. “Even more than these cartoon inaccuracies what alarmed me on my travels were the factors of impersonalization and dehumanization in the pictures countries painted for themselves of other nations.”
So one of his purposes was to get behind the dehumanising Cold War rhetoric and to present Russians as human beings rather than as collective abstractions.
I could understand possibly that a nation might be tempted to bomb a country which it regarded as filled with dire monsters. But I firmly believed the temptation could be resisted the moment it saw the potential enemy as people like itself.
How well does van der Post succeed in this aim?
In his travels he tries to find out what what makes Russians tick, and he concludes that Russians have a collective mentality that differs from Western individualism. Bolshevism does not on its own account for this, and it goes back a lot further in Russian history, The institution of the collective farm, so common in Russia in the 1960s, can be traced back to the pre-Marxist tradition of the Mir.
That he approaches Russians from the point of view of Western individualism also shapes his perception of them, and I think this is over-simplified; back in the 1930s Stalin forced collectivisation on peasants who strongly resisted it, and one result was that millions died of starvation.
Van der Post concludes from this that Russians, like the African societies he grew up among in South are primitive, in contrast to the civilised societies of the West. “The Russians are naturally a communal people because they are basically a primitive people; and primitive man is naturally collective.”
But van der Post himself acknowledges that his view is over-simplified, when he says,
As a working oversimplification I would suggest that the primitive is a condition of life wherein the instinctive, subjective and collective values tend to predominate; the civilized condition of life is where the rational, objective and individual take command. Throughout history the two have been at one another’s throats because it appears that the value of one depends on the rejection of the other and this Jacob and Esau theme has been played out between the nations and cultures of the world with the reconciliation of the brothers not yet in sight.
Sixty years ago such terminology was common, but now it has generally changed. What van der Post calls “civilized” we now refer to as modern, and what he called “primitive” we are more likely to refer to as “premodern”. Postmodernity allows us to have a different perspective. But around the time that van der Post was preparing his book for publication I was reading, and strongly influenced by, two books that seemed to be making a similar point, The primal vision and The secular city. There’s more about them at Christianity, paganism and literature (synchroblog) | Notes from underground.
Where I think van der Post’s thesis breaks down is that Bolshevism was essentially a modern project. The Bolsheviks sought to modernise Russia, and complete what Peter the Great had started.
Sheila Paine, in The Golden Horde seems to be looking for the primitive of thousands of years earlier. Her book, however, is far more confusing than van der Post’s. Perhaps that’s because it’s more instinctive and subjective. One gathers that she is travelling the former USSR just after it broke up looking for triangular embroidered amulets with three pendants. She never explains why she is looking for them, perhaps because she wrote an earlier book on the topic and assumes that all her readers have read that one too.
As a travel book I thought it was pretty good, with some lyrical descriptions of places she visited, and giving a good impression of post-Soviet Russia and Central Asia. But while the descriptive bits of scenery are good, the narrative bits are poor and confusing.
One example of the confusing narratives is that in four or five widely separated parts of the book (when she is in different places), she tells of being mugged and beaten. It is not clear where or when this mugging took place, or indeed if it was one incident or several.
She gives a rather confused and garbled picture of Orthodox Christianity, which Sheila Paine seems to have made little effort to understand more than superficially. On two occasions she joins groups of Orthodox pilgrims on boat trips along rivers, and attends Holy Weeks services on a Greek island, but her accounts of those are very garbled indeed.
Her description of her own search for amulets is the most garbled and confusing of all.She develops theories about the embroidery and amulets she is looking for, and then abandons them, but doesn’t explain why she abandoned them, perhaps because she had failed to explain why she adopted them in the first place, or even what they were. At one point she compares central Asian embroidery with Bulgarian embroidery, assuming that the reader is familiar with Bulgarian embroidery and therefore will know exactly what she is talking about.
Laurens van der Post also attended Orthodox services, in the far more restrictive period when Krushchev was in power, but even though, like Sheila Paine, he was an outsider at a time when accurate information was much harder to come by, he seems to have had a better understanding of what he was seeing. Sheila Paine went on two boat trips, each lasting several days, in the company of Orthodox pilgrims. Laurens van der Post attended a few services in big cities, in the company of an (atheist) translator employed by Intourist, the official Soviet government tourist agency. Yet he manages to look beneath the surface of events his guide dismisses as rubbish:
The Russians made their conversion to Christianity a sublimation of their finest primitive qualities. The emphasis was on the collective values of religion, on the unifying aspects, the capacity of “bringing together” of Christianity. The Russian word for church of “Sobor” which in the first place means “gathering”, and “Sobornost” (“togetherness”) is one of the most meaningful of all Russian words and the quintessence of what the church tried to promote. It served a vivid primitive instinctive sense of communion in men not only with one another but also mystical participation with all life.
Laurens van der Post has a point; Russia never went through the three key events of modernity — the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In that sense it was premodern, and van der Post saw Russians through the eyes of Western modernity. But sixty years later we can see things in a different, and perhaps postmodern perspective, seeing both van der Post and the contemporary Russians through postmodern spectacles. Doing that enables us to make a distinction between “communal” on the one hand, and “collective” on the other. Communalism, “sobornost”, is essentially premodern, a communion of persons. “Collective” on the other hand, is modern, and implies an undifferentiated mass.
Van der Post recognised this to some extent when he wrote:
It was no good pretending that these people did not feel cheated. The revolution had worked a confidence trick on them all. They had revolted in order to have the land to themselves. But no sooner was the revolution consolidated than a far more inflexible landlord, the State, had taken it away from them again in the name of collectivization. And, judging by the show pieces I saw, there were few farmers in charge of farms. Party secretaries, accountants and factory foremen were the types one usually found in positions of command.
I suspect that in the old premodern communal farms of the Mir the ones in charge were farmers. In the new modern collective farms of the Bolsheviks those in charge were not farmers but bureaucrats. And that is why the peasants resisted Stalin’s forced collectivisation.
And perhaps we can see much the same development in the “State-owned Enterprises” (SOEs) in South Africa. The old Electricity Supply Commission (ESC, Escom) was run by electrical engineers; the new SOEs are run by bureaucrats. The essence of modernity is a world run by and for MBAs.
Christopher Tolkien, Curator of Middle-earth, Has Died, and a Letter from His Father
Many words have been written about the death of Christopher Tolkien, and I don’t feel like adding to them. I just draw your attention to these.
As last evening tilted towards nighttime in my part of the world, my social media feeds began filling with the news that Christopher Tolkien had died. The last living Inkling, Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 Nov 1924 to 15 Jan 2020), may well have been merely an interesting historical note, a minor scholar or writer always overshadowed by his father, J.R.R. Tolkien. And while it is true that his father was the subcreative genius of a vast, sweeping legendarium associated with the bestselling Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien grew to become the literary curator of that world.
For this gift to us, the lovers of Middle-earth and fans of Tolkien’s linguistically rooted mythic worlds, we are ever grateful. Whereas many estates would have been content to leave the bulk of the author’s “unfinished tales” incomplete, Christopher Tolkien left behind a world of medieval scholarship to prepare…
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Another man’s war
Another Man’s War: The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain’s Forgotten Army by Barnaby Phillips
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It doesn’t look like much from the description. It’s the story of an old soldier from the Second World War. So many books have been written about the Second World War — do we need another one, written so long afterwards? The protagonist of this story was not a famous general, or a fighter pilot ace, just an ordinary private from a West African Regiment. Yet I found it a profoundly moving and illuminating story.
Isaac Fadoyebo was born in a small town in Western Nigeria. He was recruited by the British Army, trained as a medical orderly and sent to Burma to be part of the Allied push to retake it from the Japanese. He was wounded in the only real action he saw, and much of the story is taken up with the account of his almost miraculous survival. He returned to Nigeria after the war at the age of 19, and became a civil servant.
Barnaby Phillips has done a superb job of researching Isaac Fadoyebo’s life, and the lives of those who touched his and tells his story in such a way that one learns an enormous amount about the history of Nigeria and of Burma, and of the nature of war itself.
One of the things that struck me was that Isaac Fadeyebo joined the army at the age of 17, as my father-in-law did. We once persuaded my father-in-law to tell his war stories, but he was always reluctant to do so. He joined the army, was captured at Tobruk, was in a POW camp in Italy, from which he escaped and returned home. Another private, another continent, same war.
But where the story of Isaac Fadoyebo illuminated this for me was in the enormous amount of time and resources all this took. Fadoyebo was trained for a year, then despatched by ship to Bombay, travelled by train to Calcutta, and then by ship again across the Bay of Bengal to Burma. All this effort to assemble an army and get it to the right place before a shot had ever been fired.
Isaac Fadoyebo’s unit was there to be just behind the front lines to provide first aid to wounded soldiers before they could be evacuated. Fadoyebo was wounded, and a lot of his colleagues killed, before they ever helped a single wounded combatant. From the point of view of army accountants the entire effort must count as a huge waste of time and money and resources.
But the story of people like Isaac needs to be told, and Barnaby Phillips tells it very well indeed.
From Beats to hippies: the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I probably should have read this book 50 years ago. I’ve known the title for a long time, but I never saw the book before this month. I had read a couple of Tom Wolfe‘s novels, and from the blurbs in those I had become aware that he was the author of this book too, so I pictured it as being like them, a fictional novel about fictional characters. I was rather surprised, then, to see that it was actually a documentary about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, whom I had known had played a role in the rise of the hippies, though precisely what role I did not realise until I read this book.
This may or may not be the actual Prankster bus. In most accounts the name on the front of the actual bus was “Furthur”, not “Further”.
So, having read it, I think I should have read it 50 years ago. I knew vaguely that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had toured around North America in a brightly painted bus, but that was about it. I’d read one of Ken Kesey’s novels, but not been particularly impressed. I had known that the hippies of the 1960s were a more colourful outgrowth of the Beats of the 1940s and 1950s, but had not realised how deeply Neal Cassady was involved in the Merry Pranksters (he drove the bus), even though I had read biographies of him. So it tied up a few links of literary and cultural history for me, and filled in my knowledge of some gaps in the transition.
I was introduced to the Beat Generation and its literature by an Anglican monk, Brother Roger, of the Community of the Resurrection, in 1960, when he read a paper on Pilgrims of the Absolute at a student conference. He guided my reading over the next few years on paths very different from those approved by my university lecturers in English literature.
When I became aware of the emergence of hippies in 1967, the connection seemed obvious, but there was a missing link, which this book supplies. In parts its language seems old-fashioned, more appropriate to the Beats of the 1950s than to the hip[pies of the 1960s. This passage, for example, shows both the difference and the transition. One noticeable difference was that the hippie movement was largely white.
All of a sudden the Negroes are out of the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that Negroes don’t take to LSD. The big thing with spades on the hip scene has always been the quality known as cool. And LSD freaking well blows the whole lead shield known as cool, like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don’t get much of a kick out of the nostalgia for the mud that all the white middle-class kids that are coming to Haight-Ashbury like: piling into pads and living freaking basic…
So one of the differences was that the Beats were cool and the hippies were hot. And one could say that the Beats were black and white, and the hippies were full colour.
But there is also a danger that this book can give a distorted picture of the hippie era. There was much more to it than LSD, though that was the main aspect that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were involved in. Some aspects of it were dealt with in 1968 in Retrospect, which dealt mainly with the student power movements of that year, and made no mention at all of flower power.
There was a brief mention in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test of countercultural Christianity, but it mainly involved “square hip” Unitarians, rather than the kind of countercultural Christianity that would lead to the Punx to Monks and Death to the World movements.
I also noticed some interesting parallels with my own experience. At almost exactly the same time that Ken Kesey snuck across the US border into Mexico, for fear that he would be arrested for possession of marijuana, I snuck across the South African border into UDI Rhodesia, and from there to the UK, for fear that i might be banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. Maybe I’ll write about that some day.
Time travelling historian gets stuck in the past
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I wasn’t expecting much from this book when I took it out of the library — just wanting to make sure i had something light to read when the library is closed over the Christmas holidays. But I was very pleasantly surprised, and found I couldn’t put it down.
The plot is a common trope in science fiction — time-travelling historian goes back to the past to see what happened there and gets more than they bargained for. But in this case it grabs the reader’s attention, and evokes sympathy for the characters, or some of them, anyway.
The year is 2054 and Kivrin, a history student at Oxford, gets permission to travel back to the 14th century to see what life was really like then. Things go wrong, however, and the technician handling the transfer is taken ill and cannot explain the problem. It’s the Christmas vac, so all the other technicians who could deal with it are on holiday, and interdepartmental academic rivalries don’t help. So the history student is in danger of being stranded 700 years away from home.
I might have given it five stars, but there are a few flaws. The pace flags a bit in the middle, and it could probably have been made about a hundred pages shorter without losing anything. There is also a strange mixture of British and American usage and spelling. Perhaps the author intended this to represent the way English had developed by 2054, but much of it feels more like 1954.
A lot of the visions of future technology are rather inaccurate. It was published in 1992, when car phones, if not cell phones, were becoming common, yet the author doesn’t foresee them being used 60 years later. Personal computers and email were also becoming pretty common, especially in universities, by 1992, but people in Oxford in 2054 were spending a lot of time looking for public telephones.
It could have done with a good editor who could spot the inconsistencies of vocabulary and spelling, and tightened up the narrative, especially in the middle where it tended to get bogged down.
But there is an interesting evocation of 14th-century English village life, and in many ways it seemed rather familiar. The parish priest is like many village priests and catechists I’ve met in rural Africa — not very well educated, but faithful in performing his duties and in his care for his flock. And in a sense, he is the real hero of the story. And perhaps that is why I liked this story so much. It is people like him who have kept the Christian faith alive for 2000 years, and it is people like him who will keep it alive for the next 2000 years. We neglect and despise them at our peril.
I remember once visiting a couple of Anglican priests in Limpopo province about 35 years ago (it was then called the Northern Transvaal, or Venda and Gazankulu. There was one old priest, Matthew Nemakhavani, who was half blind, and another, Fr Willie Maluleke, who could not travel round his parish because his donkeys had died in the drought. I suspect that their parishes and their ministries were not all that much different from those of the priest in this story, and one could probably find something very similar in 18th century-Greece, 16th-century Russia, 12th-century Ethiopia and 10th-century Germany.
Missiological musings inspired by Die Derde Oorlog teen Mapoch
Die Derde Oorlog teen Mapoch by Hans Pienaar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Last year at our monthly literary coffee klatsch this book — the title, translated, means The Third War against Mapoch — was mentioned (see Postfiction/Truth? Literary Coffee Klatsch | Khanya), but I didn’t think much more about it until I found a copy in our local library. It turned out to be an amazing and eye-opening book, from which I learnt a great deal, facts both trivial and important.
Among other things I learnt how the town of Roossenekal got its name — two heroes of the first Anglo-Boer War, named Roos and Senekal, on different occasions stuck their heads into caves where members of the Ndzundza (Mapoch) tribe were hiding during the Second War against Mapoch, and had them blown off by snipers within.
I learnt how peach brandy came to be called mampoer — the Second War against Mapoch in 1883 was when the government of the South African Republic (ZAR) made war on the Ndzundza people whom they accused of harbouring a murderer, Mampuru, who had killed his brother and rival ruler of the Bapedi. The ZAR army was made up mainly of mercenaries who had been promised that they could have the land of the Ndzundza people once they had been conquered. They didn’t want (or know how to) farm the land, they were mostly speculators. So when they took over the land, which was planted with peach trees, the only thing they could think of to do with the peaches was make brandy, which they named “Mampoer” after Mampuru.
That story also indicates how the book can help to explain the background to the vexed land question in South Africa today, which is partly about how competent black farmers were dispossessed, sometimes violently as in this case, by incompetent white ones.
The Third War against Mapoch took place a century after the second one, in the 1980s. For all that time the Ndzundza people had no land at all. Their fate was to become landless labourers on land they had previously owned and farmed. Other tribes had “reserves” and “locations” but the Ndzundza people had nothing. When the apartheid government decided to establish the KwaNdebele “homeland” there was therefore a rush, mainly of the landless farm labourers, and its population grew rapidly.
The South African government wanted KwaNdebele to be “independent”, which would mean that most of the people would lose their rather tenuous right to work in South African cities. So the “war” was between the puppet parliament of KwaNdebele and the South African security forces on the one hand, and the tribal leaders of the Ndzundza clan and the people of KwaNdebele on the other.
Hans Pienaar has documented this, and its historical background, extremely well. As I said, I learned a great many things from it. It is not a formal history, and so, rather to my regret, it lacks some things I wish it had — footnotes, an index, and a bibliography. Pienaar explains this in his acknowledgements section, where he refers to his main sources. He says:
This book does not pretend to be a scholarly investigation. It is rather a journalistic report, and not even that, because it includes my own interpretations of a set of facts derived from a wide historical investigation. My own personal experiences were often more important to me than the striving for objectivity (my translation).
It is thus a mixture of many different kinds of book. Chapters of sober history are interspersed with biographies of some of the main characters in the story, and others with information about Pienaar’s own experiences in gathering the material.
So, for example, he not only gives the content of his interviews with Brigadier Lerm, who was in charge of the police in KwaNdebele at the height of the war, and whose main aim at the time was to suppress any opposition to KwaNdebele independence; he also describes the atmosphere of the interviews, right down to a description of the furniture and ornaments in Lerm’s house.
So the book is three genres in one, and in my view that adds to its value and gives the reader a fuller picture. If you want to understand Afrikaner nationalism, and how the ideology of apartheid developed, and how apartheid still affects South Africa today, read it. It’s an excellent account of all this. I’d still like to have had an index and footnotes, though.
In the spirit of Pienaar’s writing, I will also add to my review on GoodReads. There I wrote a more or less straightforward review, but the book is also mingled with my own experiences. I became personally involved in KwaNdebele for at least part of the time, and in reading it I found the story Pienaar was telling was interwoven with my own experiences.
At the end of 1982 I was appointed Director of Mission and Evangelism for the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria, and at one church meeting the Revd David Aphane, who was then Rector of the parish of Mamelodi West, reported on the growth of KwaNdebele. He had tried to hold services for the Anglicans there, but it was growing so fast and in so many directions that he could not cope, since he was also responsible for a large urban parish.
We arranged for David Aphane to lead the diocesan mission committee on a tour of KwaNdebele, which took place on 6 September 1984, and he took us on a long trip which covered several rapidly growing settlements — Ekangala near Bronkhorstspruit, Elandsdoorn near Dennilton, Siyabuswa and Boekenhouthoek. By then it was getting dark, so we could not see Kwaggafontein and Tweefontein, but we counted 320 Putco buses bringing commuters back from working in Pretoria, 90km from Kwaggafontein and 120km from Siyabuswa/Valschfontein.
We developed a plan for church planting in KwaNdebele, which involved bringing the Revd Alphaeus Ndebele from Swaziland, who was a talented evangelist, and working to raise up local ministries in each of the settlements, using the principles of the Anglican missiologist Roland Allen. It was a rather ambitious plan, and it failed, partly because some people in the Diocese of Pretoria did not understand the Roland Allen method, and partly because the Third War against Mapoch was gaining momentum and many of the local communities were in chaos.
Eventually I wrote my masters dissertation in missiology on The iViyo loFakazi bakaKristu and the Anglican mission in KwaNdebele but at the time I wrote it I was not aware of Pienaar’s book, which would have been enormously useful as a source.
One of the first things we did in starting the mission was to conduct community surveys. What kind of people lived in those places. We gathered volunteers from several Anglican parishes in Pretoria, gave them a crash training course, and went to Ekangala one Saturday. We sent out 75 teams of three people. Each team had at least one male and one female, one black and one white. In South Africa in 1985 it was rare for people in a place like Ekangala to be visited by a mixed group of people, but the principle there is that when predictability is low, the impact is high; when predictability is high, the impact is low.
The 75 teams visited 100 homes that Saturday afternoon. We found that most of the families were young couples who had previously been living with their parents on the East Rand (another long commute). They belonged to 50 different denominations, none of which had a church in Ekangala, Only two families had a member working in nearby Ekandustria, the showpiece of apartheid “border industries”. The reason? The wages paid in the factories in Ekandustria were less than the rents in Ekangala. The people who worked in Ekandustria commuted an equally long distance from Kwaggafontein and points north.
Alphaeus Ndebele started holding services in his house at Ekangala, and soon had a large and lively congregation.
So Pienaar’s book didn’t only give me a better understanding of South African history, it gave me a better understanding of my own history.
Theological education and literature
The other day Brenton Dickieson asked an interesting question on Twitter:
Hey lit friends: imagine you are teaching an undergrad intro lit course at
a Bible College to sophomore theology students (Christian worldview
focus).What’s:
1) One essential reading?
2) An outlier–an engaging book that you think would invite students into
discussion?
I posted it to the Inklings mailing list for discussion, and this morning we also discussed it at our literary coffee klatsch. My first thought for the “essential reading”, and also my final conclusion, was Out of the silent planet by C.S. Lewis, for reasons I will explain later. but quite a lot of different things were suggested by various people.
David Levey suggested books by John Updike, “a celebrated novelist and believing Christian who dealt with matters of sexuality as well as issues of faith. His ‘Rabbit’ series should still be obtainable. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country and
Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov would also work well.”
I have never read John Updike, but agree with David about Paton and Dostoevsky.
Several people mentioned Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress.
Tony Zbaraschuk suggested “Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (an examination of justice, forgiveness, chastity, and several other core religious issues). Have them read Samuel Johnson’s essay on this play as an example of one type of literary criticism.”
At our literary coffee klatch we discussed various “churchy” novels, like those of Susan Howatch, whose “Starbridge” series probably makes her the 20th-century Anthony Trollope. Others in that genre could include some by Ernest Raymond, Phil Rickman and Elizabeth Webster, which we had discussed at earlier gatherings.
The trouble with most of these is that they are limited to a particular cultural setting. It could be useful to those training as Anglican clergy to read novels about some of the peculiar temptations of some Anglican clergy in the 20th century, but as the period recedes into the past it becomes less relevant. And non-Anglicans could get hung up on denominational differences — we (Baptists/Methodists/Lutherans.Pentecostals/etc) aren’t like that.
Out of the silent planet takes the discussion out of this world, and into neutral territory, as it were. In South Africa we speak of our ideal as “the rainbow nation”, but Lewis transfers it to a rainbow planet in dealing with issues of multiculturral unity and diversity. Anything earthly tends to be too culturally and temporally specific.
I was also reminded of an experience some years ago when I was in an Anglican parish in Durban North. There were two young women in the adult confirmation class who asked lots of questions, so I gave them Out of the silent planet to read.
A few weeks later they came to a Bible study attended mostly by long-standing church members where we were studying the book of Revelation, and the symbolism of the dragon, the sea monster and the land monster in Revelation 12-13. The old Anglicans looked blank and puzzled and frustrated; it made no sense to them at all. But the faces of the two newcomers lit up, and they said, “It’s all in that book we read” and suddenly they were explaining it all to the rest.
So Out of the silent planet is one of the best works of fiction to stimulate theological discussion and so would be my “one essential reading”.
The question of the “outlier” seems to be more open.
David Levey: “For the outlier I’d do the opposite and go for something which questions Christian faith, so as to get students to think. Very readable is Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (the movie was condemned by the Roman Catholic church). Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and her just-released The Testaments would also fall into this category.”
My own suggestion for this would be Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, or perhaps Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe. My discussion question would be, in the case of the former, “How is the Christian gospel good news in such a society?”. And, in the case of the latter, the same question, but also asking whether those who attempted to present the Christian gospel had actually succeeded in doing so — did they present the true Christ, or merely a caricature?
St Andrew’s Church consecrated in Midrand, South Africa
Nearly seven years ago the foundation stone for St Andrew’s Church was laid in Midrand. It was the first Romanian Orthodoxc Church to be built in Africa. On St Andrew\s Day, 30th November 2019, it was consecrated by His Eminence Damaskinos, the Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria and His Eminence Iosif, Bishop of the Romanian Patriarchate for Western and Southern Europe.
The bishops leave for the consecration of the outside of the church
The Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the Bishop of the Romanian Exarchate of Western and Southern Europe consecrate St Andrew’s Church in Midrand, Gauteng
The bishops and others go in procession round the church, marking the west, south, east and north sides with holy chrism.
The bishops consult over the differences between the Greek and Romaniaqn orders of service
Consecrating a church on a hot summer day is thirsty work
All the ikons inside the church, except those on the ikonostasis itself,. were painted by Fr Justin Venn.
Fr Markos Manyeke, Fr Isajlo Marcovic and Fr Justin Venn (who painted most of the ikons in the church).
The Concert and La Belle Sauvage
At first sight the two books I discuss here seem to have little in common, so perhaps it is mere coincidence that I happened to read them at about the same time that made me see several similarities between them. So here are my separate reviews, followed by some thoughts about them together.
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I quite enjoyed Philip Pullman’s series His Dark Materials, though the third one, The Amber Spyglass was disappointing (my review here: Evangelising atheism: Philip Pullman | Notes from underground).
Then I found a shop with dozens of copies of the prequel, La Belle Sauvage going cheap — they’d clearly over-ordered in the expectation of a rush of demand, like the Harry Potter books, but it didn’t turn out like that. And if the demand was disappointing, so, to some extent, was the book.
The protagonist is eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead, an innkeeper’s son, who loves to spend his free time paddling his canoe, La Belle Sauvage. He often paddles across the river to a convent of Calvinist nuns (don’t ask), who are given a rather mysterious baby, Lyra Belaqua, the later protagonist of His Dark Materials to look after. But others have an interest in this baby, and and clearly do not wish her well.
After prolonged heavy rains the river floods, and Malcolm, aided by fifteen-year-old Alice, the kitchen girl from his parents’ inn, rescues Lyra from the flood, and, swept away by the swollen river, decides to take her to her father’s house in Chelsea. The six of them (three children and their daemons) have various adventures, with dangers and narrow escapes, en route to London.
It’s not a bad story, quite exciting in parts, but after His Dark Materials it falls a bit flat. Pullman’s world-building seems to slip in a number of places. In His Dark Materials one of the attractive things is the different alternative worlds he creates, with greater or lesser divergences from our world. But in La Belle Sauvage he seems to have grown impatient with it, and the history and geography that Malcolm studies at school seem to be the history and geography of our world rather than of Lyra’s world in Northern Lights.
The differences in language are maintained in a perfunctory way, but without consistent explanation. There is an anbaric drill, but no anbaric torches — everyone uses lanterns. Then suddenly an anbaric torch appears, and one wonders why they didn’t use them earlier.
As in Lyra’s world they use “philosophical instruments”, but in Malcolm’s world they are used to achieve “scientific management of resources”. which pricks the bubble of illusion. We are back in Will’s (or our own) Oxford, only without telephones and with people having daemons.
Lyra’s Oxford in His Dark Materials seems to have separated from ours at about the time of the Renaissance and developed in a different way. Malcolm’s Oxford seems less consistent. The sinister church organisations seem Cromwellian, but most of the rest seems modern, with perhaps a few significant differences. The daemons of people are often non-European — lemurs, bushbabies and the like, but their ancestors never are, except perhaps in the case of the gyptians. An odd discrepancy, that.
The Concert by Ismail Kadare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve read a couple of Ismail Kadare’s books before — see Chronicle in stone — book review | Khanya — but the others were set in the time before Albania was ruled by Enver Hoxha, who famously made it, for 27 years, the world’s only truly atheist county.
Albania was almost unique among communist countries in becoming increasingly isolated from the world, including other communist countries. It broke first from the USSR, but for a while maintained friendship with China, but eventually even that friendship dissolved, and during the 1970s Albania’s ties with China loosened and Hoxha came to regard the Chinese, like the Soviets, as “revisionists”.
This novel is set in that period, and shows the effects of the changing relationship with China on families that were mostly fairly close to the centres of power in Albania. Relations between the two countries cooled when Albania crtiticised the Chinese decision to invite US President Nixon to visit China in 1972, and by the time of Chairman Mao’s death in 1976 the break was almost complete. And now, 40 years later, we see China treating African countries in the same way as it treated Albania in the 1970s.
… everyone talked of how work had slowed down on many big construction sites, especially those building hydro-electric plants in the north. This was because of hold-ups in supplies of equipment from China. Freighters now took and unconscionably long time to reach their destination, and when they did arrive they might be carrying the wrong cargo. On two occasions ships had turned back without even entering Durres harbour. All this was said to be part of China’s famous “turn of the screw”. Cafes in Tirana were full of stories about this tactic: no one realized that one day the whole country would be its victim.
The “concert” of the title took place towards the end of this period, where the audience was far more important than the performers, and Albania, like the rest of the world, was watching to see who was invited and who was not, who turned up and who did not.
At the centre of the story is Silva Dibra, a civil servant like her husband Gjergj (whose job takes him on visits to China), their schoolgirl daughter Brikena, Silva’s brother Arian, an officer in a tank regiment who was expelled from the Party for disobeying an order, and her dead sister Ana. It also features several of her work colleagues and friends and associates of Ana. One of her sister’s associates was a writer, who also visited China, The life and work of Albanian writers and artists was restricted. As Kadare puts it:
…people reconciled themselves to the idea that it was going to be a dry autumn. Meanwhile all the other seasonal changes took place as usual: the leaves turned colour, the temperature dropped, the birds migrated. As usual too, painters flocked to headquarters of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union to get their annual permits to concentrate on autumnal themes.
In China, however, the Writers and Artist’s Union had been abolished altogether in the Great Cultural Revolutuon of 1966/67. According to the thought of Chairman Mao, the “new man” did not need art and literature, which were bourgeois by their very nature. Rather than painting autumnal themes, they should be planting and harvesting rice.
Tirana, Albania, 2000
Nevertheless I’m in two minds about the book. Kadare’s descriptions of the Albanian characters grabs me, perhaps because, having lived there for a month, I can picture the streets of Tirana, the beaches of Durres, and the steel factory at Elbasan, which he mentions. But I’m put off by the bits where he tries to describe the thoughts of Chairman Mao. They are racist thoughts, and I wonder if they are the thoughts of a white racist imagining the thoughts of a Chinese racist, or whether Chairman Mao ever did have any thoughts like that. But there is too much that suggests that they are what a white racist imagines a Chinese racist might think.
And in the book the Albanian characters express racist thoughts about the Chinese, as the Chinese do about the Albanians. Of course an author does not necessarily share the sentiments expressed by his characters. But when Kadare is describing the thoughts of Mao while alone in a cave, these are not mediated through a character in the story, but are described directly.
Some comparisons
Both books have descriptions of a surveillance society, with sinister secret or semi secret bodies organising spying on people.
In The Concert the body is Zhongnanhai, which actually exists as a building regarded as the seat of government of China, similar to “the Kremlin” or “the White House”. But in the novel it refers to a secret security agency responsible not to the Party or the government, but to Chairman Mao personally, and they organised for microphones to be distributed widely for such surveillance. That kind of surveillance is not unfamiliar to me; for some of my personal encounters with it, see here.
In La Belle Sauvage, however, such spying and secret arrests are arranged by the Consistorial Court of Discipline (CCD), the secret police of the “Magisterium”, the body that controls the Church in that particular world, which is, apart from a daemons and a few philosophical instruments much more like our world than Lyra’s world of Northern Lights, and it includes the League of St Alexander, an organisation of school children who are encouraged to spy on their parents and teachers.
Now it is possible that similar things may have existed in Cromwell’s England of the 17th century, or under some 15th-century Renaissance popes (Lyra’s world has that kind of atmosphere, but Malcolm’s is far more like 21st century England now). What Pullman is trying to suggest here is that Christians of the 20th and 21st centuries are the spies rather than the spied upon, and trying to smear Christians with the kind of activities that were actually practised by atheistic regimes against Christians.
What actually happened in Hoxha’s atheist Albania was that the teachers would ask the children what they had been eating at home. From their answers they could determine which families were observing Lent, or Easter or Ramadan, and this would be reported to the appropriate authorities. Pullman tried to create the impression that the victims of such actions in the last 70 years are actually the perpetrators, and that the perpetrators are the victims. If you want to know about the real modern-day “League of St Alexander”, I suggest that you read this: Alexander Schmorell – OrthodoxWiki.
Khanya 