Be born in us today

Be Born in Us Today: the Message of the Incarnation Today by John Davies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have known John Davies for 60 years. Back in 1959 he was a parish priest of a somewhat distant, largely rural parish in the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg, and he came a couple of times to speak to students at Wits Univeresity. On one of those occasions he spoke about Christian art, but I have forgotten the other. A couple of years later he spoke to students from all over South Africa on the topic of Religion versus God, and I remember quite a lot of what he said then, as it had an enormous influence on my theological understanding. It was reinforced seven years later by reading For the life of the world by Father Alexander Schmemann.

That makes it a bit difficult to review a book he has written, since his thinking has influenced my own thinking to such an extent that it is difficult to be objective and critical. So let the reader beware.

This book, as the title suggests, is about Christmas, the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and the meaning of the Incarnation. What do we mean when we say that Jesus Christ is both God and Man, both divine and human? The book is intended to be used by parish study groups, and so is divided into chapters with a scripture passage relating to the birth of Christ, intended to be read aloud by several voices,. a brief meditation on the passage, and suggestions for discussion and activities at the end.

But at the beginning there is an introduction, where John Davies describes his first Christmas as a parish priest, which shaped the understanding that lies behind the book, and is perhaps the most useful part to concentrate on in a review.

The parish was in what is now Mpumalanga, and in it there was a gold mine, and the Christmas service was in the hostel for black miners. They normally held the service in a classroom, but it was locked up with many people being away for Christmas, so they had it in the miners’ common room, which was also occupied by some of the fowls the miners kept. Davies writes:

My most abiding memory of that Christmas is of a candle-lit congregation singing the praises of the coming of Christ in half-a-dozen different languages, accompanied by the intermittent complaints of poultry whose sleep-pattern had been so strangely disturbed,

He notes some of the things that struck him about that service, which helped to shape his understanding of the scriptural texts (I can only give a much abbreviated version here).

• It happened in a borrowed room, an annexe to a public meeting place.
• It was a hidden event, not publicized much in advance.
• It happened in the dark. Few people saw or understood what was happening; most were asleep.
• It happened in the company of farmyard creatures, humanity’s close companions.
• It happened among people who were poor and voteless non-citizens. They were not “simple” or “ordinary” people; most of them were people of valuable skill and courage in the gold-mining industry, but they were people of no status within the systems controlled by the political and economic dominances of the day.
• It was an occasion which affirmed the value of material things; bread and alcoholic drink could both be sources of argument and fighting and killing; but here they were being claimed as ways for God to be present among people.

There are many other parallels that Davies notes. He notes that they are all history, but they are slanted history. They are selective, and were written down forty years after the event, just as the gospel stories of the Nartivity were themselves written down about 40 years after the events themselves. The details he notes are not recorded anywhere else.

There will be no reference to that Christmas gathering in the archives of the mine administration, or in those of the Magisterial District of Bethal in the Transvaal. There are all sorts of assumptions in what I have written… I have recorded the event because of its meaning to me. I cannot be sure that my understanding of the regulations concerning the use of mine property is correct, or that I have remembered accurately the conditions on which non-mine-employees were allowed on the site. I cannot even be sure what sorts of bread and wine were used or what the sermon was about. But my purpose is not to give a specimen of the social history of the mine, but to give an account of what I believe to have been an example of God’s presence in the world. On that basis, and only on that basis, judge my story. Similarly, we do not go to Luke to get details of the Roman taxation system, or to Matthew to get astronomical information. We go to find something concerning the meaning and manner of God’s presence in the world.

And that is what this book is about.

Not The Shack

Waking Lazarus by T.L. Hines
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I saw this book in the library the blurb looked quite interesting and I was in a hurry so I grabbed it. When I got home and began to read it, I began to have misgivings. A “Christian” book about abducted children from an evangelical publisher… was it going to be a re-run of The Shack. To my relief, it wasn’t. I found The Shack utterly twee and cringeworthy, a novel, ostensibly for adults, written in the style of Enid Blyton.

But it turned out to be quite readable, with some nice plot twists, a whodunit that keep the reader guessing, and with some strong elements of fantasy, and not too preachy. .

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Ghost stories by authors surnamed James

The House on Cold Hill by Peter James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently read a book of ghost stories by Henry James (see my review here) and was somewhat less than impressed. I had previously read one of the stories, “The Turn of the Screw”, and found the style convoluted and almost unreadable. It wasn’t improved on a second reading. I was in the library looking for ghost stories by Montague James, whose stories are said to be better, but they didn’t have any, but next to Henry James on the shelf was Peter James, and so I took out The House on Cold Hill.

I know Peter James primarily as a writer of detective stories featuring detective Roy Grace in Brighton in the south of England. I’d read a couple of Peter James’s non-detective stories before, and had not been very impressed. I thought he would do better to stick to crime fiction. But The House on Cold Hill is different. And I was not disappointed. When it comes to authors surnamed “James”, Peter undoubtedly writes better ghost stories than Henry. For a start they are written in plain English, where you don’t have to read every sentence three times to try to puzzle out the author’s meaning.

I suppose they could also be classified as horror. Not all ghost stories are scary. Some are meant to be scary but fail; this one succeeds. I was reminded of Phil Rickman, who began writing stories in the supernatural horror genre and gradually shifted to writing crime stories. Perhaps Peter James is on the opposite route — having started writing whodunits, he is now writing ghost stories like the early Phil Rickman. I’ll be looking out for more like this. I won’t say that Peter James is the new Phil Rickman, but perhaps he’s the old one revived, like an old ghost.

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The Müller-Fokker Effect

The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek

A couple of weeks ago I read Singularity, which is about a hypotheitcal moment when computers surpass human intelligence and human consciousness. That reminded me of this book, which I read 45 years ago, since it is also about digitising human consciousness. So I thought I would re-read this one to remind me what it was about, and to compare it with the kind of things people are saying about “the Singularity”

In this book Bob Shairp works for National Arsenamid, and is transferred to a different branch where his new task is to be the guinea-pig in an experiment to see if it is possible to back up a human being on tape. The recording process is under way when some white supremacists break into the lab, convinced that it is an attempt to transplant a nigger brain into a white man, so they kill Bob, and the tapes are dispersed. One of them falls into the hands of an evangelist, who captures himself on it and programs an android to preach for him when he is ill or would rather be doing something else. Another falls into the hands of the military.

Bob’s son, Spot, is sent to a military school where he is desperately unhappy, and his mother goes into advertising, where she meets a salesman for a process of freezing people. Bob Shairp has a series of bizarre adventures in his taped form, as do most of the other characters, though for the most part in their actual bodies rather than on tape.

It’s an extended satire on 1970s America, sending up manufacturing, advertising, the military and militarism, journalism (notably Playboy), politics and ideologies, especially white supremacy and fanatical anti-communist conspiracy theorists.

Concerning the last, one can read it as a send-up of The Da Vinci Code, as the conspiracy theorists decipher codes that are more and more complex. A nice touch, satirising a book before it is published. Of course it’s not the only one to have done that. Umberto Eco, the author of Foucault’s Pendulum, insisted that Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci code, was a character in one of his novels.  In that respect it anticipates several books. It also predicts that Ronald Reagan would become US president (Nixon was president at the time it was written).

After 45 years I’d forgotten how funny it was (in parts, anyway), and in retrospect it also throws light on some subsequent developments, technical (the Singularity), cultural and political.

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Singularity

Singularity by Steven James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Three years ago I heard Izak Potgieter speak at TGIF about The Singularity. According to him,  The Singularity is a milestone in the foreseeable future where technology, or non-biological intelligenc-
e, will reach the ability of its human creators, themselves largely non-biological by that point, and then transcend it at a rate that “will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”.

I had previously heard of singularities as some kind of mathematical thing relating to the topological characteristics of Mobius strips, but Izak assured us that this was not just any old singularity, but The Singularity. And he described himself as a Singularitarian,.

So when we went to TGIF last week, and I saw a book with the title Singularity, I was moved by curiosity to buy it.

What is it about?

A mysterious death, mysterious semi-government research institutes where some dodgy research is going on, hints of connections with organised crime and bent cops — mix those ingredients and you can be sure that the protagonist and those he loves will be getting deeper into danger as the story progresses.

The protagonist is Jevin Banks, a stage musician who performs in Las Vegas, and his associates Charlene Antioch and Xavier Wray. Xavier Wray, like Izak Potgieter, is a Singularitarian.

The “singularity” of the title concerns the development of Artificial Intelligence and the point at which it overtakes human intelligence, and the book raises several questions about that. But these questions are not new, and I recall reading books published more than 50 years ago on the same topic. And some of the elements were also found in speculative fiction, in novels like The Müller-Fokker Effect, which spoke of capturing someone’s consciousness and storing it as digital data.

And over the years I’ve often used that as an analogy for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body — that when we die God has us all backed up on tape somewhere, and when the last day comes he’ll restore it in new and improved hardware and reboot us.

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Stranger in a strange land

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I bought this book and had read about two-thirds of this original uncut version when I left it on a bus. I thought of buying another copy to see what happened in the end, but I didn’t think it was all that good, so I left it. Then when I saw a copy in the library I thought it was my chance to find out what happened, so I took it out and re-read it from the beginning because after 27 years I’d forgotten too much to just pick it up where I left off. And having reached the end, my verdict is unchanged. It’s not really worth paying good money for.The first half is OK, and I’d give it 3 stars on the GoodReads Scale. The second half is excruciatingly boring and preachy, and would get 1 star from me, so 2 stars for the whole thing.

The story concerns the first manned expedition to Mars, which disappears without trace. The second expedition finds there was a survivor — a child of two of the crew members who was born on Mars and named Michael Alexander Smith, and was brought up by Martians after his parents died. The second expedition brought him, now a young adult, back to earth, where he suffers from culture shock, and is perceived as a threat by vested interests on earth, and so is kept incommunicado by the government.

The book was at least partly responsible for starting a New Religious Movement (NRM), the Church of All Worlds, and perhaps the best comment on that comes from Drawing Down the Moon by Diane Adler:

The Church of All Worlds has been called everything from ‘a sub-culture science-fiction Grok-flock’ to ‘a bunch of crazy hippie freaks.’ But the real origins of CAW lead back to a small group of friends who, along with untold numbers of middle-class high school and college students in the late 1950s and early 1960s, became infatuated with the romantic, heroic, compelling right-wing ideas of Ayn Rand. It is a sign of the peculiarity of North American consciousness that thousands of young students, at one time or another, have become possessed by her novels – Atlas shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem. Jerome Tucille, in his witty, tongue-in-cheek tour of the libertarian right, It usually begins with Ayn Rand, could not have been more precise in his choice of title. He noted that Rand’s works were particularly appealing ‘to those in the process of escaping a regimented religious background.’ Despite the author’s rigid philosophy of Objectivism, she stirred a libertarian impulse, and Atlas shrugged became a ‘New Marxism of the Right’.

And the second half of Stranger in a Strange Land is like nothing so much as John Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged, only about three times as long.

It was written in the late 1950s, and is stamped with American culture of that period, including their vision of the future. This included future technology — flying cars, yes, but no personal computers, no cell phones, no digital photography. It is also full of the male chauvinist piggery of the period, though some of the language seems strange for a novel set in the USA — lots of “chaps” and “blokes” around. I didn’t know there were so many of those in the US, either back in the 1950s or now.

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An obsessive search for erasure

The Zahir by Paulo Coelho
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I can’t decide whether this is a profound book or a superficial one.

The protagonist is a novelist living in Paris, rather like the author himself, whose wife disappears without a trace, and he becomes obsessed, not so much with finding her as with discovering why she left him. This leads him to some deep (or shallow) philosophical reflection, from which he concludes that in order to discover himself as a person he needs to forget and erase his personal history.

Since the protagonist is a writer and in many ways resembles the author, I found parts of it gave me an incentive to work on things that I myself am writing. Those bits made me want to give it four stars. But part of his personal history, which he wants to erase, is that his wife was the one who inspired him to write in the first place, and when he goes on about that, in a rather banal and boring way, I want to give it one or two stars. In the end I compromised and gave it three stars.

One thing that gave the book a bit more interest is that part of the search took him to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, which has cropped up in other books I’ve been reading recently.

Another puzzling aspect of the story is that the protagonist (also like author Paulo Coelho himself) had been on a pilgrimage to St James’s Cathedral at Compostela, which had been a life-changing experience, and had written a book about it. Yet this, too, was apparently part of his personal history to be erased and forgotten. And if that is the case, why should anyone buy and read his book about it?

I suppose that one reason for my inability to sympathise with this particular aspect of the story is that I rather enjoy rereading my journals of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years ago each morning. I think of people I knew then, some I am still in touch with, others not, and I wonder what has happened to them. Even if I don’t know what has happened to them, I don’t think they can simply be erased. Their fate may not be known to me, but it is known to God, who values them, and perhaps if nothing else, I can offer a short prayer for them, wherever they may be. And if they have died, pray that their memory may be eternal. That is the opposite of forgetting.

 

 

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The heart of redness, rural development, and skunked words

The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve already written something about this book in a blog post here Post-apartheid writing and posthumous books | Khanya. Many wondered what South African writing would or should look like after apartheid, and Zakes Mda certainly provides one answer. This is what it looks like, and this is what it should look like. Mda puts his finger on some of the pressing problems of post-apartheid South Africa in this book, especially the problems of rural development.

It’s a thought-provoking book, and here I’m adding some of the thoughts it provoked in me. If you just just want a straightforward review, see my review on GoodReads.

In recent months there has been much controversy over mining on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape, and this book is very relevant to that, dealing as it does with the effects of such development on local communities. Zakes Mda, though he is writing fiction, writes from personal experience here, as he himself was instrumental in establishing a beekeeping project in the Eastern Cape. In the book the big project involving outside capital is a casino, and there have been those too on the Wild Coast, even though the current concern is mainly mining..

We have previously discussed the issue of mining on the Wild Coast at places like Xolobeni in our book club — see Philosophy, science fiction, capitalism & rural development | Khanya.  I urge everyone who is concerned about the effects of mining and similar developments on such rural communities to read this book. In this, as in many other things, Zakes Mda seems to have been prophetic, and much more accurately prophetic than Nongqawuse, who features in the book.

My one complaint about the book is that it is perhaps too didactic. At times it seems as though the characters are overridden by the need to introduce some or other ideological stance, which is not always consistent with the previous roles of those characters, and makes them at times seem inconsistent. But perhaps that is part of the truthfulness of this novel — as G.K. Chesterton said, truth is always stranger than fiction because fiction is a product of the human mind, and therefore congenial to it. And those ideological stances play an important part in the development of the story, so someone among the characters had to embody them.

One of the themes that that needed a character to embody it was do-gooding. In the book the protagonist, Camagu upbraids a shopkeeper, John Dalton, for planning an implementing a water supply project without consulting the local community. Dalton has the role of the do-gooder, one who thinks he knows what the community needs, and goes about providing it for them. The do-gooder is someone who likes doing good to other people.

Reading this, I was reminded of a true story from Zululand in the days of apartheid. A group of people went to the local magistrate to complain that they had no water. The magistrate asked why, since a new dam had been built there very recently. Yes, the people said, the dam is there, but we can’t drink the water. Why can’t you drink the water? asked the magistrate. There’s a dead dog in the dam, said the delegation. Why don’t you remove the dead dog? The government must remove the dog. The government built the dam; it’s the government’s dam, so the government must remove the dog. .

Fifty years ago I was persuaded to start an ecumenical youth group in Durban under the auspices of the Christian Institute. You can read about that here. The group was too big, so we split into smaller groups, each of which had an action project. And our group soon showed an ideological split between two groups, which I will call the Do-gooders and the Enablers.

The Do-gooders wanted to do good things for poor people. The Enablers felt uncomfortable with that, but would be happy to enable poor people to help themselves, if the poor people asked them to. The Enablers found the thought of offering unsolicited help to people embarrassing. In the book, Camagu is an Enabler, and Dalton is a Do-gooder.

I find I keep coming across this split. I go with my colleagues in Orthodox mission to a place where some one, or some group of people has expressed an interest in the Orthodox Christian faith, and one of them says something like, “Tell them we’ll build a clinic.” And I cringe inwardly, because I can see, right across the road, a doctor’s surgery with a sign “Ngaka” in big letters, and round the corner is a hospital.

No, don’t tell them you’ll build a clinic. First get to know the people, and then find out what they think their needs are. Zakes Mda, I know, from reading his memoir, is an atheist, so this would probably be of little interest to him, but I’m pretty sure that the “Tell them we’ll build a clinic” attitude has done nothing to increase his sympathy for the Christian faith and may well have contributed towards his atheism in the first place.

I was once involved in a mission project where we tried to follow the enabling approach rather than the do-gooding one. It is described in my blog post on Makhalafukwe. I keep coming across clashes between these two approaches, so I think it is very good that Zakes Mda has raised it in his book. The urge to Do-gooding persists, and perhaps one of the effects of it is that terms like “Enabler” and “Enablement”, which were unambiguous 30 years ago, have tended by be skunked by gathering bad connotations, especially, it seems, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Another related word, popular in the 1960s, which also seems to have lost some of its meaning, is “facilitator”. Back then the term “facilitator” was used instead of “leader” for small group discussions, because the task of the facilitator was not to lead discussion, but to facilitate or enable it. While a leader dominated a group, a facilitator would retire into the background, and only intervene when more enablement was required. Just how far the meaning was lost became apparent when I worked at the University of South Africa in the Editorial Department, and we were introduced to a task team, whose task, they proudly told us, was to “facilitate conflict”…. and they wondered why all the English editors laughed.

Another thing that Zakes Mda puts his finger on in The Heart of Redness, as well as in some of his other books, such as Black Diamond, is BEE, which ostensibly stands for “Black Economic Empowerment”, but actually means Black Elite Enrichment. Again, there are examples from real life. Once when my wife Val was a financial manager, a new black manager was appointed, and because he was black (as a result of BEE), his salary was a third more than that of the guy he replaced. Val observed that for the extra money she could have appointed two young junior clerks at good salaries who could learn the job hands on, and gain experience at doing the work, thus improving their future employability. There was nothing wrong with the bloke who was appointed to management — he was a nice guy and competent. But because of BEE the elite got more money rather than the poor getting more jobs.

The Heart of Redness is also, in part, a historical novel, alternating in time between the cattle-killing episode of the 1850s, and the late 20th century, where the descendants of those in the earlier period seem doomed to reenact the controversies of their ancestors, which, in changing circumstances, sometimes lead to inappropriate behaviour as they are confronted by questions like what is development? What is progress? And who stands to gain and lose from such developments?

So I repeat, if you are concerned about projects like mining at Xolobeni, and similar projects elsewhere, read this book.

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Travels on the old Silk Road

The Road To Miran: Travels In The Forbidden Zone Of Xinjiang by Christa Paula
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Christa Paula was a student of history and archaeology specialising in Central Asia, and thirty years ago she travelled there to see some of the sites on the ancient Silk Road, the main trade route between the Roman Empire and China. At that time China only allowed limited travel to foreigners and the restrictions increased after the Tianamnen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. Pro-democracy demonstrations were more successful in Paula’s own country, Germany, and she had news of the fall of the Berlin Wall while on her travels.

Many of the sites she most wanted to visit, including Miran itself, were in restricted areas, and she was arrested a couple of times, and often had to sneak into places on the principle that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

The book alternates between descriptions of contemporary travel and life in Western China (Xinjiang), and historical descriptions of ancient kingdoms on the Silk Road, based on the archaeological sites Paula visited or tried to visit. She hooked up with a Chinese friend, Chang, who helped her a great deal with arrangements for accommodation and travel.

One of the things that struck me about the book was the similarities between Communist China and apartheid South Africa. Encounters with the police, travel restrictions and requirements for permits sounded very familiar indeed, and very similar to Namibia when it was ruled by South Africa. Some of her descriptions of how she had snuck into places when she couldn’t get permits were very similar indeed to Namibia under South African rule. And in many ways the apartheid was the same too. There was, apparently, quite strict apartheid between the Han Chinese and the local Uighurs they ruled. Some hotels were for Han Chinese only, as were certain events at which local people and foreigners were not welcome.

Central Asia is far from southern Africa, and to me a rather unfamiliar part of the world. In the centre of the area visited by Christa Paula is the Taklamakan Desert, described in another book as The Worst Desert on Earth. To the south lies Tibet, to the north-east Mongolia, and to the north-west Kazakhstan. One of the few works of fiction I’ve read dealing with that area is Water touching Stone. The Uighur people living there are mostly Muslim, but in the historical period studied by Paula most were Buddhist, but since it was a major international trade route the main towns were fairly cosmopolitan.

I’ve written a few more comments on this book on my other blog here.

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Everything’s eventual by Stephen King

Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fourteen stories, ranging from good to mediocre. Most of them are ghost stories of one kind or another, about haunted people or places. Some have happy endings, others don’t.

The best, I think, was “Riding the bullet”, about a student who hitchhikes home to see his mother who has taken ill and is in hospital. I found the description of hitchhiking interesting, and it recalled a vanished age. Arthur Goldstuck once wrote a short story about a vanishing hitchhiker, an urban legend, actually. But it seems that all hitchhikers have vanished. No one I know has hitchhiked since about the mid-1970s, ever since car hijacking became the preferred method of vehicle theft.

The worst story in the collection in my view was “1408”, about a haunted hotel room. I kept falling asleep, even during the bits that were clearly meant to be the most exciting.

I thought some of the stories rated four stars, others rated two, so I gave the book as a whole three stars.

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