Thomas Cromwell: The rise and fall of Henry VIII’s most notorious minister by Robert Hutchinson. (New York : St. Martin’s Press. 360 pages. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-57794-0. $29.99.) Tells the story of Cardinal Wolsey’s fall from power over his failure to obtain a divorce from the Pope for Henry VIII who wanted to put away Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn and obtain a male heir. Cromwell then rose to power to become Henry’s most important minister. He assisted Henry to get rid of Anne Boleyn and to get new wives, Jane Seymour who died and then Anne of Cleves whom Henry divorced. Cromwell also helped Henry in financial and political matters which benefitted them both. Cromwell knew that he had to stay on Henry’s good graces or he would fall like Wolsey and others had done. He also assisted Henry in religious matters, but he was too liberal for Henry who still favored many Roman Catholic practices. This and Cromwell’s failure with the marriage of Anne of Cleves led to his downfall and his execution as a traitor.

Thomas Cromwell was a great organizer and administrator. Many of the ideas and methods he installed in the English government are still used by the British government of today. Greedy for power and wealth, he used his position to advance himself and his family. He was hated by the nobility who saw him as an upstart since he came from the poor class of England. He was corrupt and willing to do favors when a bribe was paid him. He held back some of the wealth from the dissolved monasteries and used some of it as bribes for others to keep them loyal to him. He was responsible for the destruction of many pieces of English art and architecture in order to get at the precious metals and jewels they were made of. He encouraged the destruction of many shrines in England like that of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury and St. Swithun and Winchester. He also destroyed some burial places of kings and queens, but Henry did not care as long as it brought him wealth. Cromwell was behind the martyrdom of many of the first English martyrs who are held today as saints or blessed.

Robert Hutchinson’s wonderful and entertaining book will keep the reader very interested and unwilling to put it down. Hutchinson uses quotes from various sources from Cromwell’s time period. He gives an equivalent for monetary amounts in his story so that the reader will have a better idea of how much money Cromwell was working with. There is a centerfold of color images. There are endnotes, a bibliography, and an index. There is a chronology and a list and short biography of major characters in the biography. The book jacket has an image of Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Hampton Court.

Another wonderful book about the same time period, and by the same author, is House of Treason: the rise and fall of a Tudor Dynasty (London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009. 340 pages. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-297-84564-5. $32.77). This one is on the noble Howard family of England during the reign of the Tudors. This family was involved in the government of England because they were a high ranking family with royal blood which got some into trouble. The early dukes at times became too proud of their blood line and were seen as competitors with the King or Queen who were jealous of their prerogatives. This was because the Howards might have had a better claim to the throne than did the Tudors since they had Plantagenet connections. Some of the Dukes of Norfolk ran afoul of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and were executed for treason. Hutchinson describes all the intrigues and excitement this family got into. One of the Howards, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, died in the Tower of London after having becoming a Catholic and was canonized a saint in 1970 by Pope Paul VI. The Howard family continued to have Catholic leanings which got some into trouble with the government. This is where the book ends, with the advent of the reign of the Stuarts and the Howard family surviving the Tudors

Robert Hutchinson is an expert on the Reformation in England and Wales and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquities. He is an associate tutor in church archaeology at the University of Sussex’s Center (England) for Continuing Education and is the author of many papers. He is the author of The Last Days of Henry VIII (2006), Elizabeth’s Spymaster (2007).

One of the stars of the DVD is Taylor Mason, who has spent the last 25 years making people laugh on stage, on film, and on TV. As one of the world’s best ventriloquists, he can leave you mystified as to whether you are talking to Taylor or one of the endless number of puppets that he brings to life with his voice.

Now in its third year and 4^th DVD edition, Thou Shalt Laugh may be old-fashioned comedy to some, but with over a half-million in sales, you can’t argue with its successful formula, as succinctly expressed by Taylor Mason: “We don’t go in the bathroom, we don’t go in the bedroom and our show isn’t about constantly berating someone we don’t agree with.”

Taylor is most inspired when he gets an opportunity to take his “friends” with him and go unannounced to a children’s hospital. Taylor said there are many hospitals where there are kids in need of some cheering up. He doesn’t make an appointment or seek any media attention; he just wants to make some kids happy.

One day before a show in Chicago, he walked into a children’s hospital with his famous pig puppet, “Paco.” It’s a simple, small, pink puppet, that looks like a pig, but has an attitude, like most of Mason’s puppets. “So I’m making the pig talk to this little boy,” said Taylor. The young boy was in a terminal cancer ward, with his head shaved. “The little boy starts having a conversation with the pig. He knew Paco was a puppet. He was a very sweet kid, but he was 7 or 8 years old and just kept talking back forth with the pig.”

Suddenly nurses started coming into the boy’s room and gathered around the little boy’s bed. Taylor’s pig puppet and the little dying boy kept up their funny conversation. Taylor wasn’t sure why so many nurses were in the room watching until one of them leaned over to him and whispered, “He hasn’t spoken in nearly a year… please keep the pig talking.”

The nurses then began to feed the pig questions to ask the little boy because he had not spoken to anyone in such a long time. “I never planned for that to happen. Ventriloquism is a weird art and somehow it helped for that little boy to come out of his shell and tell the nurses, through the pig, how he felt, after nearly a year of being in the hospital.”

Taylor also contributes a column and a joke file each week for New Christian Voices and dreams up new ideas for his act which takes him all over the country and around the world.

Paco the Pig is the source of another funny story, featured on the new DVD, Thou Shalt Laugh, this one involving a grown-up who purchased one of the pigs following one of Taylor Mason’s live shows.

“Yeah I had pig puppets that I used to sell after the show. I was in New York City, working in a comedy club and a guy comes up after the show and buys a pig. It’s an investment; it’s $25, so it’s not a cheap thing.”

Thirty minutes later the man who bought the little pig came back and according to Mason he was livid, “He is angry and tells me, ‘It doesn’t work, you sold me a mute. This one does not work.’”

The world class ventriloquist realized the man was not joking, “And so I had to explain to the guy, after he just saw my show, that there was no like MP-3 download, that I made the pig talk… and remember, America this is a voter who bought my pig!”

Funny. Very funny. So if you are looking for that perfect DVD that you can pop into your family’s player so the whole family can watch and see a cadre of Christian comics from ventriloquists to standup comics to talented musicians with a flair for humor, look no further than Thou Shalt Laugh 4 which is on store shelves and available at the usual online locations starting in early November. (By the way, the first 3 DVDs are great to own or rent as well.) Or visit the official website at http://www.ThouShaltLaugh.com.

Since her conversion, Rice began writing about Christ, and now about angels. These “angels” are not like the ones imagined by New Age followers. She has studied what Christianity teaches about angels. She has consulted the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Fr. Pascal Parente’s book The Angels to write about them. According to Christian teaching, angels are disembodied spirits. Each is his own distinct species of angel. There are also various classes of angels or heavenly persons which are mentioned in the Scriptures. St. Paul lists nine classes, or ranks (also called choirs). Only three angels called “archangels” are named in scripture: St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and St. Raphael. There are good angels and there are bad angels. The bad angels are led by Lucifer, otherwise known as the devil or Satan, and by other names.

According to Christian teaching we humans do not become angels when we die. We become disembodied souls that will have a human body again at the Resurrection.

Anne Rice’s new book is very entertaining, and contains a conversion story of its own. An assassin, Toby O’Dare, has an experience that changes his life so much that he is willing to do anything for God. He wants to make up for all the wrong he has done. That God forgives even assassins is something most of us accept with great difficulty. We humans may think that a notorious sinner is beyond forgiveness, but God does not work that way. This fictional story of Toby and an angel, Malchiah, permits Rice to present a number of teaching moments in the story, if one is alert to them. They are correct according to Christian teachings and the Scriptures, and undoubtedly reflect on Rice’s own life and her conversion (especially clear to this reviewer after reading her memoir). Although, Rice of course was not a notorious sinner her character O’Dare was.

Anne Rice researches the historical background for her books and she has done well with this one too. Since O’Dare tells God and the angel that he is willing to do anything to make up for his sins, Malchiah sends him back in time to correct a situation in 13th century England involving Catholics and Jews. One will have to read the book to find out what happens, suffice it to say that the book keeps the reader enthralled — as many reportedly were by her vampire stories, so she is now doing with her angel stories. This book is a first in a series she plans to write while works continues on her fictional series on the life of Christ. Anne Rice must be doing well with these Christian fictional books since some are bashing her for them. This new book is highly recommended to those who want to read good Christian fiction and about angels.

The topics he examines are divided into three parts: trust and faith, Christian life, and prayer. His letters are in a down-to-earth style that is appealing to his readers, even though Abbot Jerome is a scholar; his letters are accessible to anyone. He discusses topics like trust, prayer, silence, celibacy, responsibility, the dark night of the soul, saints, distractions during prayer, intercessory prayer, monasticism, private revelations, the American dream, and others. The letters are short (a page or two) and to the point.

Abbot Jerome Kodell, O.S.B. besides being an abbot is a founding member of the Little Rock Scripture Study Program. He is the author of Twelve Keys to Prayer (1999), The Eucharist in the New Testament (1991), The Catholic Bible Study Handbook, commentaries with the Collegeville Bible Commentary, and articles and other books. This book is highly recommended to those interested in prayer, Benedictine spirituality, and monasticism.

In other words, one had best proceed with some humility, and I do. Rightly regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language—McEwan’s prose is as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, or a time bomb―his Booker Prize win in 1998, though for one of his fluffier little books, Amsterdam, was nonetheless not entirely misplaced. Sentence for sentence, it simply doesn’t get much better.

One of the most stunning chapters I have ever read in any novel occurs early in Atonement (2001) in a section describing a woman’s flowering migraine. It is the 1920’s, the scene is an English country house, and the woman is a prosperous upper-class wife and mother:

Not long after lunch, once she was assured that her sister’s children and Briony had eaten sensibly and would keep their promise to stay away from the pool for at least two hours, Emily Tallis had withdrawn from the white glare of the afternoon’s heat to a cool and darkened bedroom. She was not in pain, not yet, but she was retreating before its threat. There were illuminated points in her vision, little pinpricks, as though the worn fabric of the visible world was being held up against a far brighter light. She felt in the top right corner of her brain a heaviness, the inert body weight of some curled and sleeping animal; but when she touched her head and pressed, the presence disappeared from the coordinates of actual space. Now it was in the top right corner of her mind, and in her imagination she could stand on tiptoe and raise her right hand to it. It was important, however, not to provoke it; once this lazy creature moved from the peripheries to the center, then the knifing pains would obliterate all thought, and there would be no chance of dining with Leon and the family tonight.”

By the time I finished reading this chapter, I had to make for the bathroom and a bottle of aspirin.

Passages of horror encroaching on the quotidian are usually the best things about an Ian McEwan novel. The man is a poet of the Age of Anxiety; of violence erupting in the midst of the everyday; of all the things that can suddenly and dreadfully Go Wrong: the opening helium balloon scene in Enduring Love; the discovery of the drunken ex-husband in the wardrobe in The Innocent; the protagonist’s wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-with-the-wrong-guy fender-bender in Saturday. In the hands of a master of the language, such scenes inspire more terror than any splatter movie. When I learned that one of his early novels opened with a child being abducted away from her father at a local grocery store, I knew at once that that was one work in McEwan’s oeuvre that this already anxious mother would never, ever pick up.

But great episodes do not a great novel make, and after reading, with a writer’s appreciation, six of his eight novels, I confess myself disappointed with the collected works of Ian McEwan. More, mine is that greatest of all disappointments in artistic terms, the disappointment of unfulfilled (great) expectations. This guy is so good, so fine a wordsmith―at crafting a sentence, a paragraph, a scene―that one ought to feel confident that he will be reckoned among the few authors of our time who will outlast our time.

And yet, set side-by-side with the Greats of previous eras―Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Melville, James, Dostoevsky, and so many others―McEwan, in my view, comes up perplexingly short. In place of a fully-realized narrative structure complete with foundation, floor, supporting walls, and a roof, fretted with golden fire, what we get in his books are brilliantly executed but strangely strung-together episodes, many of which end up having nothing to do with anything else in the novel; or which one feels should have led to a wholly different novel. That brilliant pre-migraine scene in Atonement, for instance, serves no purpose in the rest of the story. In fact, neither does Emily Tallis, the migraine-sufferer herself. Instead, Emily drops off the page as the book goes on to tell the story of Emily’s daughter, Briony, a teenager (and budding writer), whose immature misreading of a romantic incident ruins the lives of two people close to her. It was as if the author got a terrific idea for a passage about an approaching migraine, and having no place else to put it at the moment, stuck it in the middle of the manuscript that happened to be on his desktop.

Worse, in that particular novel, after getting his readers to care about the star-crossed lovers whose lives are so adversely affected by the imaginative teenager, McEwan flips the reader a literary bird with a too-clever-by-half “meta-narrative strategy” that is so cynical, so artsy-fartsy trick-ending gimmicky—a poster child for the “Unreliable Narrator” school of postmodern lit fic—that my eldest son, when he read it, threw the book against the wall. Publishers Weekly adored it, of course, calling it a “coup de theatre.” Chacun a son goût.

Texts and Subtexts

My second disappointment with the fiction of Ian McEwan has to do with the man’s acute but narrow, even blinkered, vision. On the face of it, McEwan has made his well-deserved reputation with a lack of overt political or social agenda. And thank God for that, one might well exclaim, after all the exercises in narrative agitprop readers of fiction have had to endure for the last several decades, from potboilers like The Da Vinci Code to fêted literary works like Written on the Body. (The latter, if you haven’t heard of it, is Jeanette Winterson’s sly contrivance, crafted in such a clever way that the reader, in spite of the protagonist’s love affairs with both men and women, cannot for the life of him―or her―determine by the end of the book whether the protagonist is a him or a her. And if you think there isn’t an agenda in that, then you have surely been sleeping, Van Winkle-like, through the better part of the Sexual Revolution.)

But before one succumbs to some Pollyannaish notion that McEwan displays that laudatory disposition towards fair play and reticence such as only the British seem able to produce, caveat lector: The author’s seeming lack of overt system, of agenda, masks one of the most ferocious and all-pervasive systems in intellectual history: that psycho-matrix of rationalism, scientism, materialism, positivism, and relativism that nary an educated creature of the twenty-first century West can think beyond without the most strenuous of mental labors, and a robust measure of Grace.

By God, it’s in the very (hepa-filtered) air we breathe, and the (carbon-filtered) water we drink. I think, therefore I am (I think). And if what I think is true is at odds with what you think is true, we’ll either a) do a controlled experiment, the results of which will be brought into question by next year’s controlled experiment, or, b) take a poll to settle the matter in true democratic fashion, or c) agree to disagree by agreeing that nothing is true, nor does any of it matter a good goddamn, either way.

McEwan, it would do well to remember, is a self-proclaimed atheist. When PBS was doing its series on post-9/11 faith, it chose McEwan to represent those without any. And like many of his creed (so to speak), or of any creed, McEwan occasionally exhibits a phenomenal ignorance of people who do not share his.

I’ve yet to see anything in McEwan’s fiction to make me suspect that he understands the difference between religion and superstition, belief and ideology, faith and fanaticism; between the numinous and the irrational; between what physician-novelist (and believer) Walker Percy described as “the scientific method” (which Percy loved as much as any son of the Enlightenment), and what Percy decried as “scientism.”

Indeed, McEwan associates himself so vigorously with the Voltairean myth of the inherent enmity between Faith and Reason―a position continually rejected by the Church, at least―that he has turned his back on a significant portion of the heritage of that very western civilization that produced the scientific method in the first place; the part that, while hardly excluding science or reason (and born as much from Aquinas as Kant or Locke), also acknowledges Mystery; of other ways of knowing besides mathematical certainty. In other words, Tradition (what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”) and Faith.

In the hands of McEwan, scientism is both a gift and a curse; for if he can write better than anyone when the subject is amenable to a biological, neurological, Darwinian, or even a Freudian explanation, description or diagnosis, he succumbs to a peculiar failure of imagination when the thoughts or actions of a character invite the employment of the non-ratiocinative faculties.

Consider this neo-Darwinist passage from Enduring Love:

We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half-truths, who, in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track: when it didn’t suit us, we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That’s why there are divorces, border disputes, and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn’t save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity. (Enduring Love, p. 196)

What happens when a novelist, even a brilliant one, brackets out a huge chunk of common human experience? McEwan is so much the atheist, the rationalist, the materialist, that the fictional world he creates in his novels is curiously two-dimensional and lacking in variety. One simply can’t imagine him, for instance, writing a historical novel set anytime before the modern period, so rooted is his curious mix of Enlightenment naïveté and postmodern cynicism. Even Atonement, his one attempt at a sort of historical novel, failed in this regard. Set in the period before and during the Second World War, there’s not a single figure in this rather large cast of characters who, even in the thick of battle or faced with death, seems aware that the majority of people around them believe in something called God and the Afterlife. These characters, like the author himself, appear to be untroubled atheists even in their imaginary foxholes.

By profession, a McEwan protag is likely to be a technician, a science writer, a neurosurgeon. The latter (Henry Perowne in Saturday, McEwan’s latest) seems especially fitting, given McEwan passion for biological tropes. And though perhaps honest enough at times to admit that he talks rationalism better than he walks it, a McEwan protag will invariably try to explain away his own occasional lapses into “irrationality” with polysyllabic references to neurological, bio-chemical, and trauma-induced stimuli or “evolutionary strategies.” Not that McEwan would be the first writer with a penchant for protagonists who are mirror-images of himself—in this case, atheistic hyper-rationalists so committed to the familiar terrain of scientific materialism that anything outside it, were it to be mapped, would have to be stamped, “Here be Dragons.”

And there’s the rub. For show me a McEwan “non-rationalist,” and I will show you either a female love-interest or ornery family member―some artist or literary type that the male protagonist simply cannot understand―or, if male, a threatening, out-of-control alcoholic, psychotic, or criminal with a degenerative disease.

Using words like surgical instruments, McEwan is wholly in his comfort zone when sketching these “Others”―detailing the dismal prognosis of an old woman slipping into Alzheimer’s, or limning the tell-tale features of Huntington’s disease in a clever but violent street thug, or describing, as from some Olympian professional distance, like a clinician eyeballing a virus under a microscope, the case history of a stalker suffering from erotomania.

Hound of Heaven or Feral Dog?

The problematic notion of a war between reason and science, on the one hand, and emotion, intuition and faith, on the other is so chronic a theme in McEwan’s fiction as to approach the obsessive; but only two of his books deal with religion directly: Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997). The difference in vision and emotional impact between the two consecutive novels deserves a closer look.

The earlier book, Black Dogs, gives us an indecisive, between-two-worldviews narrator writing about his mother-in-law, June―a gruff-but-endearing mystic of New Age-ish persuasion. June is married to (but separated from) Bernard, a rationalist, atheist and (for many years) committed communist. For the narrator, this bickering pair sit as it were one on each shoulder, arguing their for- and against- religion cases like angels and devils in old Tom and Jerry toons.

The novel’s (and narrator’s) focus, however, is on June, and hers is a story of conversion—of a life-changing experience of the Numinous during an otherwise terrifying encounter with two wild black mastiffs in the French countryside. While the scene amply displays McEwan’s capacious gift for instilling horror and terror―Stephen King, I understand, is a fan―his description of June’s subsequent encounter with “a circle of light” is vague, vapid, abstract. I came away feeling that the subject held little interest for the author in any event, but thought McEwan deserved brownie points, at least, for his tolerant, even affectionate characterization of June. If the narrator (and author) couldn’t understand this woman, I thought, at least he could imagine understanding her, and that was nearly enough.

With the 1997 publication of his next novel, however, McEwan appears to have finally taken sides, and with a vengeance. Recently made into a so-so film starring Daniel Craig, Enduring Love details the shocking personal aftereffects of a random accident, in which several strangers are thrown together trying to save a young boy about to be carried away in a runaway helium balloon. The upshot: the protagonist, an (of course) atheistic/rationalist science writer, finds himself the prey of a different sort of feral hound: a “Jesus freak.” A Jesus freak, moreover, as the Christian reader soon discovers with a yadda-yadda sigh of weariness, whose increasingly violent obsession with the protagonist is wrapped up homoerotically with a desire to show the protag the light of God’s love.

Well, as Walker Percy once so charmingly put the case, “just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn’t mean that God does not exist.”

Not that McEwan is such a crude intellectual combatant that he fails to endow his hyper-rationalist hero with some borderline manias of his own—indeed, there were times when the protagonist, Joe Rose began to remind me of Chesterton’s famous dictum that a madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything except his reason. Still, there’s no question that vis-à-vis McEwan’s beloved “war” between Faith and Reason, his narrative voice took a sudden, shrill-shrieking and partisan turn in this novel. No longer the each-to-his-own tightrope-walker of 1992’s Black Dogs, the protagonist of 1998’s Enduring Love is not only committed, he’s condescending, cocky, and angry. The contrast is so sharp when one reads the two novels, as I did, back-to-back, that one can’t help wonder…what the hell happened?

While it would be perilous to hang so pronounced a shift on one little hook, a quick perusal of McEwan’s available biography brings forth the fascinating factoid that in the 1990s, during the time the author was writing Enduring Love, he was also engaged in a rancorous and occasionally bizarre divorce and custody battle, the details of which were splashed like acid all over the British tabloid press, reputedly the meanest in the world. The ex-wife in question, it falls out, was a self-styled clairvoyant, meditation-teacher and faith-healer.

In which case, my sympathies. Confirmed believers have lost their faiths over less.

The Problem of Empathy

What McEwan lacks most of all, in my view, is that imaginative empathy, indispensable for a really first rate novelist, that enables one to think inside the skin of people wholly different from oneself. This is especially discouraging since, in a sorrowing post-9/11 meditation entitled “Only Love and Then Oblivion,” McEwan had the wisdom to write:

It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality….the hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination.

This is beautiful stuff; no Christian personalist could put it better. How unfortunate, then that among McEwan’s failures as a novelist, particularly a novelist with a fixation on the dodgy “Faith vs. Reason” dichotomy, is his seeming inability to “imagine what it is like to be someone” who is a believer—a believer, that is, who is not irrational, and certainly not dangerous, delusional, or obsessive. As it happens, in the real world, millions of us/them going about the streets every day, minding our/their own business; yet such as we/they never make it onto McEwan’s pages, nor those of many of his fellow literary lights, without being dressed in fool’s motley. Many of us/them have even contributed, and continue to contribute, to the history of that Science-with-a-capital-S that McEwan so clearly worships, from Newton and Copernicus to Fr. Mendel and the Curies.

It might be pertinent to mention in this context that like many male authors of the so-called “Great White Narcissist school” of fiction, McEwan not only peoples his books with intellectuals of the secular persuasion, there are also few people of color, working class or uneducated people in his work—the latter show up in Saturday only in criminal form, which is to say, as another example of “the Other.” When Zadie Smith, the young novelist of White Teeth fame, tried to call McEwan on this in a recent interview [Believer, August 2005], McEwan ducked the question with an appeal to the need to “frame” his stories—an image, I felt, that was uncannily apt, given the word’s secondary legal connotations involving the misapplication of guilt by way of false evidence.

Failure of Vison, or Failure of Nerve?

What Zadie Smith also described in her Believer interview as “the burst of the irrational into the rational,” usually in a terrifying form, is the central leitmotif in the work of McEwan; but after meeting Joe Rose, the protagonist of Enduring Love, I began to recognize another, different, more subtle, and in some ways even more chronic form of anxiety in McEwan’s fiction: a fear not only of the more bestial forms of non-rationality, but also of the everyday and human: particularly mental illness and age-related loss of mental acuity. (At least two of McEwan’s novels, for instance, have included characters stricken by dementia or Alzheimer’s.)

And then there’s the fear of being just plain wrong. A McEwan protagonist may try to explain away emotions like fear as the result of “neural activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains,” but he also spends an awful lot of his word count reassuring himself of the correctness of his analysis, whatever the ostensible subject. Could the author, I began to wonder as I moved from book to book, be less certain of his own self-described “hard won” rationalism and atheism than he would like to think? Christians, of course, have it on best authority that the Dark Night of the Soul is a stage of development awaiting every believer who stays the course; but rationalists are not supposed to be troubled by such Clouds of Unknowing.

Which brings me to my final problem with the fiction of the immensely gifted Ian McEwan: it is a different sort of “failure of imagination” and it is on full display in McEwan’s latest novel, Saturday.

Acclaimed by some as the first great “post-9/11” novel, Saturday delivers another brilliantly McEwanesque opening sequence: a London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, wakes up too early on his day off with a vague sense of unease. Getting out of bed, Perowne ponders the lazy, pleasant Saturday to come as he gazes out the bedroom window of his posh London townhouse, only to see a passenger jet wheeling slowly across the sky, on fire from what may or not be, in this post-9/11 world, a terrorist incident.

If there is any truth to the traditional storytelling wisdom that there is an unspoken “contract” between author and reader, obliging authors to “pay off” incidents that are “set up”—and I guess I’m enough of a literary traditionalist to think that without some really good narrative reason, there is―then it may be understood why I felt put out, stiffed even, when the book failed in fact to be a “post-9/11 novel,” as many critics declared and as the opening led me to believe.

See, this isn’t a book about a wealthy and complacent Londoner (a sort of upscale Everyman) coming to terms with the post-9/11threat of global terrorism; it’s a series of conversations and episodes, highlighting the so-called “law of unintended consequences,” that eventually unfolds along domestic-thriller lines. That one of these conversations includes a father-daughter exchange about the War on Terrorism as it was building up against Iraq in February 2003 doesn’t signify that the opening setup is paid off in any meaningful way, or that the author affords his readers any insights on the mess. In the end, the only setup that is paid off in this novel involves a more “everyday” form of urban anxiety, an incident of road rage leading to a home invasion such as might have just as easily occurred in 1993 as 2003.

I suspect that this failure to answer his own first-scene questions might have something to do with McEwan’s lack of a firm metaphysical foundation for his ethical and political beliefs, whatever they may be. Consider: without such a foundation, how can anyone, even with the utmost benevolence, deal with thorny questions like the effect of Global Terrorism on the individual, and the individual’s responsibility in dealing with it? Or whether the 1938 Neville Chamberlain appeasement metaphor is applicable to Saddam’s Iraq? Or whether Bush and Blair were morally justified in responding to the events of 9/11 with “Shock and Awe” against a government that, whatever its evils, appears to have had nothing to do with 9/11?

On the face of it offering little beyond a “whatever will work best” pragmatism, McEwan’s Saturday quickly downshifted to a more domesticable set of narrative questions―from Scope to Microscope, as it were: When confronted on the street with three bullies, should the rationalist/pragmatist protagonist run, fight, or use his superior but rather abstract powers of ratiocination to humiliate the leader in front of his two thug-underlings? And if he does, what might be the unintended consequences?

And if he does, I began to ask myself as I read the book, after such a crack opening, will the reader give a damn?

I didn’t. Since every scenario in a McEwan novel unravels in terms of chance accidents and biochemical or evolutionary determinism, perhaps it was for the best that the author decided not to waste breath and brain cells on the huge question of how the west should respond to global terrorism. That’s a subject for this generation’s Dostoevsky or Tolstoy…would that we had one.

(An aside: From the sounds of it, filmmaker Paul Greengrass may have come far closer to the mark, despite McEwan’s dismissal of movies as an inherently “superficial” medium, with his United 93. We may also hope that Updike’s new novel, The Terrorist, proves not only a departure from Updike’s standard adultery-in-New England fare, but a little more ambitious on the subject of terrorism and the West.)

The “Vision” Thing

More than one critic has noted a certain hesitance, even duality in McEwan. “McEwan is a Freudian with an Orwellian sense of decency,” wrote Alice Truax on Slate.com. “Rationality is [for McEwan]…not an instinct but an achievement, a sandcastle no sooner built than washed away by the tides of the mind,” wrote Adam Mars-Jones of The Observer. According to critic John Lanchester, “Ian McEwan has left-wing convictions and a right-wing imagination; the things he feels he ought to think, and the images which well up when he sits down to write, are at war.”

McEwan even admits, from time to time, that things may be a bit more complicated than his overt scientism would allow, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with these more-things-in-heaven-and-earth, Horatio, moments. “There are certain mistakes,” he notes in one of Joe Rose’s numerous scientific digressions in Enduring Love, this one about the ingenious rescue of the faulty Hubble telescope, “that no quantity of astronauts can right.”

There are hints in several of his novels that McEwan is aware of the limits of scientific knowledge and that, as he put it in a recent interview, “the innerlife…is not driven by surface rationality but by a spectrum of hints, certainties that have no base.” It is interesting to note then that even though his novels have become increasingly complacent of late in their rationalistic tenor—the days of the narrator being caught between the poles of Sense and Sensibility appear to be over—in Saturday, it is the “Sensibility” characters that effectively save the day. Indeed, it could even be argued that it is the Sensible Perowne, with his fiendishly acute and hyper-rational self-awareness, that got them all into the mess in the first place.

It was in the context of this Hamletesque duality, this “thinking too precisely on the event,” that it occurred to me that McEwan’s reluctance to take on a large-scale subject, despite his large-scale literary gifts, might have more to do with a lack of philosophical confidence and vision than any possible literary shortcomings. Both Atonement and the opening scenes of Saturday prove that McEwan has the literary capacity to tackle a large canvas, but perhaps not the largeness of mind to wrap his skills around it. Nor, perhaps, the courage to risk his distinguished literary reputation on a venture into the dragon-ridden realms of “moral fiction”―the late John Gardner might approve, were he really to give it a go, but whether The New York Review of Books would is less certain.

To be or not to be

In 1949, Laurence Olivier filmed a screen version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that became instantly famous for Olivier’s voice-over prologue announcing that Hamlet was a play “about a man who could not make up his mind.” Perhaps “infamous” would be the better word, for Olivier’s little “frame” has echoed through the decades as incredibly simplistic in reference to Shakespeare’s fiendishly complex play; but I found myself reminded of it constantly as I made my way through McEwan’s oeuvre. The chiseled narrative voice of this writer, I felt, with the possible exception of his furious Enduring Love, was generally so cagey and hyper-cautious, so laden with the subtle sophistries of a man unwilling to take responsibility for the implications of his own alleged beliefs, that I began to long for an unexpected political or ideological outburst, even at the risk of agitprop. After all, you can’t be proven wrong if you don’t make a statement, and one of the hallmarks of the scientific method is falsifiability.

McEwan’s opting for the path of least resistance in Saturday felt less like an average citizen’s quandary about his competence to make an informed decision on one of the most complex “personal-is-political” issues of our day, than the indecision of a man so lacking a moral foundation on which to hang a Just War argument, for or against, that simple paralysis ensued; a sophisticated literary rendition of “I don’t know, so do let’s talk about something else.”

Or, as a football-fan friend of mine would have it, McEwan, one of the most gifted players on the field of fiction, just when he had the ball in hand, an open lane to the end zone, and his career-best chance to have a go at this century’s War and Peace, the mother of all literary touchdowns, he punted.

On Becoming a Classic

Even with a wordsmith as supremely gifted as McEwan, it would not surprise me if his fiction, as it stands, did not survive the test of time—that mysterious process that renders one work a “classic” and another no more than a footnote in some future grad student’s doctoral dissertation on “Postmodern meta-narrative” or “Communities of Anxiety in early twenty-first century English literature,” or “The Great White Narcissist school of fiction from Mailer to McEwan.” For when it comes to the process by which our present chaos might be organized into some harmony, at least intellectual harmony, McEwan, unlike many of the “Greats” before him, seems to have nothing to offer the reader beyond technical prowess and a predilection for the outdated intellectual fashions of the Enlightenment, dressed up in postmodern robes.

This is a highly personal view, of course; but for me, wasting a talent like this on what one critic called “over-extended short stories” written in the acid-ink of chronic Voltairean dyspepsia, is like taking out an enemy trench with a nuclear warhead. No question it gets the job done, if you’re into that sort of thing, but leaves many a reader with a profound sense of disappointment at the crater-sized might-have-beens. Grouchy meaning-junkie that I am, I am tempted to paraphrase the writer-protagonist of Atonement that, when it comes to Ian McEwan, “it was not the backbone of a story that [he] lacked. It was backbone.”

[Originally published in Second Spring Journal (http://www.secondspring.co.uk) and used by permission of the author.]

The story opens and we are introduced to Esther Hobbes (Ellen Bry) who lives a high society life until the sudden death of her husband. Esther loses her grip on her comfortable lifestyle when it’s suddenly stolen away with her husband. She is flabbergasted to discover that she had been living a façade all along. Due to her husband’s bad investments her only inheritance is a rural Georgia house which had seen better days. Esther realizes that her only option for survival is to evict the tenants, sell the house and secure a suitable place to live.

As the story unfolds Esther makes her way down to the southern town clad in her big city clothes and flashy jewelry to take necessary measures to get on with her life. She meets the family consisting of foster parents, rebellious teenagers, played by Lucas Till and Jessica Luza, and three younger children with their own set of issues. Once a seemingly composed and adept woman, Esther wrestles with conflicting perspectives and feels as an orphan herself. Tension swells between the characters facing the fact that the unwanted stranger suddenly showing up may take their home and the only semblance of family stability they’ve struggled to establish.

As Esther is thrust into a dingy room with not much more than a twin bed and a dresser, she starts to shed some of her jewelry, begin to soften up and go through a metamorphism of sorts. She lightens her need for material possessions, the Armani power suit is ditched and she begins to slowly embrace a faith she had previously avoided and gradually gives away the little she has left.

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Ellen Bry from her California home and got the scoop about her personal experiences in filming and working with the cast and crew. During our interview, Bry joyfully expressed, “I feel like this movie fell from Heaven! On some level I feel I was destined to play the role.”

Bry wasn’t seeking this film but it found her. She was scouted out among several dozens of actresses for the part of Esther. Bry says she is not exactly like her character Esther but that she is similar in some respects. She said Esther is “sweet but no push over, nobody’s fool.”

Bry found the Jackson, Georgia set “an amazing place to film this movie,” Bry surmised that “Esther was a fish out of water and so was Ellen.” It was an actual culture shock for urban Bry. But the townspeople embraced the cast and crew with excitement in ways Bry said “that you just don’t get in the urban, sophisticated and jaded communities that I typically film. They showered us with love – they rolled out the welcome mats. It was so uplifting.”

The townspeople invited the cast and crew to their restaurants and shops. “It was kind of magical,” Bry said. She explained that the producer didn’t need permits for filming since the town was so willing to help, volunteering their stores; honored to have their restaurants and homes in the movie. The Lost and Found Family helped to create civic pride because it was “one of the biggest things that happened to Jackson, Georgia in a long time,” Bry explained

Most of the story took place in “a real house one step away from being condemned, so it was perfect for the film” Bry explained. “It smelled a little funky and you didn’t want to walk around in your bare feet,” she added. The house was scheduled for demolition after the completion of filming. Another possibility was to remodel it and turn it into a restaurant called, “Mrs. Hobbe’s House” if it wasn’t demolished.

Bry enjoyed working with a cast and crew. She liked the fact that “there were no divas, struggles, or people pulling rank. Everyone was happy to show up and work.” She said the children were “all quite different and just wonderful.” She said the positive attitudes of all brought “good energy to the set.”

Bry sees this film as inspirational on many levels but claims it’s “not preachy and will appeal to a general audience.” She hopes that the movie will “raise awareness to the special plight of foster kids.”

The movie is entertaining and engaging both for the spiritually oriented and those merely seeking a wholesome and enjoyable family movie experience. Faith-based nuances are woven throughout which will undoubtedly be recognized by Christian audiences. I hope this film won’t be pigeon-holed as strictly Christian since the messages supporting family values, as well as the virtues of faith, hope and love so desperately needed in our world today emerge vividly and can appropriately reach a broader audience. The Lost and Found Family also exemplifies the need for foster care and enlightens us to the depth of compassion and selflessness identified by foster parents giving their lives and homes, welcoming strangers into their families.

Visit the Lost and Found Family website to see a movie trailer and to learn more: http://www.lostandfoundfamilymovie.com/

Bill Donohue’s new book, Secular Sabotage:  How Liberals are Destroying Religion and Culture in America (New York : Faith Words.  258 pages.  Hardback.  ISBN 978-0-446-54721-5.  $26.99.  September 2009),  reveals and explores the many ways that secularists and many liberals attack Christianity and Catholicism in particular.  He presents incidences from recent times.  He says that many of these secularists are nihilists who oppose any religious expression being allowed in the public.  They want religion to be an extremely private thing although; a majority of Americans say they are Christian or belong to another religion.  The minority is trying to stifle the majority.  Many of those who bash Christianity are pro-abortion and anti-religious.

Donohue points out that the fuss over Christmas by secularists who want Hanukah and Kwanza to be celebrated as much as Christmas are using these minor celebrations to hide their bashing of Christians.   They say they are inclusive, but the truth is it is on their terms of inclusivity.  Secularists and many liberals hide behind the word “multiculturalism” to bash the traditions and cultures of the majority of Americans.  Donohue and others like George Weigel and Pope Benedict have shown that the secularists are winning in Europe and they could win in the United States if they are allowed to.

Donohue points out how secularist artists are permitted and encouraged to desecrate images and persons held holy by Catholics and other Christians.  Like having a painting of Mary the Mother of God and having elephant dung put on the portrait and displaying that and saying it is art.  Do that to Mohammed and you get killed.  According to Donohue Hollywood and the movie industry is very anti-Catholic and puts out many films that are up-front about that or subtle.  Showtime and HBO have been allowing and sponsoring anti-Catholic shows on their cable stations.  Liberal secular lawyers work for secularists and help to fight against Christians and others as lawyers for the ACLU and other secular groups.

Donohue points out that the Democratic Party used to have a lot of Catholic support from bishops on down to lay people.  Some how he says the party has forgotten its past and has given into secularists and pro-abortionists.  Many Catholics who say they are Democrats are pro-abortion and do not support some teachings of the Church on many issues like women’s ordination, vouchers for schools, homosexuality, and other teachings and issues.  There are though some Catholic Democrats who support all the teachings of the Church, but are finding it more and more difficult to support the Democratic Party of their Catholic ancestors.  Many bishops and lay people have moved to the Republican Party due to life issues.

Donohue discusses how secular supporting Catholics or liberal Catholics can be the worse enemies of the Church.  Many liberal Catholics say they are Catholic, like Catholics for Choice and Call to Action, but they oppose many teachings of the Church and join forces with secularists to oppose the Church in various ways, like the arts, abortion, etc.  This controversy has divided many Catholics against each other.

The reader may at first think that Donohue is just ranting and raving, but he is not doing that.  He points out incidences that have occurred and he documents his various sources to back up his discussions with.  The general reader will have no problem reading or understanding what Donohue is writing about.  Some may accuse him of dumbing it down, but that is not true.  He writes where all can understand what is going on in the United States.  That a secular liberal minority is trying to shut up and shut down the Christian majority.  He and others do not want to shut the minority down.  They just want to stop the bashing.  This book is highly recommended to those interested in defending Christianity and Catholicism and its culture and traditions.

Bill Donohue has been president of the Catholic League which was founded in 1973, since 1993.  He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and has taught at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Placed in charge of the relocation operation is Wikus van de Merwe, an agreeable, harmless cog in the state machine. While searching for weapons in the hovel of one of the aliens, Wikus comes across a mysterious cylinder. When he examines it, a black fluid sprays out onto his face, and in a matter of hours, he is desperately ill. He is taken to the hospital, and the doctors who examine him are flabbergasted to discover that his forearm has morphed into the appendage of an alien. Almost immediately, the state officials reduce the suffering man to an object, resolving to dissect him and experiment on him. Wikus manages a miraculous escape, but he is, throughout the film ruthlessly hunted down. I promise not to give away much more of the plot. I’ll add only this: as his transformation progresses, Wikus becomes an ally of the “prawns” and they come to respect him and to protect him from his persecutors.

With this sketch of the story in mind, I should like to return now to the two worthies I mentioned at the outset. The nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel taught that much of human history can be understood as the working out of what he called the “master/slave” relationship. Typically, people in power — politically, culturally, militarily — find a weaker, more vulnerable “other” whom they then proceed to manipulate, dominate, exclude, and scapegoat. Masters need slaves and slaves, Hegel saw, in their own way need masters, each group conditioning the other in a dysfunctional manner. Masters don’t try to understand slaves (think of the dominant Greeks who characterized any foreigners as barbarians, since all they said was “bar-bar”); instead, they use them. Furthermore, almost all of history is told from the standpoint of the masters, and mastery is the state to which all sane people aspire.

Emmanuel Levinas, a twentieth century Jewish philosopher whose family was killed in the Holocaust, reminded us how the Bible consistently undermines this master/slave dynamic, since it recounts history from the standpoint of the other, the outsider, the oppressed. Levinas argued that Biblical ethics commences, not with philosophical abstractions about the good life, but with the challenging face of the suffering “other.”

The prophets of Israel consistently remind the people that since they too were once slaves in Egypt, they must be compassionate toward the alien, the stranger, the widow and the orphan. In the faces of those “others,” they find the ground for their own moral commitments. They compelled the people, in short, not to adopt the attitude of the master but to move sensitively into the attitude of the slave.

This unique Israelite perspective came to embodied expression in Jesus, who “though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped” and who rather “emptied himself and took the form of a slave.” In Christ, the God of Israel became himself a slave, the despised other, even to the point of enduring the rejection of the masters and dying the terrible death of the cross. In Jesus, the God of Israel looks out from the face of the other and draws forth compassion from those who gaze upon him.

In District 9 , we see the master/slave dynamic on clear display: the characterization of the aliens by a derogatory nickname, their sequestration in a squalid ghetto, the violence — direct and indirect — visited on them consistently, etc. These are practices evident from ancient times to the present day. But we see something else as well: an identification of the oppressor with the oppressed, the openness to interpreting the world from the underside, from the perspective of the victim. This, I would submit, is the Biblical difference, though I doubt that most people today would recognize it as such. It is the view that comes from that strange spiritual tradition which culminates in a God who doesn’t make slaves but rather becomes one.

The movie follows the daily fare of one of the most dangerous specialties in the U.S. military — a bomb disposal unit — as its deployment in Iraq winds down.  The main story line is the tension-filled interactions between the squad’s three members as they contend with a series of crises that were all-too-common in Baghdad and other parts of the Iraqi theater in 2004, and that may be in the process of becoming so again.

The film struck me as a terrifically honest portrayal of the carnage of war from the perspective of ordinary soldiers called upon, day after day, to do extraordinary things.  While it is a highly sympathetic treatment of the heroism of those who serve, their flaws are on display as well as their courage.  The three central characters are all struggling with various personal issues, most notably, the central protagonist’s reckless disregard for personal safety — and that of others.

True to its grunt’s-eye vantage point, the story is a series of suspenseful vignettes disconnected from, and largely indifferent to, the larger conflict.  There are only two cameo appearances by senior officers — colonels, no generals — who are shown the respect required by military discipline, but are portrayed as basically out-of-touch with what their subordinates are experiencing.

The locals who are shown as, at best, indifferent and, at worst, cunningly murderous.  The images of Baghdad are of a city that is trashed and broken, a place where death lurks around every corner.  This reality imparts to the audience a sense of the agonizing slowness of the countdown to the unit’s redeployment to a tranquil and safe home Stateside.

The Hurt Locker touches as well, albeit fleetingly, on the sacrifice being made by the loved ones of those who serve.  The families left behind confront not only the protracted absences — especially on the part of those repeatedly sent into harm’s way.  They share with their warfighters the challenge of the readjustment to civilian life faced by those who have experienced the stress and trauma of violent conflict.

Taken together, the message is unmistakable:  War is hell, particularly — although not exclusively — on those called to wage it.

For too many Americans, though, the nation’s wars have become somebody else’s problem.  Few have any direct, personal connection to the military.  The success of the all-volunteer force in replacing the draft with a superb fighting force has transformed the armed services into a cohort of highly skilled warriors about whom the general population knows little, and to whom it is not as tied as has historically been the case.

This problem is compounded by the contraction of the domestic military base infrastructure as the services have tried to cut costs by reducing overhead.  Ditto, the closure across the country of industrial plants that have produced planes, ships, tanks and other weaponry for the armed forces.  The less Americans are living in base communities and involved in manufacturing for the military, the smaller the number who have any sense of what is involved in keeping the nation secure.

Scarcely less worrying is the prospect that those who fight on our behalf may feel increasingly disconnected from the society they are serving so admirably.  We owe it to them to ensure that their sacrifice is appreciated — and warranted.  The new GI bill that will, starting this week, provide Iraq and Afghan war veterans tuition support at American universities will go some way towards rectifying both these problems, by ensuring that vets are represented in larger numbers in our academic institutions and by covering much of the costs of a college education.

Still, there is an important role to be filled by Hollywood in communicating to the American people a sense of the quality of those who are putting their lives on the line for the rest of us.  This will be especially needed as the going predictably gets rougher in Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps elsewhere.  The director of The Hurt Locker , Kathryn Bigelow, and her cast deserve our thanks for the contribution they have made in this regard.  May its success at the box office encourage others to make such films — and encourage our countrymen to support those in uniform by ensuring their sacrifice is neither in vain nor unacknowledged.