The Three-Body Problem

I’ve not seen the show or read the sequels; I’ve read only the first book. It was originally serialized eighteen years ago, so not only am I not flying in with an urgent hot take, I assume this ground has been covered before. Nevertheless I wanted to share a few thoughts about Liu Cixin’s marvelous novel. (Spoilers galore, caveat lector.)

1. I was shocked by two things: first, how openly he writes about the madness and violence of the Cultural Revolution; and second, how spiritual the book is, from start to finish. I understand that Liu is an atheist, but it doesn’t show in the text; both the story and the way it’s told beg to be interpreted theologically.

2. A friend observed that the three-body problem itself—not least when it is pictured, as it is in the book, as three suns dancing around each other in an infinite, unpredictable, dangerous yet beautiful celestial choreography—is as obvious an image of the Trinity as you could imagine. Yet I’m not aware of ever having encountered it as an analogy or illustration before. Three-body perichoresis, anyone? Paging Saint Augustine.

3. I was worried, when Silent Spring appeared early, that the book would adopt an easy eco-radical, misanthropic posture. I was wrong. The narrative is bookended by the late appearance of another book, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and its explicit citation alerts the reader to one of the major themes of the book: the way that sincere and legitimate concern for anthropogenic harms or, more broadly, for the misadventures and evils of humanity—its deep-rooted inhumanity, toward itself and all else—can so easily bleed into hatred for humanity as such, a hatred that justifies far greater inhumane activities than the original offenses that first troubled the conscience. Philanthropy curdles into misanthropy and finally terminates in betrayal of all one ever loved or held dear.

4. This process, which Liu narrates with precision and compassion, is itself a mirror reflection of every totalitarianism, Marxism-Leninism above all. The book, in other words, and whatever Liu’s intentions, is a science-fiction allegory of Chinese communism. Ye Wenjie, the catalyst of every major event in the book, goes from witness and victim of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution to exhausted, listless, post-ideological grudging participant in the regime’s scientific research, to a desperate woman willing to place her hopes in the potential of radical transformation from beyond the capacities of decadent and immoral human civilization, to true-believing Trisolarian ideologist, liar, and remorseless murderer. When she finally meets some of the women who, decades prior, participated in the crazed struggle session and fatal beating of her father, and their soulless eyes and defensive words reveal only pain, not apology, she is looking at her own reflection. The chapter’s title, “No One Repents,” is the perfect summation of where total revolution ends, having begun with wide-eyed good intentions but now drawn, inexorably, to hatred, deceit, madness, and murder—with no regrets.

5. The name Mike Evans gives to his invented ideology—or “maybe you can call it a faith”—is “Pan-Species Communism.” Bingo. It is “a natural continuation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” but in actuality (as he admits) of the French Revolution, which “we haven’t even take a step beyond.” The name of Evans’ ship is Judgment Day, and its single aim is “to invite Trisolarian civilization to reform human civilization, to curb human madness and evil, so that the Earth can once again become a harmonious, prosperous, sinless world.” The ETO’s goal, in short, is a return to Eden and a redemption from sin via otherworldly powers. Once their prayers are answered, they will usher humanity into a utopia, with help from a manufactured exogenous event (=alien invasion). As ever, the advent of utopia cannot come without secrecy, deception, and untold bloodshed. As ever, too, it is not the weak or the powerless who are the agents of utopia’s arrival: it is, as Liu insists over and over again, the elites of academia, technological industry, and the media. (“To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for [common people]. But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.”) These elites are the authors, the Red Vanguard, of a new and greater interstellar cultural revolution.

6. The vaguely named “Lord” heeded, obeyed, revered, and worshiped by members of the ETO is, it seems to me, a stand-in for Mao. An alien Mao, but Mao nonetheless—a conclusion supported by the late chapter offering a kind of window onto Trisolarian civilization and the role of the autocratic “princeps,” his consuls, their top-down control of the planet, and the immediate unsentimental “dehydration” and death penalty for anyone who makes even the smallest of mistakes.

7. Liu includes the following answer in response to an interrogator asking Ye Wenjie why she had such hope for the Trisolarians coming to earth: “If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.” To which the interrogator replies: “Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?” Ye: “…”

8. The single proton unfolded into three dimensions that swiftly reveals itself to be a kind of hyper-intelligent microcosmic civilization—a universal tao or logos embedded in all the logoi of creation, down to subatomic particles—that in turn seeks to destroy Trisolaris but is destroyed first … let’s just say I didn’t expect that scene, and I found it both frightening and sublime. Liu is a theologian, I’m telling you!

9. I’m well aware that Liu “believes in science” and that one reading of this book is that we ought to place our faith in scientific knowledge and development by using it, with true philanthropy, to benefit the whole human race (while remaining pessimistic and prepared for extraterrestrial visitors). This is not the only reading the book is patient of, though, and it’s not mine.

10. I’m eager to read the next two books. I’m also told that Ken Liu’s canonical books within the same world and story are worth reading. I hear that the Netflix adaptation is excellent, but a part of me wants to hold onto the text as text for a while before I allow Benioff and Weiss to replace my imagination with theirs. I’m particularly interested to learn why the Trisolarians don’t use the sophon to make all human beings simply go insane, as Wang Miao almost does within mere hours of seeing the countdown appear in his field of vision. Wouldn’t this remove the problem of human civilization and self-defense a full four centuries before the Trisolarians’ arrival? Just drive everyone mad, let them all die (like the “bugs” they are), then inherit the earth circa AD 2450? What am I missing?

To be clear, I’m sure it’s me. This is a brilliant novelist who deserves every benefit of the doubt. I can’t wait to keep reading.

My latest: on fantasy and theology in The Christian Century

In the latest issue of The Christian Century I have an essay on the divine comedy of epic fantasy, or as the editors titled it, “Gods Who Make Worlds.” It’s ostensibly a review of the final volume of Tad Williams’s quartet The Last King of Osten Ard, which is itself a sequel series to the original trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn—not to mention a prequel, a bridge novel, and a companion volume—for a total of ten books in this world. The name of that world is Osten Ard, and I use the glories of Osten Ard to think aloud about epic fantasy as a genre and its relationship to Christian faith.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

Three decades ago, Tad Williams published the final volume in the best epic fantasy trilogy written in English since The Lord of the Rings. Called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the series ran from 1988 to 1993 and totaled over a million words. Half of those words came in the final book—one of the longest books ever to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

There is no overselling the significance of Williams’s achievement: the biggest names in fantasy in the intervening decades all acknowledge his influence, from Brandon Sanderson to Patrick Rothfuss to Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin. (There is no Westeros without Osten Ard, Williams’s fictional world.) Yet, although Williams is hyper-prolific and widely admired, he has never had the success or name recognition of these other authors. No streaming service has yet broken the bank in adapting Williams’s magnum opus.

Why have these books sold well but never set the world on fire?

Three reasons come to mind…

Click here to read the rest. Thanks again to The Christian Century for letting me write about these books and this topic—a big ask, given my lack of qualifications.

My latest: on pastors’ reading habits, in Sapientia

I’ve got an essay in Sapientia called “The Reading Lives of Pastors.” The prompt was to reflect on Pope Francis’s “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation” and, more broadly, on why pastors should (if they should) include fiction and poetry as part of their regular reading diet. After clarifying at the outset that literature does not per se make you a better person, I write the following:

The fact of literature is in general a human good, in the sense that it is a sign of an advanced culture: symbol, narrative, myth, technology, writing, literacy, communication—these are to be celebrated, granting their capacity to be bent to any number of ends. But the act of wide reading in literature in and of itself entails nothing at all about a person. The voracious reader may be either selfish or selfless, vain or humble, vicious or virtuous, religious or secular, joyful or melancholy, full of life or obsessed with death, a treasured friend or a despised enemy, a cosmopolitan or a provincial, a sage or a boor. Hitler and Stalin may not have been men of letters, but they had men of letters for followers and apologists. The list of wicked writers and artists—who abused women, abandoned children, and passed in silence over the suffering of countless victims—is too long to recount.

It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. More of one does not necessarily lead to more of the other. They are neither directly nor inversely related. The desire for a cleaner, clearer correspondence between them is understandable, but utterly belied by the facts. Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?

Click here to read the whole thing.

2023: reading

Over the last few years I’ve had the goal of inching my way from 100 books annually up to 150. Last year I hit 122. This year I’ll be lucky to finish with 90. What happened?

A passel of 1,000-page novels, is the first answer. Writing and editing not one but two books of my own, is the second. And third is surely some mix of happenstance, fatigue, and time management. So be it. The books I read this year were good, even if I didn’t hit the number I was aiming for. There’s always next year.

The list below does not include every book I read over the last 12 months, just my favorites across a handful of categories. You’ll see that I read a lot of good fiction and nonfiction. Not so much theology! I leave it to readers to decide whether that’s a reflection on academic theology or on me.

Comments and links throughout, as well as promissory notes on reviews that I’ve written but have yet to be published.

*

Rereads

5. Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. I read this when it was in draft form, as the Gifford lectures, but I’d never read the book version cover to cover. I had, and still nurture, the idea of writing an essay putting Tanner and David Graeber together in a theological reflection on work. We’ll see.

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

3. John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Not his very best—that’s A Perfect Spy—but in the top five. Even better on the second time through.

2. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. The beauty still shines in the story and dialogue and characters, but the brutality is more apparent. “A dark tale lightly told” indeed.

1. Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. As I wrote here, this return to the classic trilogy (a million words in all?) was in preparation for the sequel tetralogy (see below). My love for the series, the author, and the prose is unabated. And the narrator for the audiobook is can’t-miss for lovers of Osten Ard.

Fiction

10. Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury. Not a great book, but popular and influential; part of my attempt to read through the canonical authors of American crime fiction.

9. Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount. The framing device is gripping, but I didn’t love the middle. Roberts is always worth reading, though.

8. Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.

7. Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

6. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan. Had never read it; am listening to it now. The narrator is Jim Dale. He’s perfect. It’s a treat when you turn to a classic and immediately understand why.

5. Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo. Finally read the sequel to Lonesome Dove, where McMurtry lays waste at once to beloved characters, “bad fans,” and any remaining trace of romance we may have had with the West. It’s thrilling. And more affecting than I expected.

4. Mick Herron, Slough House. Having read the first two books in the ongoing “Slow Horses” series, I read the next six in the new year, plus a collection of short stories. In the spring I have an essay in The Hedgehog Review on the series as a whole. It’s great, if confused in its politics; as is the TV show starring Gary Oldman.

3. Tad Williams, The Last King of Osten Ard. No missed opportunity here. Williams keeps breaking my heart, but the books are on a par with what came before. I was preparing for the fourth and final book’s release last month … only for it to be delayed by a year. I’m told it’s written, but the publisher chose to delay it. Oh well. I’ll be ready.

2. Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest. No words. Just read it.

1. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. Ditto. When I finished the last page, I had plans to write a long essay comparing Toole to Melville, with Dunces a kind of madcap multicultural New-Orleans-meets-Chesterton Don Quixote for postwar America. Is Ignatius J. Reilly the white whale, a knight-errant, a holy fool, or just a fool? I forgot the answer, probably because I was laughing so hard. The novel is a one of one. Tolle lege!

Poetry

Another down year for my poetry reading. I always re-read Franz Wright, Mary Karr, Marie Howe, Christian Wiman, and Wendell Berry. This year I read some Les Murray and Allen Tate. More next year, I hope.

Christian (popular)

7. Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers.

6. Tish Harrison Warren, Advent: The Season of Hope & Emily Hunter McGowin, Christmas: The Season of Life and Light. I love this new series. Need to snag Epiphany before we turn to Lent and Easter.

5. Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. Is there anything McCaulley can’t do? New Testament scholarship, theological hermeneutics, liturgical devotions, children’s books, NYT op-eds … and now a bracing, moving memoir. There were more than a few moments that took my breath away. Recommended.

4. Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. Immediately added this to the syllabus for my course on discipleship in a digital age. Excellent!

3. Beth Moore, All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir. We all know Beth Moore is a treasure. I suggest listening to her read it. I wept.

2. Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith. Matt is a friend, so I’m biased, but I can’t wait to start giving this book to college students. It’s just what the doctor ordered. And the best thing Matt’s ever written in terms of style. Accessible yet poetic and pious in equal parts. For the brainy or doubting believer in your orbit. (Two-part interview plus podcast discussion over the book.)

1. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Easily a top-5 for 2023 new releases. Here’s my review.

Nonfiction

10. Mark Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization. Review here.

9. Tara Isabella Burton, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians. Review here.

8. John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. Good fun. Not just a joke, though. Gray contains multitudes.

7. Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress.

6. Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide.

5. Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. I sort of can’t believe how good this book is. It needed to be written; it needed to be written by the contributors involved; it needed to be published by Harvard; it needed to be readable, consisting of short entries by a range of theists, atheists, and agnostics. And somehow it was.

4. Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Wrote about this here.

3. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture. To call Murray unique is an understatement bordering on an insult. He died in 2013. We needed his voice more than ever in the decade since.

2. Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. Alongside Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, this is the first book I recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about modern Israel.

1. Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. There’s no one writing today quite like Christian Wiman. My review of his latest should be out in Comment next month. I’ve got a lot to say!

Theology (newer)

7. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything. Ten months ago I wrote a long review of this for Syndicate. I hope it comes out soon so I can finally share it with people!

6. Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions—One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World.

5. Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Every pastor, elder, and church leader needs a copy.

4. Esau McCaulley, Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance: Davidic Messianism and Paul’s Worldwide Interpretation of the Abrahamic Land Promise in Galatians.

3. Jonathan Rowlands, The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon to a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus. I wish I’d had this in hand a dozen years ago; it would have helped immensely. As it is, we have it now, and it’s a must-read for all biblical scholars, historical critics, and theologians interested in reading Scripture theologically, responsibly, and/or historically.

2. Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. See my review in a forthcoming issue of Commonweal.

1. Ross McCullough, Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God. Another biased pick, since Ross is a good friend, but an honest choice nonetheless. One of the best new works of theology in years. The only remotely satisfying treatment of theodicy, compatibilism, determinism, and human/divine agency I’ve ever read. Extra points for being concise and stylish and witty without losing an ounce of substance.

Theology (older)

4. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. What a weird but invigorating book.

3. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Almost unbearably painful, given the way it cuts to the quick. But also full of the deepest consolations. Sometimes it really is Christ addressing you, the reader, by name.

2. Patrick Ahern, trans. and ed., Maurice & Thérèse: The Story of a Love. A window into the heart of Saint Thérèse. Probably the best introduction to her, too. Recommended to me by a friend. A beautiful book. Thanks to the good bishop for putting it together.

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées. We all have gaps in our reading. I’d never (seriously) read Pascal. For the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, I read his most celebrated work. It did not disappoint.

Klosterman, Rowling, and the NFL

Recently I had the chance to sit around a campfire with a bunch of boys aged 6-12. For almost an hour they talked about one thing: Harry Potter. Both the books and the movies. Who had read which books, who had seen which films, who preferred the one to the other, ranking the volumes from one to seven (or eight), and so on. The kids who’d read and seen them all were clearly top dog—they held court over the younglings (though not all the older kids had read them all, apparently a demerit). Naturally, an overeager fourth grader spoiled Dumbledore’s fate for a first grader.

None of these boys were alive when any of the books or the films were first released. The first book came out 26 years ago. The final film came out 12 years ago. They aren’t just second but third wave Harry Potter fans. And they talked about it like it was the most relevant, the most vital, the most up-to-date pop culture matter in the world.

Eavesdropping on their conversation brought to mind a short essay by Chuck Klosterman, published in 2012 on Grantland (RIP). It’s called “The Two Lines That Never Cross.” It’s about the popularity of football in America. For years folks like Malcolm Gladwell were sounding the alarm on concussions, head injuries, and the long-term consequences for adult men’s brains of playing football in their teens and twenties. Readerly parents and good liberals stopped enrolling their boys in Pop Warner. The imminent death of American football seemed inevitable. Like boxing before it, football would go the way of the dodo.

It wasn’t to be. Eleven years ago, Klosterman saw why:

To me, this is what’s so fascinating about the contemporary state of football: It’s dominated by two hugely meaningful, totally irrefutable paradigms that refuse to acknowledge the existence of the other. Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward — that’s what football is like now. On the one hand, there is no way that a cognizant world can continue adoring a game where the end result is dementia and death; on the other hand, there is no way you can feasibly eliminate a sport that generates so much revenue (for so many people) and is so deeply beloved by everyday citizens who will never have to absorb the punishment. Is it possible that — in the future — the only teenagers playing football will be working-class kids with limited economic resources? Maybe. But that’s not exactly a recipe for diminishing athletic returns. Is it possible that — in 10 years — researchers will prove that playing just one season of pro football has the same impact on life expectancy as smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for a decade? Perhaps. But we’ll probably learn about that study during the Super Bowl pregame show, communally watched by a worldwide audience of 180 million people. Will the government have to get involved? I suppose that’s possible — but what U.S. president is going to come out against football? Only one who thinks Florida and Texas aren’t essential to his reelection.

If football’s ever-rising popularity was directly tied to its ever-increasing violence, something might collapse upon itself: Either the controversy would fade over time, or it would become a terminal anchor on its expansion. But that’s not how it’s unfolding. These two worlds will never collide. They’ll just continue to intensify, each in its own vacuum. This column can run today, or it can run in 2022. The future is the present is the future.

So far as I can tell, Klosterman was and remains right. There’s not one trend line, but two. They’re not intersecting; they’re parallel. They’re pointed straight up, forever, and they’ll never cross. Not ever.

Now think back to Harry Potter, or rather to that global phenomenon’s author. If J. K. Rowling’s name is in the headlines today, it’s not out of love or celebration. It’s a cause for controversy: something she said, something she wrote, something she did that, once again, has sullied her name and reputation and outraged her (once, no longer) fans. Search “Rowling AND cancel” and you’ll find a million think pieces about her actual/potential/impending/deserved/unearned/fake/outrageous/latest “cancellation.”

And yet. Consider those boys around the campfire. They know Rowling by name; she’s their favorite author, right up there with Rick Riordan, Jeff Kinney, Tui Sutherland, and Dav Pilkey. They know nothing about her social and political views. They know nothing about activists burning her books—whether fundamentalists in the 1990s or progressives in the 2020s. They know nothing about what they’re supposed to think. All they know is that they adore the world and the story and the characters she created, and they want to live in it and relive it constantly in conversation with their friends and in their spare time. They’d meet news of her controversies with a blank stare.

In a word: Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward. One’s made of distressed former fans who’ve repudiated Rowling and all her works. The other’s made of these boys and their peers, a whole generation of children raised on and devouring Rowling and all her works. The lines never meet. They just keep shooting upward, forever.

I think she’s going to be fine.

Every fantasy a comedy, every comedy a theodicy

Recently I wrote about returning to Osten Ard, the fantasy world of novelist Tad Williams in his two series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and The Last King of Osten Ard. One of the things I’d forgotten about the first series, a trilogy written from 1988 to 1993, is its interest in theodicy. Multiple characters throughout the books wonder, both aloud and to themselves, about the existence of God (or the gods); about their power; about their goodness; about the supposed truths taught by priests and monks; about the myths of old, handed down for centuries; about whether a world such as theirs—namely, a world of unremitting pain, illness, suffering, violence, and death, all apparently senseless, random, and unrectified—is one a just God would either create or sustain. As the lead character Simon realizes at one point: he no longer feels himself capable of praying to such a God even if he does exist. Yet this very realization is itself an indication that there is no such God, since he would not correspond to “the old stories.”

I do not know whether Tad Williams, the author, believes in God, nor can I say just what his aim was in posing these theodical questions throughout his trilogy. I’ve not yet re-read the second half of the third book in the series, so my memory may be wrong, but I don’t recall him resolving these questions in a clear or satisfactory way. That’s fine. Theodicy is usually a dish best served incomplete anyway.

Here’s the thing, though. Williams’ story wraps up beautifully. Every narrative thread is woven, by story’s end, into a gorgeous tapestry clearly thought through and planned out from the beginning. This is what makes the epic tale so marvelously told. There is not a character forgotten, nor a plot device left by the wayside. By the final pages, it’s as though behind this seemingly senseless drama stands an author, an author with meaning and purpose, whose design may have been hidden before but has now been made manifest.

It seems this way, because it is this way. The author isn’t a hypothesis we are forced to postulate in order to make sense of a story we otherwise couldn’t make sense of. We know the author’s name. The story is a novel. He wrote it. He planned it. He designed it. Duh.

But there’s the rub. If, outside the text, there stands an author, then inside the text, within the story, there must likewise be an Author. The perfect pleasing blueprint of the thing works because there is an architect. The fact of there being an architect is itself an answer to the characters’ ponderings about God. The characters wonder to themselves whether they are living in a meaningful story or a meaningless chaos. Well, we know: it’s the former, not the latter. The end of the story clears that right up. More to the point, the fact that they are characters inside a story written by an author for readers’ pleasure is as direct an answer as one could have. It may not be an answer available to the characters, within the story, but it’s a meta-textual answer available to us, the readers of their story.

In this way, Williams is unable to render a negative answer to the theodicy his narrative is meant to embody, however ambivalent his own intentions may be. Merely by authoring the story and having it make some kind of sense, he answers his own question: Yes, there is a God. In a word, it’s him. He’s the deus ex machina. He’s the one behind the curtain. There’s someone pulling the strings. It’s him. And if he exists, then the existence of God (or the gods) within the world he’s created is a given. Of course he (they) exist. Otherwise the story wouldn’t unfold the way it does; wouldn’t be orchestrated and choreographed in such a supremely fitting and satisfying manner.

This, in turn, becomes an extra-textual answer about our world, not just Osten Ard. There is a God in our world just as there is in that world, as evidenced by the fact that we make worlds like Osten Ard. Human sub-creation imitates and exemplifies divine creation. In the words of poet Franz Wright:

…And the way, always, being 
a maker 
reminds:

you were made. 

What I mean is this. Insofar as a fantasy is a comedy, it is also a theodicy: it poses and answers whether there is a God and, if he exists, whether he is both all-good and all-powerful. There is and he is, fantasy replies. For in a comedy, the Good triumphs in the end—ultimately, in some way, to some degree. This is why Dante’s masterpiece is called, simply, La Commedia. It’s the comedy, and therefore the divine comedy. This world is a comedy, for all its evil and suffering. It is not a tragedy.

For modern fantasy to avoid theodicy, it would have to embrace tragedy. Not darkness, not “grittiness,” not violence and sadism and gratuitous sex and playing footsie with nihilism. Actual, bona fide tragedy. I’ve not encountered fantasy that does that. And even then, if there’s a human author doing the tragedy-writing, there’s a case to be made that it can’t fully escape the pull of theodicy. It seems to me you’d have to go full Sartre and write a fantasy akin to La Nausée. But what world-building fantasist wants to do that? Is even capable of stomaching it?

We write because we are written. We make because we are made. We work providence in our stories because providence works in ours. We give the final word to the Good because the Good has the final word in our world—or will, at least; we hope, at least.

This is why every fantasy is a theodicy. Because every fantasy is a comedy. And comedy is a witness to our trust, howsoever we deny it or mask it, of our trust that God is, that God is good, and that God will right all wrongs in the End.

2022: reading

On its own terms, it was a solid year for reading. In terms of my goals, however, not so much. What with health, travel, and professional matters hoovering up all my attention from July to December, my reading plummeted in the second half of 2022. Last year I wrote about how, for years, I’d been stuck in the 90-110 zone for books read annually. Last year I climbed to 120. This year I hoped to reach 150. Alas, by the time Sunday rolls around I’ll have read 122 this year. At least I didn’t regress.

The environmental goals I made, I kept: namely, to cut down TV even more; to stick to audiobooks over podcasts; and to leaven scholarly theology with novels, nonfiction, poetry, and audiobooks. I make these goals, not because I value quantity over quality, nor because I want to read faster or just read a bunch of smaller books. It’s because setting these goals pushes me to set aside much less worthy uses of my time in order to focus on what is better for me and what I genuinely prefer. Both the direct effects (more reading) and the knock-on effects (less TV, less phone and laptop, less wasted time on mindless or mind-sucking activities) are what I’m after. And, as I’ve written before, I didn’t grow up reading novels. Which means I’m always playing catch-up.

My aspirational monthly goal is 2-3 novels, 2-3 volumes of poetry, 2-3 audiobooks, 3-4 nonfiction works, 4-8 works of academic theology. That alone should push me to the 140-160 range. I was on pace heading into August this year, then cratered. As 2023 approaches, I won’t make 150 my “realistic” goal; I’ll set it at 135. But one of my brothers as well as another friend both hit 200 this past year, which puts me to shame. So perhaps a little friendly competition will do the job.

In any case, what follows is a list of my favorite books I read this year. Two new books I was disappointed in: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and The Ink Black Heart, the sixth entry in J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series. I won’t write about the latter, but I might find time for the former. I also read J. G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, a hateful experience. I “get” it. But getting it doesn’t make the reading pleasant, or even justify the quality of the book. I do plan to write about that one.

Here are the ones I did like, with intermittent commentary.

*

Rereads

5. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.

4. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. Hadn’t picked this one up in 22 years. Magnificent.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I’m willing to call this a perfect book. I should probably read it every year for the rest of my life. Lewis really is a moral anatomist nonpareil.

2. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. Hadn’t read this one since middle school. Had completely forgotten about the technologies Bradbury conjured up as substitutes for reading—the very technologies (influencers live-streaming the manipulated melodrama of their own lives into ordinary people’s homes via wall-to-wall screens) we have used to the same end.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I could not remember when or whether I’d read this years and years ago, but I listened to Forest Whitaker’s rendition on Spotify and it was excellent. Highly recommended. (The audio recording; I know Douglass himself doesn’t need my stamp of approval.)

Poetry

I won’t pretend to have read as much poetry as I have in previous years. I finishing rereading R. S. Thomas’s poems; I got to a couple more collections by Denise Levertov; and I read Malcolm Guite’s The Singing Bowl, my first of his volumes. I’m hoping to get back into more poetry in the new year.

Fiction

10. William Goldman, The Princess Bride. Never knew Goldman wrote it as a book before it became a screenplay and a film. A delight.

9. John Le Carré, Silverview. A fitting send-off to the master.

8. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale. Brutality with flair. I wasn’t prepared for how good the prose, the plotting, the thematic subtext would all be. I wonder what would happen if, in the next film adaptation, they actually committed to adapting the character rather than a sanitized version of him. I’m not recommending that: Bond is wicked, and the Connery films valorized his wickedness. But the books commit to the bit, and it makes them a startling read some 70 years later.

7. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan. The second entry in the Earthsea saga. I expect to read the rest this year.

6. Walter Mosley, Trouble is What I Do. My second Mosley. Someone adapt this, please! Before picking it up, I had just finished a brand new novel celebrated by the literary establishment, a novel that contains not one interesting idea, much less an interesting sentence. Whereas Mosley is incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. He’s got more style in his pinky finger than most writers have in their whole bodies.

5. Mick Herron, Slow Horses & Dead Lions. I got hooked, before watching the series. Casting Oldman as Jackson Lamb, he who also played Smiley on film, is inspired. I expect to finish the whole series by summer. Herron isn’t as good as Le Carré—who is?—but his ability to write twisty plots in punchy prose that intersects politics without getting preachy: that’s a winning ticket.

4. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My first Jackson. As good as advertised. Read it with some guys in a book club, and one friend had a theory that another friend who’d read the novel a dozen times had never considered. I’m still thinking about it.

3. Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Wrote about it here.

2. Brian Moore, The Statement. I’ve never read anything like this novel. It floored me. James and Le Carré are my two genre masters, each of whose corpus I will complete sometime in my life. Moore may now be on the list, not least owing to his genre flexibility. I’ve read Catholics. I just grabbed Black Robe. Thanks to John Wilson for the recommendation.

1. P. D. James, The Children of Men. I’m an evangelist for this one. Don’t get me started. Just marvel, with me, that a lifelong mystery writer—who didn’t publish her first novel till age 40—found it within herself, in her 70s, to write a hyper-prescient work of dystopian fiction on a par with Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, Bradbury, and Chesterton. I would also add Atwood, since this novel is so clearly a Christian response to The Handmaid’s Tale. As ever, all hail the Queen.

Nonfiction

10. A bunch of books about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the right: Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal; Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind; Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; Matthew Continetti, The Right.

9. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. Outstanding. Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson for the recommendation.

8. Christopher Hitchens, A Hitch in Time. A pleasure to dip back in to some of Hitch’s best work. But also a reminder, with time and distance, of some of his less pleasant vices.

7. James Mumford, Vexed & Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. Imagining life beyond tribalism, neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Just hopeful.

6. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks & Phil Christman, How to Be Normal. I wrote about Burkeman here. Christman is a mensch. Read both, ideally together.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story & Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

4. Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel.

3. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

2. Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush. He’s still got it. There are a couple essays here that rank among Berry’s best.

1. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. The best book of any kind I read in 2022. One of the best books I’ve ever read. A one of one. On a par with After Virtue, A Secular Age, and other magisterial table-setters. Except this one is half the size and happens to focus on Plenty Coups, the Crow, and the moral and philosophical grounds for continuing to live in the face of reasonable despair. Take and read.

Christian (popular)

8. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Hand on heart, I’d never read a Piper book in my life. I wanted something short and punchy on audio, and this fit the bill. Turns out the man can preach.

7. John Mark Comer, Love-ology & The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry & Live No Lies. Hopped on the JMC train this year, since all of my students and many of my friends love his books. He’s doing good work. Pair him with Sayers, Crouch, Wilson, and Dane Ortlund, plus the younger gents at the intersection of Mere O, Davenent, and Theopolis—Meador, Loftus, Anderson, Roberts, Littlejohn, et al—and if you squint a bit, you can see the emerging writers, leaders, and intellectuals of a sane American evangelicalism, should that strange and unruly beast have a future. And if it doesn’t, they’re the ones who will be there on the other side.

6. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. Simply lovely.

5. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church. Shrewd, lucid diagnosis. Not so sure about the prescription.

4. Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For. Click on the “Andy Crouch” tag on this blog and you’ll see tens of thousands of words spilled over this book as well as Andy’s larger project. A wonderful man, a great writer, a gift to Christian attempts to think and live wisely today.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. I listened to this one on audio. I wept.

2. Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament. Just what the doctor ordered for my students.

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. The unrivaled summer beach read of 2022. No joke, I was at the beach in July and looked to my right and then to my left and saw more than one person reading it. You heard it here first.

Theology (newer)

15. Some books on Christian ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (by Victor Lee Austin), A Brief History (by Michael Banner), A Very Short Introduction (by D. Stephen Long).

14. Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence & From Isolation to Community. Two accessible entries from a friend on Christian pacifism and Christian community. Nab copies of both today!

13. Charlie Trimm, The Destruction of the Canaanites. See my review in Christianity Today.

12. David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse & You Are Gods.

11. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human. Victor makes a case that friendship is not just the heart of being human, but the heart of the gospel; or rather, the latter because the former; or vice versa.

10. Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation. See my forthcoming review in Pro Ecclesia.

9. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul. See my review in Modern Theology.

8. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love That is God. This one will be on a syllabus very soon.

7. R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman, Biblical Reasoning. See my forthcoming review in International Journal of Systematic Theology.

6. William G. Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. So far as I can see, immediately the standard work on the question. I’d love to see some good-faith engagements from the other side, both Protestant and Catholic.

5. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift & Paul and the Power of Grace.

4. Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah. Historical, textual, linguistic, literary, and theological scholarship at its finest.

3. Mark Kinzer, Searching Her Own Mystery. I learned a lot from this book. I try to read everything Kinzer writes on the topic of Israel, church, and messianic Judaism. Even better something focused on a particular text, in this case Nostra Aetate.

2. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life. Pellucid and compelling. A beautiful vision that captures heart and mind both. Here’s a taste.

1. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. What can I say? I have a thing for contrarian dating of the NT. I’m not at all persuaded by the consensus dating of most first-century Christian writings. Bernier updates John A. T. Robinson’s classic Redating the New Testament, with a clearly enunciated methodology deployed in calm, measured arguments that avoid even a hint of polemic. For that very reason, an invigorating read.

Theology (older)

6. A Reformation Debate: The Letters of Bishop Sadoleto and John Calvin. (Whispers: Calvin doesn’t win this round.)

5. Papal social encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Humanae Vitae, & Lumen Gentium. Always worth a re-read.

4. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God & Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beautiful, devotional, exemplary models of spiritual theology.

3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Church: Select Treatises & On the Church: Select Letters.

2. St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice. Blows your hair back then lights it on fire.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Is Ramsey the most underrated Anglophone theologian of the twentieth century? The man had exquisite theological sense; he wrote with style and passion; he cared about the unity of the church; he was a bona fide scholar; he wrote about everything; he became Archbishop of Canterbury; what’s not to love? Both this work and his little volume on the resurrection are classics.

Narnia’s saints

Does Narnia have saints? It occurred to me, as I was listening to The Last Battle this morning, that the function of the children in the stories (minus The Horse and His Boy) is analogous to the function of the saints in devotional and liturgical prayer in catholic traditions. There is no question that Aslan alone is King and Lord, but by his will the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve are sent as ministering servants to the beasts and people of Narnia. Not only that, but more than once they are called. Caspian blows Susan’s horn to call them for help. And while captured and alone, King Tirian bellows aloud—following a prayer addressed directly to Aslan—a prayer to the children of old who once aided Narnia long ago. Indeed this latter petition for the children’s intercession comes after Tirian recalling to mind the old stories he was raised on, having been well versed as a child in a kind of common Narnian hagiography of Peter and Lucy and Digory and Polly and the rest. And more or less the moment he begs their intercession, under Aslan, he is brought to them in our world, and moments later (for him: a week later for them) Jill and Eustace arrive to help.

That description is quite similar to catholic teaching and practice regarding the saints. They are alive with God in heaven (read: another world); they once lived in our world and we tell and retell stories of their words and deeds (read: tales of the fabled children who came to Narnia’s aid in times of great need); they have no power of themselves but by God’s grace hear the petitions of the church militant and intercede for them before the heavenly throne (read: the children being called or summoned to Narnia); and occasionally through their intercession the Lord works some miracle or wonder in answer to a believer’s prayer and as a sign of the saint’s patronage or protection (read: the children appearing in Narnia and defeating the White Witch or coming to Caspian’s aid or sailing to the end of the world or rescuing Prince Rilian from his enchantment). If this account makes the role of the saints, and therefore of the children in Lewis’s stories, akin to that of the angels, that is because it is. At least according to sacred tradition.

I vaguely recall Lewis half-punting the question of the saints’ intercession in his book on prayer, or perhaps in a separate essay. I’ll have to run down the reference, but I believe he affirms the saints’ intercession on principle, but not wanting to be divisive he allows the legitimacy of Protestant worries about superstitious and abuse. In any case, though, I’d be shocked if he were dead-set opposed to the practice. And even if he were, he’s rendered the practice in an intelligible and quite beautiful narrative form in the children of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Piranesi and Decreation

Last month I read Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s belated follow-up to her best-selling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Piranesi is as wonderful as advertised, a bona fide mystery box of pure prose, genuine wonder, and spiritual imagination. It’s also best to go in without knowing anything, so unspoiled readers who prefer to remain that way ought to stop here.

Much has been made about the theological character of the House, or the World, in which Piranesi finds himself. And rightly so: Clarke invites the comparisons, through interviews, the epigraph from Lewis, and the text itself. Is the House heaven? the divine mind? the realm of the Forms? an in-between place a la the Wood Between the Worlds? something else? (The TVA?)

One clue to the Nature of the Place—Clarke’s liberal capitalizations, like Katherine Sonderegger’s, are contagious—is that Piranesi, like all long-time inhabits of the House, slowly forgets himself. That is, he forgets earth, terrestrial history, his own history, even his name. He lives in a kind of utterly un-self-conscious perfect present of awareness of, and transparency to, the House in all its many-roomed splendor. His innocence and joy are childlike in their unadorned simplicity. Even when he contemplates what one would consider moral harm, he turns over the idea in his mind not so much as a moral quandary as an unthinkable question from which anyone would recoil.

As I read the book, this notion of the loss of self-consciousness in heaven brought to mind Paul Griffiths’ book Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures. (I wrote about the book a few years ago for Marginalia.) Griffiths argues there, as an admitted item of speculation, that beatified rational creatures—i.e., you and I—will not, in heaven, be self-conscious. We will be conscious, but what we will be conscious of is nothing less or more than the living and perfect and perfectly simple triune God. Saturated in his rapturous glory, we will gladly forget ourselves as we see, finally, face to face, our loving and gracious Creator, who is himself the highest good, ours and all creation’s, he who is beauty itself. But it is important to see that, for Griffiths, we will not choose to forget ourselves, as an intentional act of volition, thus retaining something like a property of self-consciousness. We will no longer be self-aware. And this condition of rapt awareness of nothing but the radiant light of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will be final, unchanging. We will forever be, as the hymn has it, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” We will forever be, in a word, happy.

Are these two depictions of heavenly self-forgetfulness the same idea, rendered in different modes? Or are they distinct? And either way, are they right?

I don’t have much to say on the question of their rightness. The matter is wholly speculative; we do not and cannot know, so the best we have to go on is the criterion convenientia, that is, the fittingness of the speculative claim to those matters about which we can claim to some measure of theological knowledge. And here Griffiths, it seems to me, is pushing back, appropriately, on modern trends in both philosophical and theological anthropology and eschatology. In the former, there is far too much emphasis on our cognitive abilities, on our self-transcendence through self-consciousness. In the latter, popular as well as scholarly pictures of the new heavens and new earth often appear as though life as we now find it (at least in the industrialized liberal West) will basically continue on—minus suffering, death, and procreation, plus God. And that is positively silly. The startling strangeness of Griffiths’ speculations does good work in helping us to shed some of those projections and illusions.

As for Clarke’s House, I think there is substantial overlap between Piranesi’s worshipful forgetfulness and Griffiths’ forgetful worship. Both see the human as basically homo adorans; self-consciousness is secondary to a teleology of praise. We are doxological creatures ordered to the Good. When we find it, we revel and glory in it, which elevates rather than denigrates us. Clarke understands this, and accordingly her ideological foe in the book is scientism—not science, properly conceived and practiced—in which the human quest for total mastery and absolute knowledge becomes an idol. “The Other” is incapable of worship, and therefore he is incapable of knowledge. He cannot know because he cannot see; he cannot see because he cannot delight; and he cannot delight because he refuses to be a creature, limited and limiting as that status is. He will not be a supplicant of the House. This makes him an idolater, curved in on the idol of his own self. Consequently the waters of the World rise and drown him in death.

To both Griffiths and Clarke, however, I want to pose a question. Apart from awareness of ourselves as selves, it seems to me a nonnegotiable feature of the life of the saints in heaven that they do not lose their identities there. And if not their identities, then neither do they lose their histories. Mary is and always shall be the Mother of God, because on earth she bore Jesus in her womb. That is an irreducible and inextirpable fact of who Mary was and therefore of who she is and never will not be—precisely in heaven.

If that is so, then Piranesi’s slow forgetting of himself, including his past and his name, seems somehow unfitting. It is not merely that he is “forgetful” of himself, the way a lover is. He forgets himself, and his history is thereby erased. He must be brought back to himself by “16,” an emissary from his world, which is to say, from his forgotten past. The novel is thus patient of a reading that sees the House in less positive, more sinister terms; one might depict it as a kind of black hole, or parasite, that slowly saps the self of the self. Or, to put it theologically, the House would here stand in for a picture of God as competitive with creatures—for him to increase, we must decrease—by contrast with the classical view, which understands the glory of God and the well-being of creatures to be positively, not negatively, correlated. The more of one, the more of the other: the more I find myself in God and he in me, the more I become truly myself. (Aslan grows as Lucy grows.) God’s presence in me, far from crowding “me” out, expands and deepens my self, for my self is nothing other than his good creation, and it finds its ultimate good in him alone.

That is why the saints are known in heaven by their names and hence by their histories. Dante understands this. St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure can sing praises of each other and of the founder of the other’s order (St. Dominic and St. Francis, respectively) only because each of them remains, in heaven, who he was on Earth, yet now purged of every taint of sin and death and transfigured in Christ by the Spirit to the glory of the Father.

In sum, whether or not I will know myself as an “I” in heaven, you will know me as the “I” I am, at least, the “I” I am in Christ; and vice versa. On its face, then, it seems unfitting for that intersubjective beatified knowledge of each individual as the person she is in Christ, with the unique and irreducible history she had in Christ, to be coextensive with a kind of self-erasure for the person in question: as though you will know I am Brad, but I will not; as though we all will know St. Francis as St. Francis, but he will not—even when we glory him in song, or rather, glory Christ in him through song. Will the words mean nothing to him even, or precisely, when the chorus resounds with his very name?

The paradigm of the saints in heaven, after all, is Christ. Christ reigns in heaven as the enthroned Lord, to be sure, but equally as the One who was crucified. (Just as Mary is Theotokos henceforth and for all eternity, so it Jesus Mary’s son.) Nor does the incarnation cease, as though he sloughs off his skin once “returned” to heaven, for the union of divine and human natures in his person is everlasting. Suffice it to say, then, that Jesus knows who he is in heaven, when we sing of him and when we do not (though that “do not” does not obtain in heaven by definition); the name and history of Jesus are a condition of there being a heaven for beatified rational creatures in the first place: and that name and its history are what are praised, what will be praised, world without end.

That should give us a hint here. Whatever the status of our self-awareness in heaven, not only our selves, but our names and histories will not be struck through, much less forgotten. They will continue to constitute us as us, the great “us” of the bride of Christ. Piranesi, in the true heaven, would be just as dumbstruck in delighted self-forgetfulness as he is in Clarke’s novel. But he would still know his name, not least if addressed by the Voice of the House or by one of its fellow happy inhabitants. The difference is that the occasion of hearing his name would not rouse him to jealousy or confusion or dissatisfaction. It would function more like an echo, a reiteration of the great Rule that guides his life: The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its kindness infinite. It would function, in other words, like a living Amen.

The queen

Of all the brilliant British women writers who lived to a good old age in the long twentieth century, who is your favorite? The candidates are many; both Mary Midgley and Agatha Christie come immediately to mind. Doubtless Rebecca West is chief among all women and men of English letters during this period. But as for me and my house, we hail P. D. James, or as I affectionately call her, The Queen. Long may she reign, even in death.

Born in 1920, James published her first novel in 1962. From her early 40s to her early 90s she published more than 20 books, one every 2-3 years. Just before her 90th birthday, in 2009, she published Talking About Detective Fiction, a winsome and leisurely stroll through the genre she mastered, having received it from the reigning women before her (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, et al) and made it her own. Born two years after the end of World War I, she lived to see every one of the wonders and horrors of the twentieth century; she then died—to give some perspective on the sheer expanse of her life—some 18 months before the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union.

The Queen is famous for many things, but most of all, and deservedly, for her series featuring Adam Dalgliesh. The series spans 14 novels written across 46 years. They are, in my humble and mostly uninformed opinion, the finest detective novels in the English language. I’m not a fanatic of the genre, but I’ve read widely across the decades (and across the Atlantic), and I’m not even sure who should come in second.

(I’m reading Gladys Mitchell’s Rising of the Moon right now; perhaps I’ll come to agree that that half-forgotten peer to Christie is a worthy competitor for the throne.)

What makes James’s work so royally perfect? The answer may be boring, but it’s true: she’s a master at the mechanics of what makes a mystery novel work. Put them together, and you’ve got the best of the genre.

First is the prose. It’s readable—she was popular, after all—but crisp, detailed, and stylish, too. More, it’s English: you can tell this is a woman who knows her eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry and novels. The sentences never waste a word, but they take their time. And they always come to a point. In this James was very much a woman of her time; she reads more like Sayers than she does Tana French or Louise Penny. Though she lived into the twenty-first century, she was born closer to the nineteenth, and you feel it in her writing.

Second is the lead. Adam Dalgliesh is the platonic ideal of the English detective. Son of a vicar, widower whose only child and young wife died giving birth, a poet of minor acclaim in his spare time, Dalgliesh is a detective whose reputation precedes him due to his supreme and inarguable competence. Reticent, tactful, passionate, compassionate, and possessed of a rich but private inner life, he lives for the job, and always gets it done.

Third is the plotting. The deaths are rarely outlandish but always complex; they’re also always equally difficult to figure out (though that may just be me, as I’m generally terrible at guessing whodunnit). Again, the mysteries lean more toward the golden age than to contemporary crime novels, so the template is classic rather than realistic: a surprising, even shocking murder; a cast of suspects; three dozen paths criss-crossing the murder scene and the victim’s now-revealed secret lives; a patient narrowing-down of suspects via interviews, alibis, discoveries, and evidence; and the final, climactic confrontation and confession. To watch James weave the web then unravel it is never anything but a joy.

Fourth and finally, and most important in terms of what elevates the Dalgliesh series above its peers, is the social observation and characterization. The plot hooks me; the prose keeps me; the acute eye for human and social detail is what strangely warms my heart. Whatever one’s view of arguments about highbrow versus middlebrow and “art” versus “entertainment,” James’s books bridge the gap inasmuch as they use the occasion of a murder and the form of a mystery to examine the human condition. And the insights invariably illumine.

That social aspect to the Dalgliesh books makes them doubly significant, since the first in the series was written in or around the year JFK was elected; the last, in or around the year Obama was elected. What one feels when reading the books in chronological order is the extraordinary social changes happening in real time in the background of the stories—and James is deeply attuned to them. (As she should be, having spent her girlhood in interwar Britain, raised in a family with so little money she had to quit school as a teenager to go to work.) That aforementioned first entry, Cover Her Face, feels very much a portrait of rural postwar England, itself still bearing traces of the Victorian and the Edwardian. By the sixth Dalgliesh novel, Death of an Expert Witness, published in 1977, the world has turned upside down. The book is littered with casual references to the signs of the times: recession; abolition of the death penalty; women wearing trousers(!); a more or less out lesbian couple living in the Fens (albeit referred to by both the narration and the dialogue solely as “friends”—this is James’s ironic reserve, not prudishness); the rise of the management class; “women’s Lib”; abandoned country churches; even ordinary police use of a helicopter, which ferries Dalgliesh from London to East Anglia the day after the murder.

What suffuses every page, adorning the narrative without ever weighing it down, is James’s lightly worn but deeply felt Anglican faith. She doesn’t require her hero to believe—his familiarity with tragedy and evil both walls him off from and draws him ineluctably toward the religious life—but the presence, or rather absence, of God haunts his every endeavor of detection. Whence law? justice? mercy? She forces her readers, as she does her characters, to wonder. It’s something every good mystery novelist aspires to do. For her part, the Queen never fails to execute.

Art tonnage

This weekend I watched Steven Soderbergh’s latest film No Sudden Move (available on HBO Max). It’s a modest period heist film, of a piece with Soderbergh’s proclivity to leaven his Major Releases with minor genre exercises. I always enjoy those exercises, and I enjoyed this one, too. It’s restrained, formally inventive, clever, and draws lovely performances out of actors old and new. I especially appreciated seeing Don Cheadle in fine form. I imagine a whole generation of young moviegoers knows Cheadle solely from his role in the Marvel films, which means they think of him as entirely forgettable and therefore dispensable. Not so! (Perhaps his own Disney+ series will rectify that error? Probably not.)

Soderbergh has likened himself, fittingly, to a graffiti artist. He’s a street performer: he does his art quick and dirty, to please his audience and himself—then moves on. His output, as a result, is quite large. Side projects, side hustles, delivery innovation, technical experimentation, multiple films per year: Soderbergh is a jitterbug craftsman, always in motion. He never sits still, just like his camera.

In this Soderbergh belongs to the Stephen King theory of popular art. Even apart from highbrow versus lowbrow (or masscult versus midcult), this theory eschews a vision of creative labors as necessarily painful and painfully long. If you’re a craftsman, then know your craft and do it when called upon, to the best of your abilities, and with celerity. The fact that you’re paid to do it, moreover, is a feature, not a bug; there’s no room here for the pure genius, tortured, alone, and unappreciated. No, you’ve got an audience—readers, viewers—happy and willing to hand over money for what you’ve made. Serve them! Entertain them!

And if not everything you make it a work of world-stopping brilliance, so be it.

This reminds me of John Grisham’s famed writing routine. Every fall, just in time for the airport-heavy travel seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas, he drops a new novel. After taking some well-earned time off, he outlines in great detail the plan for his next novel. In the first week of January, he begins writing: every weekday for x hours per day. By mid-spring he has a rough draft; by mid-summer, the revisions are complete. Then the manuscript is off the printers, and they publish the book by Halloween. Grisham’s been doing this for more than 20 years. You can set your clock by it.

I certainly don’t think the Soderbergh–King–Grisham model is for everyone. Nor do I think their work is flawless as a result of it. High art is high art for a reason; it takes time, passion, and sometimes pain. But not everyone is meant for such heights. I’m happy to live in a world with graffiti artists and airport novelists. The pleasures they afford are real, and they would be far less and few fewer if their authors weren’t willing to risk some measure of artistic failure and critical dismissal in the speed and style of their creation. May their tribe increase.

The Book of Strange New Things, 3

So I don’t think Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things works. Its lead is unbelievable; the prose is unmemorable to a fault; the payoffs meant to explain the eerie human and mental atmosphere on the alien planet are unsatisfactory, and call in turn for further explanations that are never forthcoming.

What works, if anything? A few things.

1. The aliens. Or as Peter calls them, the Oasans. Faber succeeds in creating and depicting—with considerable restraint—a plausible and heretofore unimagined style of intelligent life beyond Earth. We get to know them, but at some distance. They are hungry for Jesus, and believably so. They are stubborn, and stubbornly non-human, yet intelligible. They are both like us (bipedal, five-fingered, linguistic) and unlike us (misshapen, hideous faces; radically communitarian; lacking something like an Ego, though individuated nonetheless). Faber is at his best when he’s describing the Oasan community or narrating a conversation between one of them and Peter.

2. The most theologically pregnant feature of the book is the suggestion that the Oasans are mortal, profoundly vulnerable to suffering, illness, and death, but may not be sinful. This is half a virtue for the novel, because Faber is clever enough to imagine this state of affairs (and, by extension, the effects it might have for pastor-missionaries who think of Sin as the one great problem addressed by Christianity), but not committed or interested enough to follow through on its many pastoral and theological implications. C. S. Lewis did so in the first two books of his Space Trilogy, but that is a work of fantasy as much as it is science fiction. Faber here could have offered a more realistic or at least less of a #FullChristian take. But he just leaves it untouched, beyond the crisis it creates for Peter’s faith, since what the Oasans want is healing of their infirmities, and he doesn’t know if he truly believes he can offer that. Then he decides to leave them. The end.

3. That’s a tad glib. The final two pages, the final paragraph, and the final line are all utterly fitting to the book, and quite apt to the biblical verse on which they are a riff. Speaking of which…

4. The relationship between Peter and Beatrice (hello there, Meaningful Names; may I take your baggage?) that is, or is meant to be, the emotional heart of the novel largely works, I think, though I am undecided on what Faber himself thinks of it. Due to the distance between them, Peter’s poor communication skills, and the roiling catastrophes on Earth, Bea more or less lets go of Peter within two or three months of the six-month mission. Seems abrupt, no? She doesn’t stop loving him, but she in effect hands him over to the Oasans, thinking him dispassionate and uncaring, even as she is carrying their first and only child in her womb. It would not be an unjust reading to say that what the novel reveals is that Peter and Bea’s relationship was fragile from the start, built on codependency (she rescued him from addiction and led him to Christ; marrying him brought her out of shame for her upbringing and past sexual experiences) and persisting mutual neediness (they have no friends to speak of; they have no activities other than evangelizing and caring, together, for their little flock). Each of them has nothing but the other, plus Jesus. When all is right with the world, that’s more than enough. When the world—their world—starts to crumble, it proves not nearly enough. What I want to know is: Does Faber want us to see this? Or does he think their relationship a beautiful, healthy, antifragile thing that is only called into question by the stress shocks, so to speak, of unprecedented distance and trial? In any case, it’s emotionally credible, and while I wasn’t devastated by their increasing detachment and loss, I felt it.

4. Speaking of which, Faber also succeeds in his depiction of Peter’s relationship with Grainger, his main “handler” and only real friend on Oasis. Their budding no-yes-maybe-no relationship—little more than seeking some kind of basic human connection in an emotional wasteland—is worn and lived-in and all too recognizable.

* * *

I cannot conclude these reflections, however, without instancing a few quotations to show how off, finally, Peter is as a character, that is, as a Christian convert, pastor, and missionary (recall: not because his theology is wrong, but because it doesn’t hold together; the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense of his character, or that echoes anything one would find in the world of Christian faith and ministry). First:

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

“Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?”

“None that I can see.”

“So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?”

Peter wiped his brow again. “Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz; that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.”

Mmm. Okay. An enormous buzz. Filled with excitement. Did I mention that this guy left behind his wife and all he knew to share the gospel with aliens? That he and his wife, back on Earth, would hand-stitch tracts of Bible stories to be mailed and delivered to foreign, “unreached” people groups? For what? Buzz and excitement? (NB: He’s not a charismatic, and his faith is rocked to the core when an Oasan asks him to pray for her to be healed from a physical injury.)

Second:

He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

Ah. Gotcha. So this dude’s a “we’re all incarnations of God/Jesus is just the highest version” sort of Christian. Excellent. No further comment necessary, none whatsoever.

Third and last:

“You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgment, 100 percent less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?” Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. “Marty Kurtzburg—now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.”

Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. “I’m just trying . . . just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.”

Faber almost grasps the nettle here. Almost. The problem is that he supposes there are only two options: either fundamentalist (the Lutheran Kurtzburg) or non-fundamentalist (the (Abelardian?) evangelical Peter). Faber’s imagination can conceive a traditionalist Christian believer exclusively as a fundamentalist who travels to an alien world in “jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes.” Equation: true believer = traditionalist = confesses an actual bodily resurrection = fundamentalist = culturally parochial and anthropologically naive stereotypical Western missionary. And since Peter is not that, that is to say the last item, he cannot be any of the others. But Faber also wants—or rather, his narrative requires—Peter to be a Bible-believing, hyper-evangelistic, tract-mailing, low-church Pietist type. One who thinks Christianity is a matter of life and death … and yet who also describes Christianity as an exciting emotional buzz, moralized without remainder into treating other people the way Jesus would treat them.

The novel remains powerful and evocative, and I don’t regret reading it. But the unrealized potential makes the whole thing all the more disappointing. Oh well.

The Book of Strange New Things, 2

In my last post I wrote about how Peter, the protagonist of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, is unbelievable. I want now to say a bit more about why the novel doesn’t quite work.

One is the prose. It is bloodless and boring. Perfectly adequate, never “bad,” it is so unmemorable that at times I wondered if that was Faber’s intention: perhaps to signal the inner purity of Peter’s converted heart and mind. Based on a quick perusal of Faber’s other work (esp. Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White), the man can write interesting and stylish prose. So what went wrong here? Or, if the plain style is a choice, why does it fail in its purpose? The only possible narrative effect is to make of Peter an utterly vanilla protagonist.

A second issue is the tone. For much of the novel the atmosphere on Oasis, the alien planet, is somehow askew: haunting, haunted, moody, oppressive, mysterious. The reader gets major Solaris vibes (or even, for me, echoes of Sphere). Something is wrong here. What could it be?

Nothing at all, as it turns out. The “reveals,” such as they are, are fourfold:

1. Light years away, Earth—politically and ecologically—is falling apart at the seams.

2. The corporation that sponsors both the intergalactic travel to Oasis and the scientific outpost on it has as its goal to make Oasis a kind of ark or haven for the elite few on Earth who are (a) rich enough and (b) sane enough to qualify to come.

3. The corporate employees (scientists, engineers, doctors, mechanics) who work at/for the Oasan outpost are such flat personalities—resorting to neither sex nor drugs nor violence to let off steam or give vent to their vices and repressed desires—by design: they were selected by a sophisticated psychological process created to exclude all persons who might fall back on such “anti-social” habits.

4. The intelligent alien species, the Oasans, have extremely vulnerable bodies supported by nonexistent immune systems. The slightest injury or illness is terminal, therefore, and they believe “the technique of Jesus” to provide deliverance from, and possibly miraculous healing for, this condition.

I’m going to save comment on number 4 for the next post, because (along with the depiction of Peter’s epistolary estrangement with his wife, Beatrice) it the depiction of the Oasans is the best thing about the book. What I want to focus on now is simple: none of these reveals is satisfying, because none of them explains the brooding, discombobulated atmosphere so effectively manufactured by Faber. The closest any of them comes is number 3, and this one is the least credible. Why?

Answer: Faber wants us to believe that, so long as you put the right controls in place, you could transplant 50-100 adult human beings from Earth to a colony on another planet, and without actually lobotomizing, sterilizing, or otherwise chemically sedating them, they would go about their daily jobs more or less contentedly and consistently, without psychic or emotional needs or problems, absent children, elders, religion, recreation, marriage, family, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, art, literature, theft, envy, deceit, or violence.

To me, that reads like a joke. Or a thought experiment by someone who’s never met a human being, or read human history. Or, at best, a “what if?” exercise or narrative puzzle that calls for further explanation—rather than itself an attempt at an explanation of some other mysterious phenomenon, which is how it functions in the novel. How can this fanciful assertion of neutered, compliant, prelapsarian humans (who are, mind you, nothing but a random assortment of corporate employees who live on an alien planet with nothing to do but work) serve to answer the reader’s befuddlement at the unyielding, inhuman, overbearing environment in which Peter finds himself? The answer to one inexplicable mystery cannot be the assertion merely of another inexplicable mystery, not least one so implausible as this. But there it is. And it does not work.

The Book of Strange New Things, 1

I just finished Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, and I’ve got Thoughts. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I think I might expand on a couple reasons in future posts. But the first thing I have to say about the book is this.

The lead character is simply not believable.

Here are things that are true of him:

1. He is a Christian.

2. He is a British evangelical.

3. He is an adult convert.

4. He is an ex-addict, sober alcoholic, and onetime homeless person.

5. He is happily married.

6. He is a pastor.

7. He and his wife are partners in ministry.

8. Their ministry is extremely evangelistic; the sort that moves heaven and earth to reach a single soul.

9. Their church is very “low.”

10. Their church and ministry are Bible- and sermon-centric (liturgy and sacrament are, if I recall correctly, never mentioned).

11. Their evangelistic efforts include, for example, hand-crafted tracts and pamphlets for far-away “unreached” people groups.

12. They both agree, upon discovery of intelligent life on a distant planet, that it is God’s will for him, the husband-pastor, to journey light-years away to bring the gospel to this alien species.

13. Also, they both share misgivings about, bordering on dislike for, St. Paul.

14. Also, he, the husband-pastor, takes for granted that the Pastoral Epistles were written by St. Paul to St. Timothy in the year AD 68.

15. Also, he rejects with vehemence the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The story is set in the near future; though the year is never specified, it is probably meant to be sometime in the next 50-150 years.

Numbers 1 through 12 are perfectly believable. Number 14 would be consonant with them. Number 13 would be an odd fit; the reader would be right to expect more than a passing explanation (which she would not receive). But number 15 brings the whole edifice crumbling down.

Let me instance very nearly the only reference to bodily resurrection in all 500 pages of the novel:

Jesus Lover Five [an alien believer] had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg [the alien congregation’s former missionary-pastor from Earth] one of those Lutheran-flavored fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies—magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure—and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was decay, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.

The author, Faber, is unfailingly unpatronizing in his own (alien) inhabitation of an evangelical missionary’s mind and thoughts, even his piety. But this false note is telling. Like a fart in a fugue, it afflicts the whole. And the fact that it comes halfway through the novel, with neither preparation nor elaboration, tells us that the author cannot hear the dissonance, does not smell the stench.

Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastors are, without exception, Pauline in flavor and faith, and above all they are adamant believers in the resurrection of the body: first Jesus’s, then believers’. There are no exceptions to this rule. They do not pick and choose books of the New Testament with which they disagree or in which they casually disbelieve. To begin to do such a thing, to begin to make exceptions, is to cease to be a Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastor, one willing to move heaven and earth to win a single soul, to place a New Testament in the hands of a single unbeliever.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps Faber is himself such a person (though, from what I can tell, he most certainly is not), or perhaps he knows such a person. But such a person in unique on this planet. To make such a unique person the protagonist of a novel, one must know, and show that one knows, that he is indeed so unique; and, thereupon, to sketch what led to his being thus unique. That Faber does not offer that sketch suggests to me, his reader, that he lacks this knowledge. Lacking it, the novel’s central character does not hold together. Which means the novel does not hold together.

2021: the year of Martin, Rothfuss, and Williams?

Could 2021 see the publication of long-awaited sequels to three major fantasy series?

It would mark a full decade since George R. R. Martin published the fifth entry in his Song of Ice and Fire. He's been writing pages and pages since then, or so he says. He turns 72 this month, and following the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones concluded, then living through a global pandemic, he's had nothing but time to write. In any case, even after #6, he's got at least one more book in the series to write, assuming it doesn't keep multiplying and fracturing indefinitely. One can hope, no?

It's also been a decade since the second book in Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy was published. Four years spanned the first two books. Perhaps ten will span the second and the third? Rothfuss insists that he is hard at work on The Doors of Stone, yet reacts cantankerously to continuous "Are you finished yet?" queries. It's unclear whether it's the perfectionist in him or whether, like Martin, the sprawl of the story plus the lure of other projects is keeping completion just over the horizon.

Speaking of completion: A full three decades ago Tad Williams published his extraordinary trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. He sat on it, sat on it, and sat on it some more—then finally made good on some hints and gestures in the closing pages of the final volume, To Green Angel Tower, with the publication in 2017 of a "bridge novel," The Heart of What Was Lost (a more Williams-esque title there never was, plangent and grand in epic lament as so much of his work is). Thus began a new trilogy, The Last King of Osten Ard, with volumes published in orderly sequence: 2017, 2019, and, in prospect, October 2021. (A second short prequel novel will be published in the summer.) Once he breaks the story, the man knows how to tell it, and how to finish it.

In sum, these are three great fantasy novelists working to complete three much-beloved fantasy series. And we could have all three authors publishing eagerly anticipated books in the next 15 months. Let it be so!

Eleven thoughts on Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove

Last month I read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove for the first time, and it was even better than advertised. I have some thoughts, mostly on what makes it so good, as well as the underlying themes that (perhaps?) have been overlooked given the book's popularity, Pulitzer Prize, and adaptation into a TV miniseries.

1.  The prose is perfect. Perfect. Not perfect the way, say, Michael Chabon's is. There may not be a word in all the nearly-1,000 pages that rises above an eighth grade reading level. The sentences, moreover, are usually on the short side. The prose isn't complex. But it's pitch perfect. McMurtry never fails to communicate exactly what he intends, whether it be an action, a feeling, a thought, or a memory. Or a conversation. Oh my, the dialogue. I felt what all readers have felt reading this novel: I didn't want it to end. Like watching a sitcom for a decade, I just wanted to spend time with my friends. But anyway, reading McMurtry's prose was a delight. The way he uses euphemism and "native" construction—the way an uneducated twentysomething cowboy would think or talk—both in dialogue and in description of action or emotion from a character's perspective: it's nothing short of masterful.

2. The characters! Gus, Call, Lorena, Dish, Pea Eye, Deets, Clara—Clara!—Lippy, Newt, Wanz, Blue Duck, July Johnson, Roscoe, Po Campo, Elmira, Peach, Big Zwey, Wilbarger, Jake Spoon—oh, Jake Spoon—Cholo, Soupy, Bolivar. Each name calls forth a whole world, a flesh-and-blood person, a voice and a story and an inner dialogue. Waiting to have July open part 2 and then Clara open part 3, the latter two-thirds into the story, and for each of them to step onto the page fully-formed and wholly equal to those we'd met long before: it's invigorating, is what it is. Exhilirating for the reader. Because at that point you just don't know who might show up before long.

3. The plot is elegant in its simplicity and beautiful in its execution. An 1880 cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, from the southern border to the northern (somewhere between the Rivers Milk and Missouri), led by two famous Texas Rangers in their 50s, after all the battles have been won and the land "secured" for settlement. A journey from vista to vista that live on in the American mythos. A tale filled with outsize characters and shocking events, combined with the ordinary quirks and peccadilloes of human life anywhere: back-breaking labor, bitter weather, taming the elements and animal passions in tandem, ubiquitous prostitution, city life and wilderness within walking distance, penury and plenty even closer bedfellows, unclaimed bastards and long-lost loves, abrupt deaths and children orphaned, gallows humor and gambling and ghost stories and other ways to kill the time on the short way to the grave.

4. That leads me to what most surprised me about the novel (spoilers hereon). This is a dark story lightly told. And I cannot decide whether that is a virtue or a vice (it's certainly a feature and not a bug). The tone floats upon the surface of the pages, flitting from a Gus monologue to a light-hearted memory to a gripping set piece without pausing for Existential Comment or Thematic Flag-Planting. And that, I think, is why the book (appears to me, at least) to be remembered for the joy and pleasure of the plot and the characters and the dialogue. That was certainly my experience of the first half or so. But make no mistake. This is not a comedy. It is a tragedy.

By story's end, random minor characters have died to no purpose; Jake Spoon, fallen into mindless self-justifying murder, is captured and hanged by his friends before killing himself; July's wife, who never loved him and despises him, runs off to find another man, "marries" a third and is killed by Sioux; July's stepson and best friend together with a runaway, abused little girl are brutally murdered by Blue Duck; Deets is killed by a confused and overwhelmed young Indian boy for no reason; Clara is living alone on hard plains land, with a dying husband and three dead sons in the ground; Lorena has her dreams of San Francisco dashed by being kidnapped and gang-raped by Blue Duck's crew before being rescued by Gus, only to find herself at Clara's, alone in her grief mourning Gus (perhaps losing her mind in the process); Gus himself dies randomly as a result of an accidental run-in with Blackfeet who probably would have meant him no harm if they'd met otherwise. In fact, like Jake Gus chooses to die in a fit of vanity, preferring loss of life to life without legs, thus leaving both Clara and Lorena bereft of his presence and his love. Even Wanz burns himself alive in the saloon that just wasn't the same without Lorena there.

That's only to mention the deaths. Call's bastard son by a prostitute (herself dead) lives in his shadow for two decades, only to learn from others that Call is his father; yet Call cannot bring himself to tell the boy or give him his name, and abandons him in Montana: unclaimed, unnamed, unloved, alone. Call keeps his promise to his dead friend, eventuating with him—alone—back in Lonesome Dove, without meaning or purpose or drive. Why did he take all those cattle and all those men to Montana, and tolerate all those deaths in the process, anyway? Because Jake Spoon made mention of wide green pastures? So what? Or what of Dish, love-sick for Lorena, and July, love-sick for any woman in his orbit (Ellie, Clara, ad infinitum), both too naive and foolish and earnest ever to have their love requited. Even poor Bolivar regrets leaving the outfit and joining his wife south of the border, a house empty of his beloved daughters, home only to a woman who despises him.

Not one person in the whole book proves happy by the end; not one gets what he's looking for; not one finds lasting love or satisfaction. Even Pea Eye, the least unhappy and lonesome character in the story, precisely because he asks little of life except not getting murdered in his sleep, is bewildered and set adrift by Gus's death and Call's actions toward Newt. Never one for words, he is silenced one last time.

Lonesome Dove, in short, is a desperately sad tale. It is bleak, violent, unsparing, even merciless in the fates it doles out to its characters. And yet, for probably 600 or 700 pages, that is not the way the book reads. It reads like a romp, full of color and life and simple joys and little silly detours that make you cackle with glee. It's a book to make you smile, until you don't—because you're crying, or in shock.

Is that just the way McMurtry writes? Or is it a stylistic Trojan horse—slipping in a bleak revisionist Western tragedy in the trappings of a happy well-worn genre? I'm inclined to believe it's the latter, but I confess I don't know enough to form a judgment. I'll have to do some more reading of the book's reception and interpretation to tell.

5. The book is full of provocative themes. One of the biggest is the randomness of life. That Call or Gus lived through the battles of the '40s, '50s, and '60s is sheer luck: the bounce of a rock, a horse's ill-considered step, a bullet's trajectory infinitesimally altered—they're dead, and not the living heroes they find themselves to be as aging men in the '70s. That July Johnson gets mixed up in the Hat Creek's affairs, that Jake Spoon whispers a dream of Montana to Call, is owed to nothing so meaningful as a stray bullet in Fort Smith, Arkansas. All is arbitrary, the luck of the draw. Whether some men are lucky or we merely call men lucky who live in the absence of bad luck, it's chance all the way down either way.

6. If life is random, it's also without intrinsic purpose. What meaning one's life has is mostly a matter of the meaning one assigns to it or discovers in it. Call's nature is to work, and so work he does. When the drive to work leaves him, however, he is listless, lethargic, confused. Why, again, drive cattle north, risking danger to life and limb? Why, for that matter, hang Mexican horsethieves all the while crossing the Rio Grande to steal horses from Mexican rancheros? Why pursue and clear out and kill Indians? Gus asks these questions aloud. Call dismisses them as so much nonsense. But when the question presents itself to him once all is said and done, he has no answer, for there is no answer.

7. Are Gus and Call "good men"? We readers are disposed to think so. Because we grow to love them, our affection tells us they are admirable and virtuous. Are they, though? Call is an unreflective taskmaster, and though he is a gifted leader of men, he acts for no clear higher purpose, and is quite literally possessed by violence when provoked. Gus, for his part, is larger than life, funny, clear-headed, philosophical, lettered, skilled, and wholly undetermined by others' opinions or desires. Then again, he spends most of his time doing nothing; and when not doing nothing, he is gambling, eating voraciously, busting balls, or paying a woman for sex. He openly questions whether the work of a Texas Ranger is just, and does it anyway. Would we call such a person a "good man" in real life?

8. To be sure, the novel does not "need" Gus and Call to be "good men." I imagine lovers of the novel think they are, though, and would defend the claim with feeling. Such a claim is found in one of the blurbs in my copy of the book. But I have to think McMurtry, even apart from the aim of rendering believable and interesting characters with detail and affection, intends this, too, as a kind of Trojan horse. We want to believe Gus and Call are good men because they appear to fulfill the role. But our love for them and our wanting to be in their company blinds us to a true estimation of their character. And McMurtry wants us to see, on the one hand, the emptiness of our approbation of our ancestors; and, on the other, the vacuity of any such estimation at all.

9. What McMurtry so accurately captures in this novel is the sheer givenness and there-ness of life in all its passivity and activity. The characters in Lonesome Dove rarely do things with foresight or reflection. They do them because they are the sort of things one does in their shoes. You rope the bull or drive the cattle or steal the horses or hang the thief or chase the bandits or pay the prostitute or cross the river or give or obey orders because that's just the thing to be done, the thing all of us do, here and now, in these circumstances (and not others), as the persons we are (and not others). Biases and prejudices here are not rendered in world-historical or structural terms. They're inherited, rarely thought of, and only slightly less rarely acted upon. One simply lives, typically a short while, and dies. What action occurs in between is mostly stumbled into.

10. McMurtry, though his two main female characters (Lorena and Clara) are exquisitely drawn, excels in depicting masculinity. The men of the Hat Creek outfit act exactly as men do in such conditions. The moodiness and boredom and in-fighting, the ball-busting and petty quarrels and venting of pent-up frustration, the paralyzing fear and loneliness that grips them all to one degree or another: it is as true to life as any narrative description of men in close community together as any I have ever read.

11. Perhaps my only real criticism of the book is the almost complete absence of religious matters. By this I don't mean that the novel should be theological in outlook (the way, for example, that Blood Meridian drips theological significance off every page). Nor do I mean that a character should have stood in for the Good Christian, or some such thing. What I mean is that mid-19th century Texas was a land saturated in settler-colonial European-cultural Christianity. If you were a white person in the continental United States (prior to their being United States), you belonged to a civilization that claimed the Bible and Jesus and God and Christian faith as a birthright. Even if, sometimes especially if, you were untutored and unpracticed in such faith, you talked as if you were. The vernacular was marinated in it.

And oddly, McMurtry almost never adverts to such vernacular. The boys of Hat Creek don't wonder around the campfire where they go when they die. There's no fierce defender of the name of Jesus Christ against casual sacrilege. There's no Christian burial (except for a briefly mentioned one right at the end). There's no begging Jesus for mercy with a gunshot wound in the gut. There's basically nothing of the sort. There's not even God-salted or Scripture-ornamented speech. And that seems to me a shocking historical oversight. Everything else in the novel rings true. But not this. McMurtry could well have offered his tragic vision of the old West, with no heroes or only heroes compromised by violence and vanity, a vision untainted by transcendent virtue, and yet one pockmarked by a thousand imperfect encounters with the texts and names and stories and concepts of the Christian religion. I have to think he left it out by intention, and that that intention was to give us an unfamiliar, desacralized West, godless and faithless. But the wiser course by far (as, again, the example of Cormac McCarthy attests) would be to leave the religious in, as nothing but empty ornamentation and self-aggrandizing consecration of the otherwise amoral or evil.

Had McMurtry gone that way, I might call Lonesome Dove a flawless novel. Even as it stands, I'm inclined to think it may well still be perfect.

Genre criticism

I'm in a book club with some buddies in town, and as it happens I'm the only one who liked the latest book, a work of fantasy. Two issues with the book have come to the surface, and I've been thinking about their status for fiction more generally.

First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.

Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.

Thoughts about Don Winslow's Cartel Trilogy

1. I initially called it his Border Trilogy, but then I remembered that name's already taken.

2. What Winslow has done in these books is impressive, in literary terms, and powerful, in terms of educating the reading public while also entertaining them. Little did he know when he began writing the first book nearly 20 years ago how relevant, and prescient, the topic of the drug war and its ever-widening social, moral, and political consequences would be.

3. Winslow is a gifted writer. His prose is propulsive, soaked in adrenaline and masculine energy, in all its creative and destructive forms. His control of tone, voice, character, cultural reference (popular and "high"), and biblical allusion is masterful. The complexity of his plots, the centripetal force drawing their far-flung lines of action to some center or centers of encounter and explosion (often literal), is enthralling. The man was born to do this.

4. The TV adaptation of the trilogy, on FX, is therefore going to be a blast to watch.

5. Having said all that... I found myself disappointed with The Border, and increasingly so as the book wore on. At over 700 pages, it brings the trilogy as a whole (following The Power of the Dog and The Cartel) to around 2,000 pages. In the end, the series makes for diminishing returns. I would recommend POTD to anyone, so long as they could stomach some intense, though realistic, violence and sex. The sequel was nearly as good, though the ending was a betrayal, in my view, and some of the flaws that would drag down the conclusion began to show up here. What are some of those flaws?

6. First, the sheer gratuity of the sex and violence becomes pornographic. It's superfluous, upsetting, and finally boring. Winslow, like so many genre artists, wants to have his cake and eat it too: to titillate readers then to indict them for it, given the who and the what and the how and the what-for of what's on the page. In other words, it's Truffaut's principle about war films applied to the drug war journo-novel: reveling in the glorious debauchery and hedonism of the money, power, fame, and pleasure that comes with the illegal drug trade only to reveal the nauseating rot that underwrites it all. There is (I believe) a way of showing the behavior and experiences of those who themselves revel in the extravagance made possible by drug trafficking without inviting readers to be voyeurs, to enjoy what they see, even if from afar. Call it the Goodfellas problem. However brilliant the third act, the first two acts of a story don't vanish into thin air once the bad guys get their comeuppance. Portray them as they feel in the moment (rather than as they are in lamentable fact), and you glorify The Life, whatever the consequences awaiting them down the line.

In short, I just got sick of it all. And I realized, whether it's Winslow or another genre author, I think I'm done with this sort of thing. It's just too much. Life's too short to have your nose rubbed in this wretchedness. Morally (and Winslow thinks his novels have a moral perspective), it's ugly; artistically, it's unnecessary and self-defeating.

7. The great temptation today is to make Relevant Art, where "relevant" means "speaking in terms that correspond directly and literally to the loudest and most public events on the American scene," and where "art" means "a vehicle for a thesis about said scene, didactically delivered, preferably reducible to a single statement about 'what it all means.'" Alas, Winslow has, with The Border, made Relevant Art.

8. How so? Well, Trump and his son-in-law and a Mueller stand-in all play central roles. You read that right. It's as bad as it sounds. Actually, it's worse.

Perhaps I shouldn't say "central." They aren't page-to-page speaking characters (though we do meet all of them face to face, as it were). But they're there on every page, whether as background, subtext, or pseudonym.

In fact, the climax of the narrative—I kid you not—has the protagonist of all three books, Art Keller, testifying before Congress (on and on and on he drones, with impressive, dizzying self-righteousness), the dramatic upshot of which concerns whether the Attorney General will appoint a Special Counsel. Winslow actually has his Trump stand-in, Dennison, fire Mueller-1, only for Keller's testimony to elicit a Mueller-2 to replace him. (Whoops: maybe should have delayed publication by a year or so...)

It dawned on me in the last 100 pages of the novel: I was reading Resistance Fan Fiction. A fever dream of anti-Trump Earth-2 wishful thinking. What an error in judgment.

9. Because Winslow views this Trilogy as educational entertainment, he also indulges himself with a C-plot that bears no relationship the rest of the story, except by the most indirect and least consequential reckoning, and even that in a terribly forced way. The plot tracks a 10-year old boy from the slums of Guatemala all the way north across the Texas border, through the immigration system once he's caught, into street crime in New York City, and finally in a wildly implausible intersection with three other (actual) characters. Why, you might ask, are we reading the tale of this boy, Nico? There's only one answer: to inform American readers What It's Like. What it's like, that is to say, to live in poverty in Latin America, to consider migrating to El Norte, to actually undertake the terribly dangerous journey, etc., etc., etc.

It's a Ripped From The Headlines Vox Explainer Piece, in novelized form. It does not work. It has no reason internal to the novel for its own existence. It exists because readers are wondering about such things, so Winslow will give it to them—even if it adds 150 pages to an already enormous book.

10. Last, Winslow already failed his lead character, Keller, in the finale of The Cartel, and The Border only extends the problem. I won't elaborate on the plot details, only to say that what makes the Trilogy work, when it does, is its willingness to let the tragic realities of the drug war bear, without sentimental qualification, on the lives and psyches of its fictional characters. But there's one, 2,000-page exception to this rule: the hero. He is insulated from it all, as if he has a force field protecting him—not just from bullets, but from any and all other consequences of his and others' actions. Divine providence (i.e., Don Winslow) just can't let Keller take a fall. Though he doesn't ride into the sunset, he does see one, looking across the border with his wife, on the final page of the book. They need a cane and a walker, respectively, to make it down the hill on their newly purchased land—but they're there, and it's theirs.

This is the same man who commits perjury before Congress and murders a man in cold blood, in addition to all the other extralegal and immoral and morally gray actions he commits across four decades for the simple reason (which Winslow has him earnestly report) that he's a "patriot." This is a man who makes a deal with the devil then, at the end of book 2, gets to shoot the devil twice in the face before walking out of the jungle, and taking a flight home to see his love.

The problem isn't that Keller "needs" to be "punished." It isn't that he lives. It's that the rules of the story that Winslow sets up from the beginning, and consistently lets play out in the lives of his characters up to the end, do not apply to the man at the center. It doesn't help that when Keller gets to speechifying in front of Congress, it reads like Winslow's (actual, not hypothetical) op-eds in favor of legalizing all drugs, ending mandatory minimums, so on and so forth. Fictional heroes usually embody their creators' aspirations for themselves, but in this case the self-projected myth-making goes so far as to undermine everything that made the story worth reading, and telling, in the first place.

Genre lists: the best science fiction authors and series

All right. I've written about my crime fiction list and my fantasy list; here, rounding out the genres (at least those in which I'm interested), is my chronological list of the authors and series in science fiction that I have read or aim to read. Far from exhaustive, and not aiming to be "completist." I want to read the best. What should I add to it? [NB: The list has now been expanded with suggestions.]

1. H. G. Wells, Time Machine + Invisible Man + War of the Worlds (1895–98)
2. Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)
3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
4. C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy (1938–45)
5. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
6. Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles (1950) + Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
7. Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (1951–53)
8. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953) + 2001 (1968)
9. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
10. Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1957)
11. Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
12. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
13. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) + The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
14. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
15. Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
16. J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (1966)
17. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) + The Dispossessed (1974)
18. Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
19. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
20. Alice Sheldon (as James Tiptree Jr.), The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1974)
21. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
22. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
23. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
24. Connie Willis, Fire Watch (1984) + Doomsday Book (1992)
25. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985) + Speaker for the Dead (1986) + Ender’s Shadow (1999)
26. Michael Crichton, Sphere (1987) + Jurassic Park (1990) + Timeline (1999)
27. Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series (1987–2012)
28. Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989) 
29. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992) + Anantham (2008)
30. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) + Parable of the Talents (1998)
31. Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy (1993–96)
32. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996) + Children of God (1998)
33. Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life (1998/2002)
34. Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–13)
35. Theodore Judson, Fitzpatrick's War (2004)
36. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
37. John Scalzi, Old Man's War Series (2005–2015) 
38. Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy (2008–10) 
39. Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)
40. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (2010)
41. Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers (2011)
42. China Miéville, Embassytown (2011)
43. Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch Trilogy (2013–15)
44. Pierce Brown, Red Rising (2014–)
45. Jeff Vandermeer, The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)
46. Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself (2015) 

Genre lists: the best fantasy series

Last year I wrote about how I worked my way back into regular fiction reading through genre, specifically the genre of crime novels. I also keep separate genre lists for fantasy and science fiction. Each scratches a particular itch, and I slowly make my way through each one, as the mood strikes me. But I'm a novice, using either my own eclectic interests or the lists of others as guides. I thought I'd open myself up to others to build out my current fantasy list.

NB: I'm not looking to be a completist for completion's sake. I don't want to read just-fine or so-so series in order to comprehend the genre. I want to read the very best series, for nothing but pleasure. Having said that, I do enjoy (as my chronological listing below shows) understanding the relationship between different fantasy novelists and series, tracking the influence going forward and the reactions, revisions, and subversions looking backward. I find that endlessly fascinating.

So: Having said that, if you were to add 3-5 must-read books or series to this list, what would you recommend? [NB: The list has now been updated with suggestions.]

1. E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922)
2. Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian (1932–36)
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) + The Lord of the Rings (1954)
4. T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1938–58) + The Book of Merlyn (1977)
5. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56)
6. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960)
7. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
8. Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–68)
9. Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Cycle (1968–2001)
10. Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972)
11. Stephen King, The Stand (1978) + The Dark Tower (1982–2004)
12. Mark Helprin, A Winter’s Tale (1983)
13. Terry Pratchett, Discworld (1983–2015)
14. Guy Gavriel Kay, The Fionavar Tapestry (1984–86)
15. Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (1988–1993)
16. Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time (1990–2013) 
17. Robin Hobb, The Farseer Trilogy (1995–97)
18. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000)
19. George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–)
20. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter (1997–2007)
21. Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files (2000–)
22. Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
23. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004)
24. Gene Wolfe, The Wizard Knight (2004)
25. Scott Lynch, Gentlemen Bastard Sequence (2006–) 
26. Joe Abercrombie, The First Law (2006–)
27. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn (2006–)
28. China Miéville, Un Lun Dun (2007) + The City & The City (2009)
29. Patrick Rothfuss, The Kingkiller Chronicle (2007–)
30. Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy (2009–2014)
31. Justin Cronin, The Passage Trilogy (2010–16) 
32. N. K. Jemisin, Broken Earth Trilogy (2015–17)