History of Western Philosophy

This book by Bertrand Russell is pretty much what it says on the tin,* being in itself one of the most famous and influential academic works of the twentieth century. Russell being a thinker of incredible stature in his own right, this more broadly germane outline of the key figures and trends in the history of western philosophical thought never fails to be an insightful, illuminating, and surprisingly easy-to-read book.

    To give a coherently satisfactory summary of this weighty tome is far beyond the scope of a blogpost, so I will merely list out the figures and trends covered, and then give a few reflections of my own on the text as a whole. Russell divides the history of philosophy in the west into the broad chunks - ancient, Catholic, and modern.

    The "ancient" section starts with the pre-Socratics: after an initial chapter about the rise of Greek civilisation, we look into the Milesian school, and then more closely at Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Protagoras; we also have chapters on the relation of Athens to cultural developments and the influence of Sparta. Following this we get onto the Big Three Boys of classical thought - elusive as he is we only have the only chapter on Socrates, but then Plato has distinct chapters covering the source of his opinions, his notion of utopia, his theory of ideas, his ideas around immortality, his cosmogony, and his thoughts regarding knowledge and perception - Aristotle has almost as many chapters too, covering his metaphysics, politics, ethics, logic, and physics. A supplementary chapter details ancient Greek developments in mathematics and astronomy. The final section of this first third of the book ties up the ancient period with a brief consideration of Hellenism's impact more broadly, then covering the cynics and skeptics, the Epicureans, the stoics, the changes culturally wrought by the Roman Empire, and finally the only individual thinker in this part to get his own chapter, Plotinus.

    The "Catholic" section is divided between the older Fathers of the Church and the latter scholastics. We begin with a broad sketch of the history of Judaism and its evolution into Christianity, then tracing intellectual currents within the first four centuries of Church history. A particularly meaty chapter then lumps together three 'doctors' of the Church - saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; the last of which gets an extra following chapter diving into his theology and philosophy more intensively. A vaguer but still fascinating chapter covers the dark days of the fifth and sixth centuries, and then the influences of St Benedict and Gregory the Great, before we consider the impact of the Papacy within the dark ages. John the Scot gets his own chapter, before we zoom back out for a wider take on ecclesiastical reforms in the eleventh century, as well as the multifarious impacts of Islam, and then the general trends of things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While no individual thinker is predominant in these looser historical chapters there were still many profoundly interesting people discussed who I'd never heard of. St Thomas Aquinas gets his own chapter, unsurprisingly, before the section is finished off with discussions of Franciscan schoolmen and the eclipse of the Papacy towards the end of the medieval era.

    The final third of the book, concerned with "modern" philosophy, opens with a double-barrel of general characteristics of the Renaissance and then how this manifested in Italy specifically. After smaller chapters on Machiavelli, and Erasmus and More, we plunge back into more broad historical analysis, as both the Reformation and its counter-Reformation were taking place against a backdrop of the rising tides of scientific inquiry and achievement. Most of the rest of the chapters in this part concern individual thinkers; Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, after a preable-chapter discussing the wider tendencies toward a growing liberalism Locke gets three chapters detailing his theory of knowledge, his political theory, and his influence; then we have Berkeley, Hume, a slight tangent discussing the cultural challenges and changes wrought by the romantic movement and later a broader consideration of deeper trends in the nineteenth century particularly, then Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarian school (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their ilk), Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey - and finally closing out on the most modern trend in western philosophy at the time of this book's writing** being logical analysis.

    I am obviously not going to dissect his presentation of all of this content in detail. What I will say is that he clearly knows what he is talking about to an immensely intimate degree, and even when presenting thinkers with whom he disagrees strongly (a fact he will always let the reader know, often in great detail and with sparklingly dry logically-witty remarks) he is careful to present the general details of what they thought and, most probably, why, insofar as one can surmise this from a historical perspective, with a generous degree of goodwill. Russell never shrinks from decrying what he thinks is wrong but he will never misrepresent it to make his doing so easier - in fact some of the densest writing in this book appears when he is well into the hedges of having to content with particularly messy or convoluted ideas to unwrap just what a thinker originally thought in order to judge how much veracity it likely has. He is also always very good at situating systems of thought in their historical context, so that cultural and political influences as well as the personal circumstances of these ideas' originators can all be taken into account when we are brought to judge the evolving steps in the development of the western modes of thought.

    Russell is a superlative academic and I think anyone would get a huge amount of benefit from reading this book. It will be inordinately eye-opening for anyone who has ever wondered where our ideas have come from and how they have been shaped and reshaped over the millennia-long story of western civilisation. While I do not personally agree with Russell on everything, I cannot refute him as a keen and penetrating thinker with a sharp and soft and strong set of moral sentiments - and what is more, despite the potentially off-putting nature perhaps inherent in a book of such scale and ambition, he is remarkably easy to read, never needlessly academic for its own sake, and delightfully largely free from that habit all-too-common in professional philosophers and theologians to dump random Latin or Greek phrases at you with no translatory footnotes. Overall I think this book is well worth a visit from any reader with a general curiosity - if you're looking for a solid text on the history of western philosophy, this is almost certainly IT - and if you're just a casual reader who'd like to get their teeth stuck into something highly educational and world-broadening, this might take you a while to get all the way through but I guarantee you'll get a great deal out of the experience.

* I'm reading it as I'm in the process of planning an application for a PhD in philosophy and not only has it been a few years since I've been involved in direct academia but I am painfully aware of my own blind spots, and this seems like a good place to start broadly rectifying those. In close tandem with reading through this I've also been watching my way through Arthur Holmes's own history of philosophy course, which is all on YouTube - Holmes deals immediately with fewer key philosophers than Russell does, but goes into far greater detail on each, and in my opinion it's a much more helpful introduction to those thinkers he does cover, as his commentary is more concerned with explaining the intricacies of each rather than, as is Russell's wont, going into somewhat opinionated digressions about why so-and-so is wrong. The comparison of these two also highlights a couple of interesting lacunas - while Holmes gives almost zero air-time to the pre-Socratics, which Russell has an entire part of the book dedicated to, Russell mentions Kierkegaard (inarguably an immensely important figure for modern philosophy) exactly zero times, and while Holmes has a full two hour-long lectures on A. N. Whitehead (whom one would expect Russell to talk about at least a bit given that Whitehead was his professor when he was just starting out in philosophy, and they wrote the Principia Mathematica together) Russell barely mentions his mentor.

** The manuscript was originally composed over the course of World War Two, which makes the occasional passing remarks about Hitler and Stalin all the more striking.

Self-Constitution

This book, which I have already read since the beginning of this blog hence the link above and the shortness of this entry, is, as I stated before, easily in the top few philosophy books I've read to date. I stand by everything I said about it last time, and have nothing in particular of reflective note to add, but I will say, going through a period of my life at the moment where I have been struggling with being an effective agent in both doing and/or not doing the things that I know to be best for me, the calm, rational train of thought Korsgaard carries throughout here was a real blessing to help me reassert some semblance of control over my habits. As I said before I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to know themselves better and become a better person, regardless of how familiar you are with philosophy - though her arguments are intensely academic in nature the way she writes should be largely accessible to anyone with an above-American vocabulary.

the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

the Dragon in the Library

This book by Louie Stowell is the first in a series of three novels following a ten-year old tomboy called Kit Spencer who gets peer-pressured into going to the library with her friends Josh and Alita, only to stumble upon magical secrets (of the variety that you can probably guess from the title) and commence training with head librarian Faith, who is also a wizard. Beyond that I won't spoil the plot, other than that the Evil Businessman Bad Guy is a very entertainingly Dahlesque villain. The prose is sharp and accessible, the story is well-paced and exciting, the arcane lore is actually quite well-explained and internally consistent, and the illustrations by Davide Ortu are pretty delightful and add a lot of character.

   Overall this is a cracking little children's novel - I bought it as a fifth-birthday present for my niece and pre-read it to make sure it was appropriate, but I reckon this would go down a bomb with any imaginative kids between the ages of five and nine or so. Would recommend.

the Infinite and the Divine

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Robert Rath, and I have to say it's hands-down the funniest book from within that fictional universe that I've read.

    Without wanting to give too much away... Trazyn "the Infinite" is a collector of things. He has entire planets that are basically his own private museums. Any nifty or esoteric new artefact that he can acquire is highly desirable. Meanwhile Orikan "the Diviner" is a fore-seer of futures. He has honed skills in temporal manipulation to the point that the line between him predicting a prophetic truth and him making it happen is - well, blurry. Both of the characters are necrons, and though in their original organic forms they were fairly close friends, over the millions of years of soulless existence their relationship has turned into a bitter and spiky rivalry. When the promise of a new treasure emerges, one that Trazyn craves for his own collection as deeply as Orikan suspects he can wangle to be instrumental in the future of the race, the pair enter a series of calamitous and frankly hilarious clashes of one-upmanship in trying to get their hands on this mysterious object, and while as you probably expect from a 40k novel about beings who are literally millions of years old the story does build to a shocking and epic climax, the meat of this novel is in the games Trazyn and Orikan play in outwitting and outmanoeuvring each other over literal millennia. The lives of lesser beings such as humans are used as far as they can be and then discarded without a century's thought. I'm not joking when I say how funny this book is - some of the dialogue is solid gold. I'd always thought of the necrons as characterless ancient-Egypt-wannabe robot whatevers but Rath in this novel really drives home how crazy eccentric you can get as an immortal stick kicking about in the Milky Way when they last time you had actual flesh stegosaurus was still doing its thing on Earth, and here you are, still just building a museum full of cool stuff you can find, or devising algorithms to see a few millennia into the future. There is a particularly funny moment when Trazyn, in one of his historic visits to a human world, was mistaken for a Space Marine and so had a statue to him built by the grateful locals; Orikan is unimpressed and the pair have a very silly argument about ego. There is an even funnier moment when Orikan has set up a convoluted ritual and Trazyn sabotages him by using a Pokéball* to unleash a genestealer on him for a prank, which not only ruins Orikan's ritual but means that they next time the pair visit that planet a few decades later the genestealer has successfully planted a tyranid cult and doomed the world. Sorry if these are spoilers but I felt like I needed to give a couple of examples of exactly what these guys get up to. They're essentially just a very elderly pair of close friends who have been through enough dumb stuff alongside each other over the years that they kind of hate each other but love to do so because they find the rest of the galaxy dumb enough in comparison to themselves that, both always ending up generally on top of it, they can bear each others' interference in their own inclinations. They kind of remind me of that duo of old men in The Muppets who are just constantly heckling from the balcony. They're the equivalent of those guys for the 40k universe.

    Anyway - even if you have zero familiarity with Warhammer 40,000 if you're halfway able to dive into unfamiliar science fiction and let it just wash over you, I reckon you'd probably really enjoy this. You'd probably enjoy it more if you are familiar with the universe - it doesn't have a great deal of wider lore implications but there are a bunch of easter eggs in there, but whatevs if that's not what draws you to it and you just want a funny story about a petty feud between a pair of ancient robots having dramatic unforeseen consequences.

* Necron tech is so ridiculously advanced. Yeh basically Trazyn has these tiny little cubes of matter-condensing meta-space that do function more or less exactly like Pokéballs - mind you, Pokéballs that can capture entire armies to be stored at Trazyn's behest until he's in a tight spot and needs to fart out six random enemy cohorts to distract whatever's inconveniencing him. Dude doesn't give the slightest of shits.

Poems on the Underground

This book, edited by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert, is a collection of the poems that have been being displayed on the London Underground for the last few years. It's a brilliant means of injecting enjoyable, brief spurts of accessible art to the public sphere and I am greatly in applause of it as an initiative.

    The range of poems are all quite short, as one would expect, as they are all selected to be readable by people who might merely be hopping onto the Tube for a stop or two, but they are all powerful pieces of poetic form and their diversity in theme is satisfyingly broad. Though I can't estimate how many actual poems have graced the walls of the Underground since this scheme came into being, the two hundred or so of them scraped together for this published collection are organised neatly into a sequence of categories: love, London, the wider world, exile and loss, seasons, the natural world, families, "out there", dreams, music, sense and nonsense, the darker side, war, the artist as "maker", the poet as prophet, and finally a defence of poetry itself. There is a rewarding diversity of names benefiting this collection too, from such Romantic stalwarts as Williams Blake and Wordsworth to more modern figures like Carol Ann Duffy or William Carlos Williams to four or five dozen artists I'd never heard of.

    While obviously the preferred mode of encountering these poems would have been when one is bleary-eyed, coffee-hazed, and lacklustrely dreading another drudging day of work in the grim smog of our capital, and thus in great need of a random poem to drag your mind into spaces more transcendent than it currently finds itself - reading them all together in a book like this was still a special experience. I liked imagining how my commute may have been transformed in profoundly different ways depending on whether I'd read Siegfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang or Judith Wright's Rainforest on a particular morning, and the subtle (or not!) impact that may have had on my mindset for the rest of the day. A daily injection of poetry, especially for those who might not consider themselves especially fans of the art form, can be something unpredictable and transformative, and so I am very excited that this is a thing that happens. I look forward to my next trip to London on the off-chance that I see one of these plastered in-between the Tube maps above the doors of the subway trains, in place of an inevitable advert for a department store sale or an insurance firm. Even in lieu of reading them in their intended habitat however I think this book is a worthwhile and well-selected collection of quality poetry. Recommended for enjoyers of the form.

the Damnation Document

This book is - well, it's actually a report from the organisation called thirty-one eight - who are specialized in investigating abuses within churches. I'm including it on this blog as it was at least as long as many books I've read and has far more content. As regular readers will know, I am a committed Christian - and as more attentive readers may know, my relationship with the church I grew up in deteriorated quite viciously toward my exit from that congregation.

   I'm not going to make a huge song-and-dance about everything in this post. I left The Crowded House for my own reasons, though I'm sure they were folded into manifold other factors going on within that church that made it spiritually unsustainable for me to stay. Anyway, the title of this post is simply what I've been thinking of this report as - I read the first quarter of it way back when it came out and broke down in tears, but I've finally psyched myself up to read the whole thing so I could have a coherent backwards opinion. And I am sure I made the right choice in leaving. This is a book review blog, not a church-dissection blog, so I'm going to eschew any personal commentary here; if you are interested in what was awry in my home church the link is right there above.

Dark Creed

This book is the third instalment in Anthony Reynolds's Word Bearers trilogy.*

    Plot-wise I'll be more sparing this time than I was with the prior two as this is where the series culminates and I don't want to spoil the whole thing. Basically, having worked out how to use the necron artifact obtained in the first book, Marduk now has to side with other hosts of the Word Bearers legion amidst questionable political internal intrigue, in order to squash the White Consuls, a chapter of loyalist Space Marines, defending the target planet of Boros Prime - a task that seems to be largely going well, until the necrons themselves turn up to reinstate their claim upon their artifact.

    So, I've covered the plots - now for some reflections.

    Having recently completed a re-read of Dan Abnett's stellar Gaunt's Ghosts series (see the April posts from this year for most of these) I was in a real Warhammer 40,000 hype mood, and having spent so long with Imperial loyalists wanted a bit more of a taste of the bad guys. Hence the Word Bearers - whom I've always thought were the most interesting of the traitor legions. I mean, most of them just slash and kill and destroy, but the Word Bearers actively root themselves into places to set up religious cults in a very sustainable manner. It's grim-dark to the hilt still, but it's a tad more interesting. And Reynolds writes them this way - they are evil characters, sure, but there is a degree of genuine faith and fervour there that makes you as a reader genuinely come to appreciate how compelling it must be to exist as a nigh-immortal warrior in the service of empirically-demonstrable gods. Reynolds writes action well, if a bit repetitively - I suppose there are lexically only so many ways you can describe what happens to someone's skull when a bolt-round enters it without either becoming overtly floral or simply repeating yourself - and his dialogue is, I will say, serviceable. None of the characters are particularly likeable (except Burias - he's my dog in this fight) but that's to be expected of a series about a traitor legion; sadly though this often means there is a real lack of humour. The only real human moments come from the scenes that centre on the point-of-view of antagonists, i.e. Imperial soldiers and personnel, and I will say that Reynolds in these scenes does show a real versatility in conveying the scope and destructiveness of conquest in the 41st millennium in a way neutral enough to make you genuinely sympathise with both sides, even if one is defending humanity while another serves the powers of Chaos.

    To conclude - I really enjoyed re-reading** these. If you're a 40k fan you'd probably get a kick out of them, unless you're one of those weirdo closet fascists who genuinely sides with the Imperium out of an ethical prerogative and can't just appreciate the fictional satirical setting for what it is. This is an action packed, twisty and fun trilogy, and even if you know nothing about 40k I bet you could still enjoy it as a well-packaged anti-hero blockbuster.

* That said, I read all three as part of the omnibus edition, so technically it was all one book, but three separate novels, hence I hope you will appreciate the three separate posts. Also included in the omnibus is a bonus short story called Torment, which is a harrowing and grim walkthrough of the punishments Burias is forced to undergo following his betrayal of Marduk.

** Yes, re-reading - I'd read the whole trilogy in separate instalments borrowed from my local library back when I was but a youngling still several years away from starting this damn blog.

Dark Disciple

This book is the second of Anthony Reynolds's Word Bearers trilogy. I'll continue in the same manner as the first post commenced.

    Having secured the artifact (which seems to be of necron origin, though this is still basically a mystery to the main characters it is obvious to the readers who are familiar with 40k lore), Marduk (now no longer First Acolyte but acting Dark Apostle, following the tragic death of Jarulek at the end of book one - sorry, spoilers) is now tasked with tracking down an elusive Imperial adept of the Mechanicus who might be able to help decode and thus make utilizable the artifact. This leads them to the planet Perdus Skylla - though things rarely go exactly according to neat little plans, and not only does this adept prove incredibly inconvenient to track down, but the planet in question is A) currently under seige from a cohort of Dark Eldar who are enslaving as much of the population as they can for torture farms & B) directly in the path of an encroaching tyranid hive-fleet which will annihilate and consume everything possible. Marduk has to find a way of masterminding this adept-retrieval mission in such a way that not too many Word Bearers get either kidnapped for endless torture or simply eaten, all while contending with his own army leader Kol Badar and possessed icon bearer Burias-Drak'shal, both of whom are starting to have their own questions as to the legitimacy of their new leader.

Dark Apostle

This book by Anthony Reynolds is the first in the Word Bearers trilogy - I'll do a full reflection in the final post but here will just give a very brief overview of what's going on.

    Basically, the Word Bearers, who were at founding the XVII Legion of Space Marines but have since turned heretic, are still fighting their endless war against the Imperium. If that all sounds like jargon-blabber then what are you doing reading my blog if a post or two hasn't made you need to google one or two Warhammer 40,000-related terms. Marduk, the First Acolyte of the 34th Host under Dark Apostle Jarulek, harbours secret ambitions, but is patiently biding his time for these to come to fruition, as the Host is undertaking some major actions: mainly the invasion and thus conquest of a planet called Tanakreg, where the Word Bearers plan on building a gehemahnet (essentially a giant tower built of rock and reconstituted corpses) to summon a huge build-up of warp energy and thus burst open the planet, concealed within which, according to legend, lies an artefact the likes of which could be an ultimate game changer for the Legion as a whole...

    And yeh, they basically manage it. But a few things go awry. I won't spoil it.

Hapworth 16, 1924

This book - well, it was never published as a book, rather as a Very Long Short Story in the New Yorker (the whole text is available from the link above) - by J.D. Salinger - is easily and without a doubt the worst thing he ever had properly published. I really wanted this to be good; you see, it's Buddy Glass copying word-for-word a very long letter his elder brother Seymour (who is, from this at least, though reading this has somewhat soured that, one of my favourite characters in all of fiction) sent from a summer camp in 1924, when Seymour was apparently seven years old.

   It already strains belief. The letter is well over sixty A4 pages long if you copy-paste the text from the link above and fart it into a Word document or similar. However clever or eccentric seven-year-old Seymour was, however injured his leg may have been, I simply do not believe that he would have devoted so much time to a single letter to his mother who he would have seen in a week or two anyway. Realism aside, the tone rankles. Seymour as the author of this letter is very obviously not a child and is very obviously Salinger himself attempting to pre-empt some bizarre precocious fantasy. There are extensive passages where this Literal Child at length objectifies the female camp warden's wife and thinks about what it would be like to pleasure her. Then there's the final forty percent of the letter, which is a "request for reading material" - deeply pedantically specific, unquantifiably esoteric, and of course far too much for even a very clever seven-year-old and his very clever five-year-old brother to get through in a handful of weeks at summer camp, where there are other activities, other children, etc. I really don't know what Salinger was trying to say with this piece. It really has forever soured my impression of the Glass family, who I always had prior found fascinating sources of curiosity as quasi-realistic character studies - but this letter and the portrait of the child supposed to be writing it paints, really just makes me sad. It's like J.D. had no clue what real people were like, were supposed to be like, were supposed to like, were supposed to do, say, write - and he just goes off on this nitrous tangent that's so ridiculous it would be comical if it weren't so long and taking itself so seriously. This letter did not make me laugh or even smile once in its fifty/sixty page length (once I'd copy-pasted it from that website and farted it into a .pdf so I could flip through it on my Kindle); and though Salinger is far from what I would consider a comic writer, everything else I've ever read by him has at least had a certain levity and humour to it that gives the impression that it was written by a human about humans. This doesn't. This is just sad. This is like some grand gesture of literary experiment that nobody asked for because everybody knows they wouldn't like it. And I didn't. Sorry, Seymour Glass. I hope your leg got better after all that - but I hope you got your sad arse out of bed and made friends with some other actual children at that summer camp instead of sitting around pretending that you can read French and Italian and German well enough to interpret those historical texts you requested to a degree that satisfies you. You know, Seymour - when I read this, I thought you were one of the most interesting characters I'd ever come across. But having read this letter to your mother, so devotedly re-typed by your brother Buddy, I feel nothing but sorrow for you. And not in the way that I would even want to comfort you. I can see myself watching you blow your brains out in that hotel room and I would feel nothing but relief that at least you weren't bothering the banana-fish anymore.

   That's almost certainly harsh. But he's not real, he's a character - and for Salinger to create a character of such complexity and mystery and depth in a handful of glimpses, only then to give us an extensive diarrhoea of a letter from this very same character that reveals him merely to be nothing but an imagined caricature of who I can only presume the author wished he had been somewhat like as a child so that he may have come closer to some kind of a spiritual fulfilment - I mean (oh man, don't even get started on Salinger and religion, he was Not to be Trusted with it in the slightest instance) - ugh. Jerome David, can you hear me? Nobody can know everything. Not even someone who did know everything could solve every problem just by knowing how. Calm down. Shut up. And in your grave if nothing else regret having made the New Yorker publish this total embarrassment of a "story". I mean - to have written the four books that you have, and then print this mess, is like performing an otherwise perfect decathlon and then halfway through the final 1000m sharting so badly that you slip over in your own excrement. If you enjoy Salinger's books, do not read this. It isn't one of them in the slightest.

the Book of Enoch

This book* - or probably more accurately collection of books - is typically referred to by scholars of ancient texts as 'the Book of Enoch', given the Judaic tradition that has followed them for centuries despite spurious archaeological evidence. Though most archaeological evidence referring to specific people is probably spurious going that far back.

   The claim is that this is a collection of texts recorded by Noah's (and therefore Abraham's, and therefore David's, and therefore Jesus's, etc) ancestor Enoch - during the period of post-exile-from-Eden but pre-Flood strangeness upon the Earth. And strange it is. I won't even try to give a close summary as there is a great deal happening in these chapters and if you're intrigued in the slightest I recommend going to the link above and reading the whole thing for free; but I will give a few flappy hints. Enoch is approached by renegade angels who have been teaching dark arts like astronomy and metalworking to humans; they ask him to help defend against the wrath of the Lord who wants to punish them for rebelling against him. Enoch sides with God. The rest of the (really quite longish) book is a series of spiralling visions where Enoch is shown both earthly and heavenly realms in a past and/or future sense; the metaphors are so dense it's hard to tell really what's going on. There is a section later in the book where several passages of metaphor do seem to prophecy events of the Hebrew Old Testament, using animals as stand-ins for the characters - but I don't know enough about Judaic tradition to confirm this.

   What I can say for certain is that the vast majority of Christians I know from my circles have never heard of this book, let alone would be able to interpret it properly. The text only survives because it was preserved in proto-semitic communities in Ethiopia well before 1000 BCE. So whatever else we might want to think, this is a very old text: and it warrants scholarly and prayerful interpretation. I'm still on the fence myself as to whether I consider it scripture - a big part of me keeps screaming "of course it can't be scripture, look how weird some of it is!" and then the other part of me keeps replying, "um, hello? Ezekiel? Revelation?"

   So.... yeh. This is an ancient text worth thinking about, for whatever it may turn out to be.

* There's a bunch of translations out there on the web and I want you to be on the same page as me reading-wise, so I've specifically linked the Andy McCracken translation above, stored in my own Google Drive as I know the sites that host these kinds of documents can often be somewhat temperamental.

Anarch

This book is the fifteenth, and most recent instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. I have read this one before since I started doing this blog so there is a post about it already, but I didn't really put much effort into overviewing the story there, and besides I promised that on this new read-through of the whole series the final post would give more of my honest personal reflections rather than mere summations and hints. So, I may have said that previous books in the series were the most harrowing or the most intense - and I stand by those assertions - but this one is the most truly traumatic. This one picks up mere moments after the last book closes: Gaunt is both in his element and floundering about trying to make his element work in his new role with the war council, and most of the Tanith First are still defending a hopeless scrap of almost-indefensible land of very little tactical value. Things are a mess: Rawne has abandoned post to go and defend the traitor Blood Pact general who, everyone's pretty sure, Sek is trying to have killed again; Major Pasha has been sent to defend a Mechanicum research outpost where a significant Chaos artefact is being held; scout-sergeant Mkoll is nowhere to be seen. What's worse, Yoncy keeps talking to her big brother Dalin about woe machines (remember them? from Verghast?) as they're hiding in the cellars of the city palaces where all Imperial command forces are currently stationed. What ensues in the rest of the book I will not say outright, except for that there are four main strands - 1. with Pasha's group, trying to defend (and then retrieve) the artefacts from Very-Hard-To-Kill daemon troops sent directly from Sek; 2. with Rawne's mob, trying to keep the traitor general safe from other Very-Hard-To-Kill daemon troops sent directly from Sek; 3. with Mkoll, who is off doing his own thing trying to infiltrate Sek's base of operations as best as he can; 4. with a bunch of civilians and a handful of Guard looking after them in the palace cellars (and trust me, this is the subplot that gets traumatic. I'm fucking thirty years old and I had to sleep with the lights on for two nights (of course it didn't help that there is building work going on next door and a lot of their tools sound like bonesaws)). There are a lot of major losses in this book, and all of them hurt. Except for one. I won't say anything about the context - but when Gaunt's daughter gets her first canonically-confirmed kill, I cheered. Also, it should be said - this is the first time in a Gaunt's Ghosts novel that an Inquisitor has been actually helpful and not just a deceptive political shithead. Made a nice change.

   Okay, so that's a summary of that one.

   But I said I'd give some reflections on the series as a whole. Well, I think what's so great about the Gaunt's Ghosts saga can be broken down into three primary factors:

1. Honouring the grimdark: Warhammer 40,000 is the franchise archetype of a 'grimdark' setting. That means there are not meant to be places in this fictional universe where you can go to find hope, or peace, or joy, or even rest. It is total horror and war and carnage. And I think Dan grasps that with both hands; by making the Crusade that is the backdrop of this whole series one against Chaos specifically, it means that there isn't some mindless alien threat of dumb orks or hungry tyranids, or mindful alien threat of hopeful t'au or hope-deprived eldar, or wherever on this spectrum necrons would go; it's Chaos, and they're primarily human. Though, rather than being recognisable as human, they have given themselves to dark daemonic powers - and so there is an uncanny horror to all the conflicts that our protagonists find themselves in. It's one thing to shoot a greenskin in the head because it was about to chop you to bits for nothing but fun; it's one thing to fire a plasma rifle at a kroot because it was about to dismember you for 'the greater good'; it's another thing entirely to have to defend yourself any way you can against a slavering, mutated beast that you know full well was less than a month ago a perfectly normal citizen of the neighbouring hive-city. Dan has stared into the grimdark and concluded that Chaos is the worst enemy, and the way he writes it, you have to agree.
2. Humanising the Imperium: in his prologue to the first omnibus collection of these novels, Dan stated that he didn't want to start with Space Marines, because they're so super-human he wouldn't know how to characterise them. So he started with the Guard; the humble, unaugmented grunts of all Imperial combat. And I wholeheartedly think this was the right choice. I mean, obviously since, he's written many of the stories in the Horus Heresy series, as well as several standalone books, about Space Marines - and he manages to characterise them while retaining their superhumanity - but as a starting point, the Guard is where you go. I mean, First and Only kickstarted the entire Black Library. It was his, and their, first novel. And the series remains going strong to this day nearly two-and-a-half decades later. Don't get me wrong - the dystopian horrors of the Imperium and its necessity of constant war still shine through in gut-wrenching ways. But despite it all, Dan's characters still manage to make each other - and you, the reader - smile, or even laugh, when there is a respite from the bullets and shells.
3. Taking liberties with both the above, and whatever the feth else Dan wants to: what kind of writer follows rules to a T exactly? No kind of writer, exactly. If he wants a story that's a bit safer and a bit sillier, while still being a grimdark war story, he'll give you Blood Pact. If he wants to include superhuman characters to show their contrast against the rank-and-file guardsmen, he dumps three Space Marines into Salvation's Reach, or five Chaos Marines into Traitor General, to show off the sheer disparities in capability of these kinds of being; or he'll give you a powerful psyker as in the Inquisitors from several different stories or the tragic [redacted] being from Only in Death. Warhammer 40,000 is a very big very messy universe lore-wise, and I am sure that if Dan wanted to finish the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade on a triumphal note but then have the Tanith First go off and fight a wholly different enemy - he could pull that off as well.

   That's all you're getting for now. If I ever feel the urge to re-read these again, and I'm still running this ridiculous blog, they will probably be much shorter posts. Although, I don't know - Dan may well still have a dozen or more books in this series up his sleeve. And who knows where they will go. I mean, they still need to win the Crusade, right? Or then there was the Warmaster's promise that when the Tanith liberate a world and the moment is right, they could settle on it in exchange for their home planet, and that's gotta happen at some point, right? RIGHT?

The Warmaster

This book is the fourteenth in the Gaunt's Ghosts series by Dan Abnett - I have read this one since I started this blog, so there is a pre-existing post about it if you wanna check that out, but I probably have some new stuff to say since when I last read this one it had been nearly a decade since I'd read the previous instalment, whereas this time I've read the whole series (nearly, so far) in about a year. In this one, the Tanith First - though having been presumed long-dead by Imperial Command since their warp-drive went slightly skew-whiff and they lost ten years during retranslation into real-space - arrive on the forge-world of Urdesh, where both Saint Beatti herself and Anakwanar Sek himself are present, so you can imagine there's a fairly major number of intense skirmishes going on. While the Tanith First-and-Only (newly reinforced with an influx of volunteer troops from both Verghast and Belladon) are caught in the thick of the fighting, having been tasked with defending a wide-open area between a residential scrub and the docks, where their only support is artillery that's useless once the enemy gets too close - the chief driving conflicts of this book are political. Gaunt's old friend Lord General Van Voytz is pleased to see the Colonel-Commissar back from Salvation's Reach after a decade of doubt - but there are deeper machinations at play. The war council is growing tired of the unpredictability and reclusiveness of Warmaster Macaroth, the man who has been in charge of the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade since (well, just) before the start of this series of novels. And they're hungry for a replacement. And they've nominated Gaunt, given his war record and reputation for no-nonsense behaviour. Without giving too much away about how it all goes down, Gaunt goes to find Macaroth to try and have a frank conversation, which is apparently quite successful* in achieving - something. The book ends on a cliff-hanger - well, two - with the First in a perilously pinned combat situation with Blood Pact forces in the south side of the city, and Gaunt in a curious new roles amongst the ever-political war council.

* Abnett's characterisation of Macaroth, even given just a scene-and-a-half in which to be actually present in the story, is masterful and hilarious and exhilarating and humbling, I have to say.

(also, I don't want to give spoilers for the next one yet, which I will have to do in the post for that one for the sake of catharsis, but - if you've not by the end of this book figured out that there is something Very Very Wrong with Yoncy - then your grasp of subtext is such that I'm amazed you bother to finish reading any fictional works at all.)

Salvation's Reach

This book is the thirteenth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. In this one, the Tanith First are tasked with a top-secret mission from Crusade Command itself - they are to infiltrate a place* and retrieve as much useful data as they can from it and destroy as much of the rest of it as they can. Obviously, this is an extremely hard mission, so the Tanith even have three Space Marines tagging along with them.** With no spoilers, the mission doesn't go to the exact plan, but it goes to plan well enough to be considered a success - even if a stow-away spy gave away their ship's location early on and there was a resultant space battle*** that could have risked the lives of many senior Imperial commanders - and they get away largely intact. There are a handful of upsetting character losses, but one of these was a long time coming and is couched by the fact that it's defended by a heroic sacrifice; and really the only major takeaway from Tanith losses in this one is "absolutely feth Meryn."

* I couldn't think of a better word and didn't want to fatten that sentence up too much by describing what it actually is. Salvation's Reach is an area of remote space where the wreckage and junk leftover from millennia-worth of void-battles has aggregated together under its own gravity, collided, fused, and become a misshapen small-planet-sized Thing floating about far away from anything else. The reason it's of interest is that Anakwanar Sek, the chief lieutenant to the Chaos commander Gaur, in this current Crusade, has been using the place as a secret lab and testing ground for all manner of warp-craft, war machines, and new terrible means of killing and traumatising Imperial forces. So there you go.

** It's a minor point, but one of my favourite things in this book is the fact that Nahum Ludd manages to assert authority over these three Space Marines even when they're in the thick of combat-readiness. Pretty badass for a junior commissar.

*** This is also one of my favourite bits - the Chaos ships that follow them out of the warp all shout their own names over and over through the vox, like giant metal evil Pokémon. The best of which has to be TORMAGEDDON MONSTRUM REX! - I mean, if that isn't one of the silliest most extreme names for an evil spaceship you've ever heard I don't know what to say to you.

Blood Pact

This book is the twelfth in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series - and while still harrowing and full of threat in many places, I think this is probably one of the most entertaining of the bunch. It reads like a bloody Guy Ritchie film, with all the various players faffing about and colliding and trying to second-guess each other against a backdrop of apathetic violence. This story is, with very little stretch of exaggeration, Traitor General in reverse: that is to say, Imperial forces are holding a traitorous general from the Blood Pact (an elite Chaos force) prisoner - and a crack-team of Chaos infiltrators have come to Balhaut (where as it happens the Tanith First are on a well-earned break after the horrors of Jago) to come and assassinate him. I know I'd read this before but for some reason remembered hardly anything of what happens in it - sure, there are moments of extreme violence and horror - but it's also a very funny book. The meddling of the Inquisition again rears its head with interesting consequences, and the band of outlaw Tanith who contribute heavily to saving the day are probably my favourite subplot. I also really appreciate Gaunt's commandeering of an agoraphobic coroner to help them win out over the loyalist Blood Pact infiltrators. A lot of fun. And no serious losses on the Good Guy front! I know that's a spoiler but it's very rare to have a Ghosts novel where you can genuinely relax in knowledge of that. One final thing - I know in his Inquisitor novels (see Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin etc) Abnett has shown us intriguing glimpses of the non-frontline "normal life" of Imperial worlds before, but it's cool to see how the Tanith First adapt (or in Rawne & co.'s case, refuse to) to life among such relatively safe normality.

Only in Death

This book is the eleventh in Dan Abnett's increasingly-stomach-wrenching Gaunt's Ghosts series, and in my opinion it's probably the best of the lot. I mean, it's so intense, that I started it out of why-not-ness immediately after finishing the previous instalment - and then, feth sleep, I read the whole damn thing in one sitting, only getting up to pee or refill my canteen.* Sent to the arse-end of the dusty planet Jago, the First end up tasked with guarding a mountain fortress called Hinzerhaus - which deserves special mention, as it's No Joke the main character in this book. Hinzerhaus is creepy as all fuck**. This book is incredibly atmospheric and 97% of that comes from Hinzerhaus. (Well, okay, quite a lot of it comes from an old friend who has been sent off to become incorporated into the Imperial psyker forces as well, but I won't spoil that.***) It may feel like something of a slow-burn, this one - but when things get going, they Get Going, and I genuinely felt "they all might actually die" with a seriousness I'd not felt since Vervunhive in book three. Anyway, I'll stop rambling here for want of not giving spoilers - except to say 1. I hope Maggs got therapy, 2. Baskevyl was the MVP of this book by a long shot and everyone would've died if it wasn't for him, love it (one of my favourite characters), and 3. the chapters with Mkoll and Ezsrah on their little quests is just - ah, chef's kiss. Yes, this is the best Gaunt's Ghosts novel. So far, anyway.

* Which I only did once. Having drank half a litre of water over about two hours, I then spent the next eight hours carefully rationing my next half a litre, out of solidarity with the regiment. If you know, you know. I did get a little dehydrated but I think it added to the experience.

** An atmosphere intensified perfectly straight from the opening line of the book - "There was a rumour circulating through the troops, nobody knew who had started it - that scouts from another force had discovered a huge valley full to the brim of dry and dusty human skulls, all with their tops sawn off." (slight paraphrase there, I've already reshelved the book and can't be bothered to get it back off just to ensure accurate wording. that's the vibe)

*** Although I wish I could. You deserve a warning. The fate of that character made me openly weep it was so sad and touching and just fethed-up in the way only something in 40k could be.

The Armour of Contempt

This book is the tenth Gaunt's Ghosts instalment from Dan Abnett, and it's probably the most horrific - not the most upsetting, merely totally grim & dark in its portrayal of war in the grim darkness of the far future. Here we get to see the Tanith First-and-Only (with newly-incorporated Belladon troops) return to Gereon to finally liberate it from Chaos forces. The narrative is kind of split in two - one stream follows the main regiment as they try to make contact with whatever remains of the resistance, so they can help them overthrow the incumbent Chaos leadership; the second (and far more intense) follows those members of the regiment who have been on RIP (retraining, indoctrination and punishment) protocols and are therefore assigned to be - eh, yeh, essentially cannon fodder in the worst front of the whole planetary assault. This book more than any other Ghosts novel is full of sucker-punches: you'll think something awful is about to happen and then it hasn't, or you'll think safety has been achieved and then BAM-feth. Witnessing what has become of Gereon after so many years of Chaos occupation is tremendously disturbing. And again there is another heart-breaking loss at the end which I won't spoil. One uplifting thing I will say about this book is the reintroduction of Merrt as a major character - he quickly went on to become one of my favourites. Oh, and there's meddling by the Inquisition, which Gaunt's lot haven't had to deal with for a while, but it's entertaining to see how they handle it.

His Last Command

This book, number nine in Dan Abnett's increasingly-upsetting Gaunt's Ghosts series, takes place about a year-and-a-half after the Gereon mission. Despite an extremely rocky path getting back into Imperial safe-space, Gaunt and his team find yet another major problem to deal with: in their commander's absence, the Tanith First-and-Only have been subsumed into a Belladon regiment under the control of one Colonel Wilder. Which would be enough to contend with, if it weren't also for the fact that the Sparshad Mons antique "city" thing the Guard are trying to clear Chaos forces out of is a completely insane place, and terrifying monsters keep appearing out of nowhere. Gaunt and his team's reappearance disturbs things not only for Wilder and the Belladon but also for the Tanith and Verghastite troops who had assumed them all long-dead. This vein of doubt and discomfort runs throughout the book, as does the increasing apparency that - having survived on a Chaos-held world for fifteen months, these prodigal comrades are on another level of proficient in dealing death and destruction (not to mention, quite seriously-questionably corrupted from their long exposure to Chaos). The Guard win the day, but it's a close call, and one only made possible by the heightened specialisation of the Gereon team and their return into the Imperial intelligence networks. The ending of this book is heart-breaking, even if it's characters you barely know.* Is that a spoiler? Probably. Sorry.

* True fact - this was the first Gaunt's Ghosts book I ever read. I found it in my local library, a fourteen-year-old who had been painting and playing Warhammer 40k for about four years, but had never read one of its books - and even with no familiarity with the characters or context, the sheer scale and depravity of war I was exposed to in these pages blew my tiny young mind. Needless to say, I read it twice, took it back, paid my late fee, and as soon as I could afford it started buying up the whole series from the start. And part of me still wishes I hadn't, because however good they are, Dan keeps stabbing me in the feel-bone.

Traitor General

This book is the eighth in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts saga, and let me tell you it's the most harrowing yet. Not by a long shot the most upsetting, but the most consistently intense and unnerving throughout. Gaunt and a small crack-team of elites from the regiment* are tasked with a top-secret mission to infiltrate Chaos-held world Gereon, meet up with the local resistance, and then find and eliminate - oh, you guessed it from the title? - an Imperial Guard general who has turned traitor. This is a hard swallow, this book. The portrayal of a human life under the Imperial regime is often bad enough but under Chaos - it's fething insane. Anyway, I won't tell you how the team get on with their mission, but I will say that this book contains some of the most outrageously badass scenes** in the entire series, and also introduces one of the coolest characters, Ezsrah ap Niht, into the regimental fold. So there's that.

* I won't say who, but you wouldn't be at all surprised, if you're familiar with the series so far, that it includes Criid, Varl, Larkin, Mkoll, Bonin, Brostin, Rawne, and Mkvenner.

** I mean, Mkvenner could probably have done this whole book on his own. He is ridiculous.

Sabbat Martyr

This book is the seventh of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Fuck me. I can't do this. Yes I can. So. The Ghosts are sent to the tactically-insignificant world Herodor - where, to everyone's surprise, the reincarnation of Saint Beatti herself is present to lead the crusade into glorious victory. Except Gaunt doesn't believe it's really her. Regardless of whether it is her or not, the Tanith and Verghastite troops have to contend not only with a typical Chaos assault of the main hive-city, but also with a subversive ploy by the archenemy to assassinate the Saint using a small coterie of incredibly-dangerous specialists. And while the ensuing fights that the Ghosts and these specialists get into are incredibly cool and punchily well-prosed, again, this book ends with a loss that puts George R.R. Martin to shame for its sheer miserable wastefulness.

Straight Silver

This book is the sixth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Yes, I've finally calmed down from the fuckeries at the end of the last one to come back to re-reading my way through. I may regret this. Alternatively, I may just force myself to get through them all as fast as possible so then I can just sit back and let the trauma fade for several years before I feel the need to revisit the series. Anyway, here the Tanith First are sent to Aexe Cardinal, where a horrifically-overblown trench war has been raging for decades. Aristocrats are in charge, which makes for a delightfully Sharpe-ish* butting of heads over tactics, priorities, and whatnot; aristocrats also make up a hefty proportion of the non-Guard troops involved in the war, which largely explains why it has been going on so long. Incompetence and cowardice are on full display, and Ibram Gaunt is in full swing as a leadership-empowered Commissar - which doesn't make him or the regiment very popular. I have to say that the depictions of a trench war in this book are absolutely heart-rendingly gross; they made me feel the realities of what an absolute shitshow that kind of thing must be like far worse than any World War 1 film ever has.

* Dan always has said that the inspiration for doing the Ghosts was "Sharpe in space".

God in Creation

This book is the second (after this one) in Jürgen Moltmann's systematic theology series; as you can tell from the title, this one deals with creation doctrines. Though Moltmann approaches the topic quite innovatively from an ecological perspective - placing God and creation in relation to each other within their own spiritual and natural ecologies. This book took me a long time to read - if I must admit, I started reading it way back in late 2017 when I was still working at Church Army, but found it too difficult; but since getting nudged back onto Moltmann in more recent years, and having found his first book of systematic theology relatively manageable, I decided to embark upon the rest of his series, and found it somewhat workable, though it was a real mental test compared to most of the other Christian literature I read.* In any case, I have now finished it, and found it profoundly enlightening on a number of half-baked questions I've always had about creation but had never articulated, as well as a number more of things I'd never even wondered but now having been made to think about them am astounded that most Christians seem to be able to slide along without deep doubts in their cognizance about such things. Moltmann is that kind of theologian; he thinks into the weird corners and flushes them out with ecumenical sources, biblical wisdom, and fat old logic.

   It would be completely disingenuous of me to say I can summarise what Moltmann says in this book. I hope the introductory paragraph is enough to entice you as to the aim and style of his book in his overall systematic theology project, and following from here I will give a very brief list of the chapter subjects covered in this volume.

1. The idea of God being in creation as an introductory chapter
2. Specific considerations of the significance of this in the ecological crisis**
3. How God, and we, know creation
4. God as the creator
5. How time relates to the act of God's creation
6. How space relates to the act of God's creation
7. The duality/unity of heaven and earth
8. Evolution in creation
9. Human beings as God's image
10. Embodiment and the soul as the end of created works
11. The Sabbath as the feast of creation
12. An appendix comprising various symbols of creation

   Many of these might seem quite dry, or even irrelevant, to what you might consider core themes or issues in creation doctrine; but trust me, once Moltmann gets his teeth into one of these things, it becomes interesting as anything. And illuminating in ways you had probably never imagined. But anyway. So that's it for Moltmann on creation - merely volume two in his systematic theology series. Since finishing this one, I have acquired volumes three, four and five - Christology, pneumatology, and eschatology respectively - so I suppose I'll see you again soon for breakdowns of those.

* Maybe that says more about most Christian literature than it does me or Moltmann... you make your mind up.

** I have to say, it is fucking affirming to have such an adept theologian tackling creation issues through the lens of the "ecological crisis" way back in the 1980's, when that kind of language has only just barely entered the mainstream consciousness now in the 2020's.

The Conquest of Bread

This book by Peter Kropotkin is one of the seminal founding texts in our modern understanding of anarcho-socialism. I had previously read it as an impressionable sixteen-year-old - but now with a much deeper education of politics, economics, and philosophy - I genuinely hold to the ideas herein far stronger than I had then.

   This book is a masterfully mathematically inarguable treatise on how anarcho-socialism can be the most efficient and humane means of organising a political economy along egalitarian lines. I  realise that given the age of the book the numbers comprising its core arguments are in sheer need of an update for the 21st-century, which given how much things are changing these days may again need another update every two or three years to come - but the underlying principles remain solid. Kropotkin's assessment of industrial here is timeless; the ideas about social organisation, to the workers as to their capabilities and to the citizens as to their needs is a core tenet of "small c" communism; this is a model of how a political-economic body could function sustainably for the best of its members with no impingement on those around it can flourish.

   This book was a key text in my rational radicalisation as a teenager - and having re-read it so many years later it seems it still makes a great deal of sense. Capitalism is worse than a virus; it is simply unnecessary. Once the means of production are consolidated, for the workers not to be in democratic control of them implies an undue influence that is not in the best interests of the surrounding society. We, the proletariat, must demand control in such manner - or industrialised societies will never get over their "hill" of liberalism and embrace the truth of political and economic equality.

   There are many more ruminations on this great book that I could lay forth but I think the key points have been made. Revolution, whether democratic or sectarian-violent - are inevitable - but they best way to guard against that is to issue such structures to the workers in the first place. In 2023 it seems like a silly argument to make, when "artificial intelligence" is already starting to cannibalize the jobs of artists, writers, translators, coders, and so many more - but does not that simply drive home the urgency of such a revolution?

A Wilderness of Mirrors

This book by Mark Meynell is, as its subtitle puts it, a Christian apologetic via an exploration into "trusting again in a cynical world". And boy, is it timely. In fact maybe too timely - but we'll come back to that point later. First let's get a grip on what it actually talks about.

   The first part of the book looks into the legacy of fracturing trust in the modern age. In three heavily-endnoted chapters, Meynell talks about the failures on this front of our ruling authorities (although largely here drawing on historical examples, which is all very well, but I would have liked a bit more of a juicy socio-political analysis), our mediating authorities (informers and the like), and our personal authorities (or caregivers - though the chapter swiftly brushes aside both the medical and teaching professions within a single page and then is mainly charged with the failures of the church*).

   The second part is a short, theoretical pair of reflections on the loneliness-inducing alienation, lostness and paranoia that we can all-too-easily succumb to in such a climate. These chapters are fine enough I guess, but Meynell doesn't really say anything that hasn't already been said in far more insightful ways by both academics and meme-smiths, so I won't toot the horn for this middle section too much. I also think he entirely fails to address a few key factors that are driving our sense of alienation, betrayedness and paranoia - the rampantly shifting techno-social landscape, the death throes of late capitalism, the ecological crises, to name just three. You can probably think of more. A bit of legwork in talking about the sociology or political-economic theory of trust would also have been appreciated.

   But it is in part three that we get to the meat of the book - the Christian apologetic section. Firstly he deals with the biblical conception of original sin as both the starting-point and to-some-degree justification of such a culture of mistrust: this was an interesting chapter and made a lot of connections I hadn't seen before. The next three chapters are far more simply predictable: Jesus is the one we can trust; the Church is the society in which we can start to break away from patterns of cynicism; the gospel is the message and narrative we need to begin building a more trustful future. Nothing bad, but nothing original: especially in the final chapter, a few more pragmatic pointers about how to break through psychologically or socially into the cynical miasma of the postmodern world wouldn't have gone amiss.

   As I hinted in my opening paragraph, the real problem with this book is that it came out too soon. It was published in 2015, and while "post truth" was already a thing in certain academic circles at that time, it wasn't yet the predominant socio-political normativity - had this book been put together even three years later, let alone six and he'd have had all the Covid madness to break down to boot, it could have had a lot more to draw on and impactfully say. But that's a pretty cynical two cents to dig into a book which is a perfectly respectable Christian apologetic speaking into a vital issue in most of the contemporary western world. It's not great reading, but it's perfectly readable, if that makes sense. I'd probably only recommend this to you if you're already a Christian and you're specifically looking for a resource on how to engage the cynicism of our times; as exhortational as the final sections were for me as a believing reader, I really doubt they'd convince anyone who wasn't already convinced of the Truth beyond truth in a world where truth barely even exists anymore.

* Something I am all too familiar with, as the elder of my old church The Crowded House, one Steve Timmis (who, interestingly enough, wrote one of the blurb reviews on this very book - he describes it as "well researched, well written, and well worth reading" - I tentatively agree), was pushed to resign as CEO of global church-planting network Acts 29 and as leader of the church for persistent allegations of bullying behaviour and fostering a culture of spiritual abuse under his leadership. I have talked about my personal journey in all this in other posts which I'm not going to bother to link here, but if you're really interested feel free to search through my blog's (not inconsiderable, I know lols) history until you find the particularly long, whingy posts.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

This book, a collection of medical-theological reflections by eminent surgeon Dr Paul Brand edited together and fleshed out a bit by Philip Yancey, is an actually miraculous read. It will both make you appreciate the complex marvel that is the human body in ways you probably never knew if you're not in the medical profession, and further to this, its interwoven reflections (which I will talk about in a moment) really drive home the New Testament metaphor of the Church being the Body of Christ in fresh, compelling ways, that make this a powerful apologetic for the Church as the vehicle of witness in faith. It is also quite beautifully written, often dealing with intricate biological subjects but never getting bogged down in jargon; and when making its wider points it does so with a deftness and clarity that makes the book extremely easy reading. I finished it in two [not-even-that]-long sittings.

   The book is split into four sections, though there is initially quite a long preface by Philip Yancey which is excellent reading in itself, mainly reflecting on his friendship with Brand and how the older man was a source of much inspiration to his faith and also just a marvellous human all-round, doing much great research that revolutionized leprosy treatment in the 20th-century.

   The first of the four main parts is about cells. Their central metaphor here is drawing on the imagery the apostle Paul uses (see 1 Corinthians 12, the second half of the chapter) to talk about individual members within the Body that is the Church, and how each needs to perform its duty to the benefit of the whole; cells are the perfect metaphor to carry this forward. Seven bitesize chapters (all the chapters in this book are bitesize, part of what makes it so readable) deal with: the nature of this membership as individual entities; the specialization of those members; the innate diversity of the individuals all working together; the intrinsic worth of each individual member; the total unity of all members as one collective; the duty of service to the whole demanded by the whole of its members; and finally "mutiny" - which in cell terms means cancer (and this chapter uses this metaphorical understanding of the Body of Christ to talk about the hoarding of wealth/food/time in the global context of the Church in a world where there is so much need with such adroitness that it alone is worth reading the book for).

   The next, bones. Metaphorically here Brand and Yancey are talking about the doctrinal elements that support Christianity from its core - the Law, the character of God, and such. Its chapters deal with: the notion of having a frame from which everything else either hangs or is contained; the hardness necessary to deal with knocks and turns of life; the freedom enabled the human body by the marvel that is its skeleton (also this chapter contains a "positive re-spin" of the Ten Commandments that are just brilliant); the essential capacity for growth and healing; the adaptability to new contexts and activities; and finally we get a brilliantly insightful chapter that talks about the dangers of legalism by inversing the metaphor and considering creatures that have exoskeletons.

   The third, skin. In the Christian metaphor this is all about love, as you'll hopefully see is fairly obvious from the brief sketches of each chapter. They talk about skin as: something visible, by which the world recognises our outward form; perceptive and sensitive in relation to its environment and other things and people; compliant in its flexibility and durability; full of an immensity of inner interconnections that transmit information; essential to the physical and emotive experience of embodied love; and lastly capable of confronting threats and protecting innards.

   And finally, the body's capacity for motion. The metaphorical application is somewhat looser here, ranging from reliance on the Holy Spirit to keep us tapped into "the Head" of the Body (that is of course Christ) to the need for the Church to be on its toes in responding to things around it. Chapters: the concert of muscle activity that is movement; the balance between all facets of moving parts; why dysfunction occurs and how it can be remedied; the need for a stable, trusted hierarchy for effective function (this makes the shift from muscles to nerves); the guidance of the whole by the executive operation of the Head (or the brain, depending on what side of the metaphor you're looking through); and the capacity of the whole to be real, meaningful, as a human presence in another's life.

   I would heartily recommend this book to Christian readers as an illuminating work on what it can, or should, or does, look like to be part of the Body of Christ; moreover from that gospel angle it will bring you to an incredible perspective on the magical sack of electric meat that is you, your own actual body. Brand's memories of his medical exploits, in particular those from among the leper communities whom he served so diligently, selflessly and effectively, will leave you breathless. Similarly I would recommend it to non-Christian readers who all think this is a pretty weird metaphor, and Brand and Yancey's brilliant collaboration here will leave you scratching your head in wonderment but substantively better informed about why we use this phrase to talk about the Church - and what a perfect metaphor it actually is.

Sourcery

This book is, it should need no introduction - one of the inimitable Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. And in this one the incompetent wizard Rincewind finds himself caught in a baffling and threateningly-apocalyptic scenario, as a new Sourcerer has turned up at the Unseen University and had turned the whole culture of magic on its head and inside out. It is up to out plucky hero to muddle his way through this without being turned into a piece of bellybutton-fluff or something - which could very easily have happened, given everything else that seems to be going on. I've read a fair few Discworld novels but this is the maddest so far. And if you have half an idea what goes on in a normal one that should shock you. I'm not reading them in order, mind you. But I am trying to read all of them, given enough time, and luck in charity shops. That said, Rincewind is always a brilliantly entertaining protagonist for the comic fuel of Pratchett's imagination, and this instalment in the ongoing exploration of Discworld is no exception: hilarious, mind-boggling, slightly scary, thought-provoking, all at the same time. There are no other authors who can do what Pratchett does. I would say read this, but really just flop open a page of all the Discworld novels that exist and stick your finger down at random and start there, and then repeat until you've read them all. That's more or less what I'm doing, and it seems to be fun enough.

The Cloven

This book is the third and final instalment in Brian Catling's utterly phenomenal series of novels, preceded by The Vorrh and The Erstwhile; and oh man was this trilogy worth sticking with, no matter how bogged down and lost I felt at times wading through its depths.

   Characters collide. Plot threads intertwine. Answers are unwrapped and mysteries implode back into the dark heart of the forest from whence they came. Angels go mad and back again. Humans find themselves thrust up against their closest relatives and hate what they see. War begins to raise its ugly head, and colonialists and locals alike begin to panic, to plan, and in some cases to abandon ship altogether and leave chaos behind. Nothing will be the same again - except the Vorrh itself, though even that will take time to rest and recover. But you, dear reader? You certainly won't be the same again.

   Having finished the trilogy I am now probably about 60-70% certain that I could tell you maybe half of what definitely happened in these books. But I don't care. These are not novels you read for surety, for comfortable solidity or easy solutions to the riddles posed. This is a trilogy that makes you feel like you are wandering through the Vorrh, slowly losing your mind at exactly the same time that your instincts are sharpening and your ancestral memory deepening. To say that this is a well-written trio of magical novels would be like saying that The Godfather series is a well-directed trio of mobster films. I have never read anything like this and I doubt I will again. These books made me laugh maybe once or twice per instalment, brought me to the verge of tears two or three times per instalment, but kept me in a state of suspended anxious confusion and tension for at least three-quarters of the whole length of each. They just don't let up, but they never tread the same ground twice either. I honestly think these may be some of the best fiction I've ever had the privilege of reading for their sheer immersive quality. Read these if you want an itchy mind.

the Last Battle

This book is C. S. Lewis's final instalment in The Chronicles of Narnia - and oh boy, if you were to read back through this month's worth of posts you would see me saying some pretty ungenerous things about this saga. Not undeservedly, I will say. As much love as I have for Lewis as a Christian apologist in my experience so far his fiction is streets behind that of the man who turned him to Christ in the first place.

    Plot-wise it's relatively simple - there's a sneaky ape called Shift who finds the skin of a dead lion and persuades his donkey friend called Puzzle to wear in and pretend to be Aslan so that he can take rulership of Narnia to his own benefit. King Tirian, a descendant of Caspian, tries to clear matters up but soon becomes embroiled in the larger schemes. Eventually Eustace and Jill (from prior books) are summoned and start making more headway in unravelling the conspiracy, eventually even summoning as a bonus Peter, Edmund and Lucy (Susan is not allowed as she apparently doesn't believe in Narnia anymore) to help thwart the plot. Which they do. The actual eponymous "last battle" is extremely short and small-scale, even if it's very important for the story itself - but what makes this book a worthy conclusion to a seven-novel saga is its final three or four chapters. Basically, having achieved everything that that world was meant to, Narnia just ends, under the controlling supervision of Jesus Aslan. As disparaging as I may at times have been of this series throughout these posts I genuinely do think their moral core is incredibly strong and edifying, especially for children readers or listeners, and this final segment is where in my opinion that shines through the strongest - this last bit of the saga where Narnia is being wrapped up back into the fabric of creation is not only the most powerful part of the series but some of the most beautiful allegorical fantasy I've read anywhere. Lewis is very clearly trying to communicate some of the boundless hope found in Christian concepts of the transition between the dying creation of post-Fall Earth and new-Built Heaven - and it shows, in glorious imagery and a resoundingly satisfying conclusion to the whole series of seven novels.

    So, as I said in my post about the first of these, and as I do for all sequences of posts about series of books rather than singulars, I have been reserving my overall reflections until this last one.* Thankfully that doesn't mean I have to spew out an absurdly long thing here as my totality of thought looking back on the Chronicles of Narnia are pretty simple. I could even do it in a mere four point-paragraphs. Here goes:

1. Clive Staples Lewis is a far better non-fiction writer than he is fiction. I mean, I haven't read all his fiction, but I haven't read all his non-fiction either, but on balance I think this is a fair assessment of just how the communicative parts of his brain work best. Though that said, The Screwtape Letters is technically fiction and is my favourite thing of his that I've read to date... so... don't take me seriously.
2. All of these characters are pretty dull. Their flaws are obvious and superficial if they exist at all, their approach to problems is pragmatically plot-development-oriented, and they all have they same manner of dialogue. All except Jesus Aslan, of course, but he's a special case.
3. Speaking of Jesus Aslan, it bears to mention that fellow Inkling Tolkien was not a fan of the Narnia series because, among other given reasons, he thought its religious allegory was too on-the-nose. And he was right. But then the two authors had different purposes; J.R.R. was seeking to create an agelessly original yet academically-legitimate mythology for the English peoples, while C. S. just wanted to make children excited about discipleship in a new, engaging way. Different strokes, innit? (see image below)
4. Overall recommendation: I think I would have enjoyed this series far more if I'd been at all familiar with it as a child. Obviously I saw the movies as the were coming out in the early 2000's, but though my parents read the whole series to most of my siblings they never did with me - I was already in too deep with my own literary taste, I suppose. But that said I do think that Christian allegory or not this is a very rich and entertaining series of fantasy novels, that even despite its evangelical bent is by no means proselytizing literature and can be enjoyed on its own merits as fantastical story, with relatable (if arguably a bit predictable) protagonists and a lot of thematic & plot developments that can be on their own terms pretty thought-provoking to a young mind.

So yeh, overall, I don't think this seven-novel series quite deserves the hype it seems to have of being in the same ilk as Tolkien and Le Guin for the best fantasy series of the 20th century, but it has a lot going for it and I can easily imagine younger readers absolutely eating this up. Go for it.

* One additional thing I will say - the editions I were reading was a box-set of seven separate volumes as opposed to the single volume linked in these posts, but I couldn't find it in online booksellers. I don't know about the linked version but mine had copies of all the original black-and-white illustrations from the first-published novels - and while I appreciate their inclusion I can't say that they were of a notable quality and their addition didn't really do much for me.