REVIEW: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Phillip Pullman

Title: The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ
Author: Phillip Pullman
Pages: 256
Rating: 3.5/5
Bought/Borrowed/Loaned: Read in one sitting in Foyles


SUMMARY
Joseph and Mary have twins: Jesus, healthy and strong, loved by everyone; and Christ, a sickly child with a wondruous knowledge of the word of God and His Will. They grow up and Christ realizes Jesus is just the man to lead their people to revolution, to an uprising against the invading and unfair rule of Rome. Jesus indeed does that, but the miracles are staged by Christ and his determination to give his brother good press. As Jesus grows in power and Rome begins to see him as a threat both brothers face their doubts about God, and each other.


REVIEW
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is the latest installment in Canongate's Myth series: books that take a well-known myth and turn in a new retelling. In that sense this is exactly what Pullman has done - he takes the familiar story of Jesus Christ and introduces a variation (Jesus and Christ as two separate people) to illuminate the themes of this myth that he is interested in. Faith and propaganda are the main lifelines of this story and though Pullman's exploration is as straightforward and light-feeted as his language in this book it is enough to pick the interest of any readers.

It's easy to see why the release of this book might have upset some Christian groups; I suggest they start by reading the book before condemning it. Granted, Pullman is an atheist and that was bound to colour the retelling of the myth. Granted, I am a deeply convinced atheist as well so the book obviously didn't hurt any sensibility here. But I also think this is a book that portrays religious faith with a deep respect. There are wonderful passages about Jesus and his love for God, despite the doubts, and of Christ and his belief on the good of the cause, both a political and religious one.

The stranger
A stranger came to Christ and spoke to him privately.
"I'm interested in you," he said. "Your brother is attracting all the attention, but I think you are the one I should speak to."
"Who are you?" said Christ. "And how do you know about me? I have never spoken in public, unlike Jesus."
"I heard a story about your birth. Some shepherds saw a vision that led them to you, and some magicians from the East brought you gifts. Isn't that so?"
"Why, yes," said Christ.
"And I spoke to your mother yesterday, and she told me of what happened when John baptised Jesus. You heard a voice speaking from a cloud."
"My mother should not have spoken of that," said Christ modestly.
"And some years ago, you confounded the priests in the temple at Jerusalem when your brother got into trouble. People remember these things."
"But – who are you? And what do you want?"
"I want to make sure that you have your rightful reward. I want the world to know your name as well as that of Jesus. In fact I want your name to shine with even greater splendour. He is a man, and only a man, but you are the word of God."
"I don't know that expression, the word of God. What does it mean? And again, sir – who are you?"
"There is time, and there is what is beyond time. There is darkness, and there is light. There is the world and the flesh, and there is God. These things are separated by a gulf deeper than any man can measure, and no man can cross it; but the word of God can come from God to the world and the flesh, from light to darkness, from what is beyond time into time. Now I must go away, and you must watch and wait, but I shall come to you again."
And he left. Christ had not found out his name, but the stranger had spoken with such knowledge and clarity that Christ knew, without having to ask, that he was an important teacher, no doubt a priest, perhaps from Jerusalem itself. After all, he had mentioned the incident in the temple, and how else would he have heard about it?

 The way Pullam uses language in this book is a very interesting method: the writing is simple and sparse, echoing the Bible stories, with their urgent sense of destiny and the divine. It makes for a short volume, very direct story-telling. That approach is the book's greatest strength and at the same time one of the reasons I could not connect with the character fully: Pullamn makes all his characters archetypes, highlighting the myth to suvert it but most of the characters in the story failed to seem like people to me. They sound like story-devices, which I guess in a way it's fitting for a book that talks to us about the advantages and dangers of storytelling, but I must admit that made it difficult for me to connect emotionally with the book. But this is one a minor quibble - perhaps I was wishing for a different book that does not exist. Christ interested me much more than Jesus (except when Jesus confronted God and His Silence in the Garden of Gethsemane) and I would have liked his issues explored in more length.

I love Pullman's writing, I have for many years (since I was a teenager and Northern Lights came out in a Spanish translation), and here the simple and humble, almost naked style has the loveliness of certain religious painting (I'm think of Murillo and Zurbarán here, the brown tones, the confident brush-strokes, the overwhelming compassion of the images) and although I think this is the weakest book in the Myth series (but then again I love Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood more than I do Pullman) The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is worth a reading, about the power of the Word of God but also about how men create the Word and the purposes it serves.

A story about stories.

More: There is a fantastic and deep review of the book at Things Mean A Lot (a book blog I highly recommend), which made me want to read the book immediately. Visit.

April 23: Favourite Shakespeare Books Post

I am a compulsive Shakespeare-related reader and over the years my bookshelves have filled and overspilled with biographies of the man from Stratford-upon-Avon and studies about his work, even with manga-like comic adaptations of dubious graphic quality. One has to fill her library with light and there's no light brighter than Will's words. So to celebrate today his 446th birthday I just thought I'd talk about some of my favourite (non-fiction) books about him.

1599: A Year In The Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro.
Most Shakespeare biographies fail because there's so little we know for certain about the man that it all ends being conjecture without the honesty of admitting it. Flights of fancy are welcome, provided you don't try to pass them as academia. Here James Shapiro takes a clever, reductive angle. He writes about just ONE YEAR in the life of the playwright; but with a limited structure he lets his readers navigate the world of Elizabethan London on their own, letting the details of the period come alive and with a clear narrative flair. It also has one of the best opening scenes in any book, fiction or non-fiction: the image of Shakespeare and fellow company actors carrying the wood of their old theatre across a frozen Thames is obviously apocrypha, but unforgettable.

Shakespeare, by Anthony Burgess.
Word-boy and cleverest of the clever, novelist Anthony Burgess wrote the book I love most in the world (Nothing Like The Sun) on this very subject: an imagined life of Shakespeare. But here it's that novel's non-fiction twi - a sharp and concise biography of the poet, accesible to any reader. A thin, wonderful volume. It is a great book to kick off your Shakespeare readings, if you've never picked up a biography of the man.

Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt.
A deep, lyrical, excellently-researched meditation on how the events in Shakespeare's life and the period he lived in could have influenced, coloured and facilitate the writer's work. With a fortunate focus on Shakespeare's language, this is a book to keep near you at all times.

Shakespeare's Language, by Frank Kermode.
If you are a word-geek like me, obsessed with the way Will Shakespeare was obssessed with language, this is the book for you. Kermode has a keen eye and explains things very well, even I - who doesn't have English as my first language - could get through the whole business easily. It explores the peculiar language of each play extensively, but never gets too academic for the average reader.

Simon Armitage @ Swedenborg House

Last night I went to a reading-plus-talk about the translation of the epic Old English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage. For various reasons (you can check the poem of the day at his website if you want to find them) Simon Armitage is my favourite living poet so I could not past up this opportinity to see him read his work live for the first time. I knew nothing about the Swedenborg Society when I arrived at their House in Bloomsbury, nothing about Emanuel Swedenborg, inventor and philosopher of the 18th century. But it was a prettily put event; Armitage not only read from his world-famous translation of Gawain and answered the audience questions but he also talked about the themes in the poem and showed us a bit of the documentary he made for BBC4 about it.

Gawain is a gorgeous poem and Armitage's translation (my introduction to the poem, actually, a couple of years ago) keeps the music of the original Middle-English language, it's a piece full of alliterations and wonderful noise. Armitage insisted in the connection of the poem with nature, the way the language and landscape are entwined. This is particularly interesting for a poet like Armitage, self-confessed Ted Hughes admirer and a worthy heir of England's best nature poet. It is also the most interesting aspect of the translation for me, as well; how the landscape needs to influence the language of your work, specially if you are dealing with a historical period (Gawain was probably written around 1400) where people were more in contact with raw nature on a daily basis than we are now in our technological and man-made society. The writing has to reflect the sound and rhythm of the story's landscapes and that's what Armitage excels at in this translation. That and a very peculiar sense of humour, perfectly fit to the playful original. Armitage confessed to being drawn to the topography of the poem because it's very likely that the original author came from the same area as Armitage comes from, a frontier-land in the south Pennines - somewhere between Cheshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire.

Gawain is a great mystery - written by a someone contemporary of Chaucer but with a very different language, a whole other dialect indeed, the poem catches the excitement of the English language starting to come together, come alive. We don't know who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and we might never find out. Simon Armitage, at least, declared his hopes that we should never resolve the riddle of this anonymous author. He'd like to live with the mystery intact.

This is one of my favourite passages, when the Green Knight gets his head chopped off at the Court of King Arthur, but remains alive and well nonetheless:

In the standing position he prepared to be struck,
bent forward, revealing a flash of green flesh
as he heaped his hair to the crown of his head,
the nape of his neck now naked and ready.
Gawain grips the axe and heaves it heavenwards,
plants his left foot firmly on the floor in front,
then swings it swiftly towards the bare skin.
The cleanness of the strike cleaved the spinal cord
and parted the fat and the flesh so far
that that bright steel blade took a bite from the floor.
The handsome head tumbles onto the earth
and the king's men kick it as it clatters past.
Blood gutters brightly against his green gown,
yet the man doesn't shudder or stagger or sink
but trudges towards them on those tree-trunk legs
and rummages around, reaches at their feet
and cops hold of his head and hoists it high,
and strides to his steed, snatches the bridle,
steps into the stirrup and swings into the saddle
still gripping his head by a handful of hair.
Then he settles himself in his seat with the ease
of a man unmarked, never mind being minus
his head!
And when he wheeled about
his bloody neck still bled.
His point was proved. The court
was deadened now with dread.

 

REVIEW: Music And Silence, by Rose Tremain

Title: Music and Silence
Author: Rose Tremain
Pages: 464
Rating: 4.5/5
Bought/Borrowed/Loaned: Bought 2nd hand from amazon.co.uk

SUMMARY
Music and Silence is many things, encompasses many stories and moments, fleeting, magical, painful moments. But at its centre is Peter Claire, an English lute player who arrives in the court of King Christian IV of Denmark in 1630. The king soon takes a liking to Peter, calling him his "angel" due to Peter's good looks, and asking the Englishman to be his personal aide and help in times of need. Christian is a contradictory man, haunted by the past, pained by his unrequited love for his wife the Queen Kirsten, who is conducting a not-so-discreet adulterous affair. A mirror image of Peter's role the queen has employed a new lady-in-waiting at the time of Peter's arrival in Denmark: Emilia Tilsen, a quiet and compassionate girl, becomes the queen's confidant. Both Peter and Emilia are escaping from their painful pasts and find themselves, almost inevitably, drawn to each other, seeking love and comfort amidts the royal intrigues and the sorrows of a country in ruin.

REVIEW
The biggest strength of Music and Silence is its kaleidoscopic nature. The accumulation of stories, small in scope or important, like grains of sand that together make up the true landscape of this work. The point of view changes and so do the narrative voices, and the non-chronological plot made me enjoy this book so much, in a way that I had not enjoyed Restoration - maybe the voice in that one was too detached, too clever to begin with, and while that fitted the narrator perfectly, I felt it lacked some heart. There's plenty of heart in Music and Silence, and while occassionally sentimentaly shows its ugly head but otherwise Tremain has an admirable command of her material. Many images will stick to the reader's mind: for me it's the teenage King Christian tending to his best friend Bror during his illness, fighting off Death with the power of writing, the power of names, words.

As a historical novel, which what we are interested in now, this is an example of what should be done: a story told in a shamelessly modern style, which illuminates the 17th century through human detail and lyricism, not dead fact. The gorgeous writing, rather than the predictable character or the thin plot, is what grabs us here. A fine example of literary novel in a historical setting and using history for its own purposes, rather than a historical novel that dispatches literary style as useless, which sadly is what happens with almost every labelled historical novel I've met with.

Read-a-thon: The End

Title of book(s) read since last update: Tamburlaine Must Die.
Number of books read since you started: 3 and 3/4.
Pages read since last update: 99.
Running total of pages read since you started: 878.
Amount of time spent reading since last update: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Running total of time spent reading since you started: 11 hours 40 minutes.
Mini-challenges completed: The intro one, the nominees, book title sentence and the song one, and one in comments, I can't remember which (it was late, my mind was drifting).
Other participants you’ve visited: I've been out of the house for the last hours, I'll be sure to catch how everybody did.
Prizes you’ve won: One, the soundtrack one.

And now the final survey from Dewey's Read-a-thon:

1. Which hour was most daunting for you? Around 17-18. I was SO sleepy.
2. Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year? I've been reading Blissett's Q lately and that's one page-turner. Also, Virginia Woolf's Orlando I think would be perfect for this kind of situation
3. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? I would like to have more mini-challenges, but maybe that's just me and I like to be distracted.
4. What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon? The mini-challenges, they were a treat.
5. How many books did you read? 3 and 3/4 of another.
6. What were the names of the books you read? The Magic Apple Tree, Music and Silence, Unthinkable (graphic novel) and Tamburlaine Must Die.
7. Which book did you enjoy most? Music and Silence, hands down.
8. Which did you enjoy least? The Magic Apple Tree, it wasn't a good night opener, the writining wasn't sharo enough.
9. If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders? I wasn't a cheerleader - I loved seeing their comments on my blog.
10. How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again? What role would you be likely to take next time? I'm almost 100% I will do the Read-a-thon again, I really enjoyed the challenge. As a Reader.

Hour 13: Update and survey

Title of book(s) read since last update: Music and Silence.
Number of books read since you started: 1.
Pages read since last update: 201.
Running total of pages read since you started: 450.
Amount of time spent reading since last update: 2 hours 30 minutes.
Running total of time spent reading since you started: 6 hours 10 minutes.
Mini-challenges completed: The intro one, the nominees, book title sentence and the song one.
Other participants you’ve visited: None this round, I've been on full reading mode.
Prizes you’ve won: One, the soundtrack one.


And now a Mid-Event Survey from Dewey's Read-a-thon:
1. What are you reading right now? I'm well into the second half of Music and Silence.
2. How many books have you read so far? Only one.
3. What book are you most looking forward to for the second half of the Read-a-thon? Mark Sable's Unthinkable. It'll be quite a change of pacing.
4. Did you have to make any special arrangements to free up your whole day? No, I had the day off anyway.
5. Have you had many interruptions? How did you deal with those? Many, from football matches to Channel 4's Greatest Comedy Stand-Ups, I'm easily distracted.
6. What surprises you most about the Read-a-thon, so far? How much people blog - and they still have time to read!
7. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? Not really, I think it's a pretty smooth ride as it is.
8. What would you do differently, as a Reader or a Cheerleader, if you were to do this again next year? I'd prepare better, pre-event wise.
9. Are you getting tired yet? A bit. I might need a power nap.
10. Do you have any tips for other Readers or Cheerleaders, something you think is working well for you that others may not have discovered? I found that having some good, moody music helps, at least it does me - I've had BBC Radio 3 on all day and it really puts me in a reading frame of mind.

Hour 9: Update and mini-challenge

UPDATE

Title of book(s) read since last update: Music and Silence.
Number of books read since you started: 1.
Pages read since last update:20 .
Running total of pages read since you started: 249.
Amount of time spent reading since last update: 40 minutes.
Running total of time spent reading since you started: 3 hours 40 minutes.
Mini-challenges completed: The intro one, the nominees, book title sentence and this song one.
Other participants you’ve visited: None this round, I've been distracted by the football match.
Prizes you’ve won:

MINI-CHALLENGE

Excellent books + song challenge over at alita.reads. Here’s how to play:

* Pick up a book that you’ve read today, or are currently reading.
* Choose a song that goes with the book – could be that it fits the overall feel of it or even a certain scene.
* Create a blog post answering the following:

• Book title
• Soundtrack song
• Why you chose that song

My entry then:

Book title: Music and Silence
Song: Heima by Sigur Ros.
Why I chose this song: Sigur Ros always evokes empty, frozen landscapes that go well with the Denmark-set narrative of this books. This song is also full of yearning and subdued tragedy, much like Rose Tremain's sickly-sweet and aching prose here.

Hour 5: Update and challenge

Title of book(s) read since last update: Still The Magic Apple Tree. Slowly because I'm not liking it much.
Number of books read since you started: None.
Pages read since last update: 49.
Running total of pages read since you started: 143.
Amount of time spent reading since last update: 2 hours.
Running total of time spent reading since you started: 2 hours.
Mini-challenges completed: The intro one, the nominees and the book titles one.
Other participants you’ve visited: Mainly tried to see how people in my blogroll are doing, like kiss a cloud and She Read A Book.
Prize you’ve won:

MINI-CHALLENGE

The Titles challenge over at Bart's Bookshelf (basically you have to make a book title composed of other book titles you have in your bookshelf):

Under the black flag, Mrs Dalloway saved Vermeer's Hat.

Hour 3: Update and mini-challenge

Not much actual reading done these past couple of hours because I had lunch (& had to go buy it too) but things are starting to pick up now.

UPDATE HOUR 3:

Title of book(s) read since last update: Still going through The Magic Apple Tree.
Number of books read since you started: None.
Pages read since last update: 96.
Running total of pages read since you started: 96.
Amount of time spent reading since last update: 1 hour & 10 minutes.
Running total of time spent reading since you started: 1 hour 10 minutes.
Mini-challenges completed: The intro one, and in this post the nominees challenge.
Other participants you’ve visited: Not many yet. Working on it now.
Prize you’ve won:

And the hour three mini-challenge is the Nominees challenge at 'Til We Read Again:

Favorite Female Character in a book: Villanelle from The Passion.
Favorite Male Character in a book: Raskolnikov from Crime And Punishment.
Favorite Side Kick in a book: William Bush in the Hornblower series.
Favorite Couple in a Book: Howl and Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle.
Favorite Book Series: Pat Barker's WWI trilogy.
Favorite Author: Jeanette Winterson.
Favorite Book Cover: The Vintage editions of Virginia Woolf.
Favorite Book of 2009: The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels.

Hour 1: Mini-challenge

Read-a-thon has started, and I'm making my way through Susan Hill's The Magic Apple Tree, because it's light and short, a good way to start.

Now, for the first mini-challenge over at Dewey's Read-a-thon:

Where are you reading from today? The west of London.

3 facts about me …

1) I'm allergic to aspirin.

2) I was a football player in my teens.

3) I don't care for plot in books.

How many books do you have in your TBR pile for the next 24 hours? Seven.

Do you have any goals for the read-a-thon (i.e. number of books, number of pages, number of hours, or number of comments on blogs)? I'd like to read all seven books. Some of them are related to the research for my novel, so it's a win-win. And I'd like to use this chance as a way to discover new blogs.

Read-a-thon

Today I'll be participating in Dewey's Read-a-thon. It's my first time doing this "event" so good luck to me. This is my stack:

Music and Silence by Rose Tremain.
The Earth Made of Glass by Robert Edric.
Tambourlaine Must Die by Louside Welsh.
Auriel Rising by Elizabeth Redfern.
Thurdsbitch by Alan Garner.
Three Power Plays by David Pinner. (theatre)
The Magic Apple Tree by Susanna Hill.
Unthinkable by Mark Sable. (graphic novel)

Henrich Schütz - Psalm 150

A Visit To Turnham Green

These glriously sunny days are an invitation for a little trip around the city. All Civil War-related, of course.

Today I decided to venture a journey to the west in search of Turnham Green. It shames me to admit that I do not know the West of London very well, compared to other neighbourhood, which is ironic considering I live pretty much on the west. Research can get you out of your comfort zone and expeditions are literal as well as inner.

From UK Battlefields Resource Centre:

The battle of Turnham Green was fought on the 13th November 1642. Following the battle of Edgehill, and after taking Banbury and Oxford, the royalist army eventually advanced on London along the Thames valley. On 12th a royalist detachment attacked two parliamentarian regiments quartered in Brentford, which were covering the approach to London from the west. The royalists were victorious but their army was delayed by the parliamentarian resistance and halted, probably on Turnham Green at nightfall. This allowed the parliamentary field army and London militia to form-up on Turnham Green and Chiswick common field the next day.

Both armies appear to have deployed in traditional 17^th century style with cavalry on the flanks and infantry in the centre. The parliamentarian line extended further than that of the King’s army on the northern side of the battlefield and the royalists deployed musketeers in the hedgerows there to counter this threat. These were driven out by parliamentarian troops, which then outflanked the royalists on that flank with a march to Acton. Despite this favourable position the parliamentarian commander, the earl of Essex, recalled this detachment due to fear over splitting his army and the battle settled into a stalemate. The royalist army was too small to force its way past the parliamentarian forces and, as night fell, the King had to withdraw.

Recriminations occurred on both sides following the battle. On the royalist side, there were some who judged the King had missed an opportunity to end the war, though in reality had he launched an attack on the parliamentarian lines his own army would probably have been defeated. Others on the parliamentarian side, who saw Turnham Green as a missed opportunity to defeat the royalist army, particularly following the successful outflanking manoeuvre, probably had more of a case.

Turnham Green is now largely encompassed by the urban development of Greater London. However there are limited areas which remain undeveloped – parts of Turnham Green and Acton Green, though now municipal parkland, provide a sense of the open ground, which extended as far south as Chiswick House in the 17^th century.

Turnham Green is one of the few chances to visit Civil War battlefields inside London and since I'm short of cash to make trips to more glamurous locations like Edgehill at least for the moment, I took the bus towards Chiswick with high spirits and a copy of Eliot's The Wasteland in my bag, pen and paper, and my camera. (I always carry poetry with me, it's absolutely balsamic.)

Chsiwick itself is a tranquil and pretty part of the city; an explosion of green and things that scream "local goverment", with that feeling of tight community one finds in a village, not in a metropolis. It also looks tremendously fashionable and unaffordable.

Turnham Green turned out to be a small, flat, humble business of a park, not really atmospheric. This is the closest the Royalists came to London. I tried not to feel too esoteric about it - much as I like the idea of psychogeography I think of it as more of a poetic notion than real phenomena. But the sunlight was generous and the noises were few and I spent a nice morning sitting on benches reading and writing.


Then it was time to change scenery and make the most of a day in the West and in the 17th century but visiting another cultural, if less well-known, spot. After a long stroll along the Thames - strange, unfamiliar sights and moods, like those near the Steam Museum, and the treetops of Kew on the other side - I set off for Boston Manor Park.



The house in Boston Manor Park was built in 1623 and only converted into a house-museum in the early 20th century. The park itself is a mix of the mundane and the wild, with spots you'd find in Regent's or Hyde Park and then dark, untamed corners. (A man walking his dog passed my way and we exchange greetings - that doesn't happen in Spain, you don't exchange greetings at public parks, not in my experience anyway). The Lake was definitely a highlight. It felt refreshing under the shadow of the trees and once again I was reminded of my love of public parks.



I was excited to see the 17th century house - it looked interesting from the outside, not too grand - but alas, I had made a mistake checking the opening times and it was not open today. Oh well. The walk alone was worth it.


More info about the Battle of Turnham Green from the BBC.

Check out the website of the Friends of Boston Manor for history of the house and events.