You Can Change

This book by Tim Chester (available as a free digibook from that link) is one I'd read once before as a confused fifteen-year-old struggling to properly engage with or enjoy life as a Christian, which in fairness continued to broadly define my habitual over-intellectualized theological education masquerading as a genuine spiritual life until relatively recently, or arguably is ongoing and will only be peeled back layer-by-layer of exactly the same basic lessons and then attempting, failing, againing, to put them into practice... It's a book about sin, redemption, hope, and has an incredibly challenging but helpful focus on observable patterns of behaviour as well as emphasising trying to listen to and respond with abundance of truth-reminders to our own thoughts and feelings. Having re-read it, personally I think it may be one of the most potent, emotionally and psychologically realistic, sinners'-life-affirming yet wholly-holiness-concerned Christian books I've read; and it is thoroughly and delightfully biblical. Anyone, pretty much, struggling with anything, I would recommend read this, as it takes you through a rigorous but generous questioning discernment process that unavoidably leads to practical considerations and may well spark the renewals in feeling, thinking, doing or being that you perhaps are held back from living life in fullness and joy by. This book is hard-hitting but sensitive, honest, and fundamentally rooted in the grace of a good & glorious God.

A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind

This book by Shoukei Matsumoto was as disappointingly materialistic as it was wishy-washily platitudinous. I'm not sure what I was expecting from a book with a title like this, but it pretty much is just comprised of a list of possible chores and household maintenance tasks appendaged with cloying and repetitive discussions of how these particular tasks, performed with attentive deliberation, mindfully and carefully, can (enormous surprise) help the cleaner develop meditative states and attitudes. This is not something that anyone who's ever done a thorough spring clean needs explaining - I was hoping that this book would shed some deeper insight into Zen Buddhist philosophies around material objects and stewarding them well, perhaps also cultural or psychological nuggets of interestingness as to how one may approach these tasks in such a way as to bring about such states; at the very least partial repressedly-angry tirade against Western society's lazy-affluent carpet-hoovering torpor. But no! Aside from the pleasant regular illustrations and the occasional spots of discussion which do actually acknowledge the global historical contexts of the advice contained herein (many of these are couched in sections included apparently to sole aims of explicating a certain item of Japanese home cleaning-ware), I'm sad to say it's hard to describe this book as anything more or less than a list of domestic to-maybe-do's padded out with samey almost-ironic-in-their-extremity-of-sincere-mundane-devotion* broad generalisations associating housework with purity, love, life, enlightenment, and all that jazz. I'll finish with a selected quote to show you what I mean: "Dishes must be carefully held in both hands. Holding things in this way displays a sense of natural sophistication and shows that you take care of each and every thing you hold." So, there probably are some people who would enjoy this book, but for me, in a cruel twist of fate it has become one of the few of my acquisitions to have been updated in its material-possession status - to clutter.

* Is that maybe just what Zen Buddhism is like? And if so, is this whole post xenophobic?**

** Maybe it wasn't until I asked this in an asterisk!? Oh dear, what a minefield.

Making Disciples in Messy Church

This book by Paul Moore is an excellently concise, accessible, affirming, practical, and thoroughly biblical discussion of how Messy Churches are meeting people at different points on their journeys of exploring, discovering, and developing faith. It's bookended by a helpfully balanced consideration of what discipleship is (which lemme tell you, as a member of a team who've been trying to define this while we've been studying Messy Church, is not easy), how this can be maintained through Christian community, sustained and encouraged at homes, and made workable in ways inclusive of all various ages, with solid pepperings of example practices, activities and so on to give messy discipleship roots in the hearts of attenders. The intervening chapters dive deeper in scripture to look at what discipleship, or following God's plan, looks like in the Old and New Testaments; and while by no means deviating from being anything less than a brilliant layperson's resource in terms of non-jargonfulness, there is a great richness of theological weight in these and often consideredly related to the on-the-ground realities of running Messy Churches. A great little book, both for those involved with Messy Church who want to think through how to make it churchier without changing its nature, and for those maybe sceptical of Messy Churches as being viable vehicles of Spirit-led growth and renewal. There will be learning points for anyone in church leadership here.

Confabulations

This book, by the brilliant John Berger (who, as one of the blurb-comments here attests, handles thoughts the way an artist handles paints), is composed of a series of short not-quite-essays more-than-reflective-passages poetic prosaic perfectly constructed  - now, how to describe these? assemblages of words and punctuation, interspersed with occasional images, designed to gently peel back onionskin layers of everyday taken-for-granted real and normal and prod through the porous membranes of pond-rippled personal and collective memories to feel the conceptual textures by which these just-about-communicable nuggets of human experience become slanted or skewed as they disperse in social and cultural forms most varied and beautiful and mysterious. Their topics range from Rosa Luxemburg and songbirds to orphan mentality and Charlie Chaplin to eels, clouds, and many many many things far too importantly deep-and-wide that single words particular to the expressed label of them simply do not exist, and these things can (insofar as language or art can grasp them at all) only be seen in peripheral vision, only be known by intuition, only be heard with imagination; if this all just sounds like guff, it's because this is a far easier book to read than it is to explain what it's about, as Berger's pages echo with profundity and clarity of intellectual heart as they take us to confront some urgent and essential basic, yet utterly mysterious, truths.

Notes on 'Camp'

This book is a Penguin Modern re-publication of two essays by Susan Sontag, the titular Notes on 'Camp' and One Culture and the New Sensibility; both are densely thought-provoking but quite readable and very short (I read both in one go while babysitting for my younger brothers). It's difficult to summarise what she's talking about without being grossly reductive: both are very broad and deep essays, and though their main focus is the nature of consumed creative-cultural content, the ways in which this has notably changed through history is discussed with a deftness and nuance that is hugely enriching given the wealth of social, political, economic, technological and psychological trends and concepts which she brings to bear on this infuriatingly intangibly unanswerable question - that of, what is art for? And therefore what constitutes good taste?

   'Camp' may be rudely described as that which is 'so bad it's good', but only raises more questions about what good meant in the first place, and therefore how something might be perceived as bad, and ways in which ironic or detached (yet still wholehearted, more-or-less) enjoyment of such a bad thing might make it be perceived as a sort-of-good thing, but when others then try to emulate what makes these bad/(good?) things bad/(good?) it either comes across as pretentious or it lowers the bar. Either way, for all the surgical meditations on the user's aesthetic experience which Sontag lays out here, the questions underpinning both essays are far from settled philosophically - and given the rapidity with which culture and our technological means of consuming or engaging with it continue to change,* I'm not sure there is much more than a few grains of truth about these painfully convoluted realms of intersubjectivity to be found throughout this essay. That's not to say it isn't a thoroughly interesting springboard into the basic outlines of these as things to think about though.

   Anyway, the second essay is much more objective - instead of trying to lay out clear guidelines for what constitutes 'camp' taste, she here explores the shifting role that art plays in affluent post-industrial societies with mass communication technology. The brute accessibility of pretty much everything has broken down the barriers between 'high' and 'low' culture, argues Sontag, leading to a frenzy of experimentation with forms and media that see art increasingly calling itself into question through its very self, in a combination of content, style, and context; things are no longer created as timeless artifacts for the proven taste of aristocratic norm-wranglers, but are fluid, self-aware, daring - in ways which mirror the development of science as a continual force progressing by learning from and building upon itself, so art is increasingly created not only as singular entities but as ongoing collective ruminations on meaning, ever being deconstructed and reconstructed afresh for new audiences or in response to new events or to take opportunity of a new means of creating a particular thing...

   I will end here, as this is a topic I could probably spool on about almost indefinitely, and at the very least I don't want to write a post longer than the book it's about.

* An amusing testament to this is that most of the pop-culture references she makes, being from the early sixties at the latest, went straight over my head. Which, in fairness, is likely part of why I didn't find her range of points as comprehensively convincing as I might have.

Being Messy, Being Church

This book, edited by Ian Paul, is a collection of essays exploring Messy Church, and was another of the books I've finished as part of ongoing reflective reading in my job at Church Army's research team. My personal reflections on it all tie in strongly with other reading about church and discipleship and stuff so if you're interested have a peruse of other posts - I've also been condensing my applied reflections from each chapter into note forms which are all in my desk at work, and I'm writing this at home (weirdly, I've not yet asked if they'd mind me taking an hour or so every time I finish reading something at work to then write a blog post about, so) - thus this post will, in thorough contravention of its title and themes, be straightforward, simplistic, neat, and will not invite collaboration or participation from or with any of my other thoughts on any other books. In fact, it barely constitutes more than a copy of the contents of the Contents page.

• A foreword by Lucy Moore (who founded the Messy Church [MC] movement).
• An introduction by Ian Paul about the ongoing vitality of the MC vision.
• Karen Rooms on MC in different contexts.
• Isabelle Hamley on teamwork and developing team members' faith in MC.
• Greg Ross on common challenges and pitfalls to MCs.
• Jean Pienaar on making sacred spaces in MC.
• Philip North on MCs and the sacraments.
• Sabrina Muller on MCs' appropriacy for the postmodern world.
• Mark Rylands on the conversation between MCs and 'traditional' Sunday churches.
• Judyth Roberts on MCs' playfulness.
• Irene Smale on the pastoral implications in a MC.
• Tim Sanderson on evangelism in MCs.
• Stephen Kuhrt on the challenge on discipleship in MCs.
• Tim Dakin on missional structures for missional outcomes (applied to MCs).

   To close this dishearteningly* boiler-plate post, I will add that despite the lack of depth with which I have discussed them here, these essays are deeply insightful and thought-provoking, and I would hold this book up in recommendation for anyone involved in church leadership or organisation - especially churches that look a bit like, or that you feel God is telling you could or maybe should look more like, Messy Churches.

* At least, I dare to presume that someone might have found it so, if they happen to both (or either) be a follower of this blog or an enthusiast for Messy ecclesiology/missiology in pursuit of online resources to find out more about these - well for one, I'm hazarding on the assumption that these two circles maybe don't overlap much (especially given that the first, if the people in it are real at all, is tiny) and maybe the secondary assumption that if there is such an overlap then whoever's in it probably wouldn't be that disheartened if I flappingly apologised for the uselessness of this post knowing full well that it isn't useless properly if it points them toward a relevant book.

Poetry, Conspiracy and Radicalism in Sheffield

This book, edited by Hamish Mathison and Adam James Smith, well - I spied it in a lefty bookstall in the Winter Gardens and knew from the title* that it was a book I needed to read. It's a collection of poems printed in the Sheffield Register, a more-or-less radical (in that it espouses basic civil equalities and liberties) paper that was hush-forced out of existence in the late 18th-century.**

   There are ten poems, mostly published anonymously or under pseudonyms: they deal with matters ranging from slavery and the (still quite young in 1793) British abolitionist movement, income inequality and the corrupting power of wealth, the futility of patriotism in a country fighting a war which made no sense to the common people, the fundamental necessity of individual freedom to think for oneself, and such things. The poems vary a great deal (considering they're all from the same city in the same couple of years during the early onset of the Romantic period, that is) in style and tone, with some being borderline polemical and others veering playfully into ironising or picking up metaphors and running off into the horizons with them; also, each poem is discussed in a short reflective essay later in the book, placing its content and themes into social and historical context so as to better explore their potentcies and intents. There is also a longer essay about Joseph Gales (who founded the Register) and his apprentice who was also an influential poet James Montgomery (who later also founded the Iris), their work and its impact on the artistic side of things but also how meaningful it was for the establishment of publicly-available socially-conscious information in the form of non-conservative newspapers; Sheffield has a deep and strong history of progressive grassroots movements and the work which the contents of this book barely scratch the surface of has a significant place in the history of my city's development of such a community tendency. Finally, there are contained in appendices a handful of readers' letter to the Register, as well as another two poems, and some speech extracts and editorials by Joseph Gales and James Montgomery both.

   Excellent little book.

   By means of explicating my personal reflections on this book, see the asterisky bit, and note that I have since finishing it not only found myself experimenting with writing poems that actually rhyme, I've even [self-censored in case any deep-state intelligence agencies are surveilling this blog to find out what I, a known rampant (if relatively eloquent, and, some would even venture as far as to say, well-informed) anarchist, am up to on the whole subversive collective action front]. Just joking. I'm going to a fracking site next Friday but I was doing that anyway before I read this book and it's hardly my first encounter with that kind of thing. I have however written a poem about fracking in a similar style to one of the poems in this book, which I will not hesitate to whip out into action should I manage to trap one of the rig-site staff in conversation. That's how you get to them, you know.

* Poetry is my craft, radicalism is more-or-less my politics, Sheffield is my home, and who doesn't love the excitement of a good conspiracy from time to time?

   I'm properly just on a hype for the intersections of these things at the moment anyway - there's an exhibition in Weston Park Museum about Sheffield's over-200-year history of radical collective action movements, and another in the Millennium Galleries about the power of art and activism drawing on and enriching each other. I'd feel spoilt - if I enjoyed it for its own sake only, but such delightful overlaps remind me of the call to action that creativity is; art which is not perceived with moral-political consciousness becomes mere production/consumption rather than the gorgeous messy explosive collaborative dialogue about what is true and beautiful and good and what this means for us; art which is perceived with moral-political consciousness, even if it wasn't necessarily created with the same, gains the capacity for inspiration beyond abstractified*** arguments about detectable stylistic influences or liable auction values - inspiration for concrete acts of moral-political creativity, which of course take place in the grandest medium of all, human society.

** Fortunately a more tentative (but with just as much emancipatory intentionality in its long-term sociocultural subversiveness) paper, the Sheffield Iris, replaced it.

*** Is this a synonym for bourgeois? Not sure I'd stretch that far, but maybe.

Tim the Tiny Horse at Large

This book, by none other than esteemed comedian Harry Hill, isn't that funny or good. I'm literally at a loose end trying to work out who it's for. It's not accessible enough to be a kids' book, it's not subversive or compelling enough to be a jokey adults' book, and it's not edgy enough in either direction to be some kind of Young Adult genre-blender... here Hill seems to have told a story that is, while vaguely entertaining in general, has very little of substance to offer any particular audience, and I'm struggling to think of any means by which it genuinely endeared itself to me - I mean, I did laugh, or at least chuckle, once or twice,* but more out of the total non-sequitur of its whole devising** than purebred wit or characterful comedy. Ah well.


* For my money the best bit in the whole book is the chorus of the lullaby Tim sings to a maggot he's babysitting: "Oh where are your parents? / They can't be that much longer! / It's doing my head in / I'm never having children / If it's like this"

** Tim is a horse roughly the size of a bee, or perhaps a small mint. His best friend is a fly, called Fly, and he later acquires a pet greenfly called George.

the Screwtape Letters

This book by Clive Staples Lewis is an indisputable classic of modern popular theology. It's comprised of a series of thirty-one letters* written from Screwtape to his nephew, named Wormwood - both being eternally employed in the demonic art of tempting humans into sinful states (seemingly an industrial effort concerned with harvesting souls for tortuous consumption by those same demons).

   All these letters comprise advice and criticism on Wormwood's work (he being a junior tempter) on the life a particular English everyman during the Second World War - Screwtape's advice, being the intentions of an efficient devil, reads with a topsy-turviness that is consistently disorienting yet refreshing in its clarity of perspective on human nature and weakness; it is as clever a book as it is simple, as funny as serious, and even through the backwardsness of this choice of voice Lewis's insight into spiritual-moral efforts in people's lives rings loud, warmly darkly and sharply challenging to the reader as the letter's contents penetrate so incisively the contours of the general conscience.

   I cannot recommend this book enough.** For Christian readers it will be an entertaining, humblingly realistic and intellectually playful reflection on the life of a disciple; for those of other faiths (or none) its meditations on the subtleties of influence and growth in personal harmony will still probably to a considerable degree still ring true, exposing the absurdities and dangers of leaving ourselves on auto-pilot.

* Plus final text of a speech Screwtape makes to a dinner party audience of fellow senior tempters; an elaborate toast to the capacities of human tendencies to make their work so much easier than it could be.

** Quite literally, it seems.
   This is the third time I've read this book (previously when aged fifteen and nineteen) but the fourth copy of it I've owned - it's one of those which I recommend with such enthusiasm, and which other people have heard is worth reading so much, that they keep getting lended and forgottenly kept. Fortunately copies are commonly attainable from the second-hand section of Christian bookshops for £2 or less, which makes this process of occasional informal spiritual resource dissemination actually pretty viable on the whole.

Holistic Learning

This ebook by Scott H. Young (available for free online through that link) is very short, very readable, and offers a simple and potent introduction to some of the principles of, as it says on the tin, holistic learning. This is basically a whole approach to education which forms frameworks of understanding with a fundamental expectation that things within these frameworks, and even the frameworks themselves, will be interconnected, once you find out enough about them or the objects of their understanding. This is radically at odds with the conventional model of modernistic education, which breaks the world down into fields which one has to specialise in further and further until you can genuinely struggle to find ways in which people who effectively study the same thing from different perspectives can find common ground upon which to discuss the things they both study, because breaking fields down and compartmentalising information and understanding is not conducive to cross-pollination - which means you have to sort of decide to become a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none before you can start linking things into some kind of bigger picture. It's challenging, and frankly given the sociocultural and political-economic order currently prevalent I don't see the models of education (which are deeply reductive; subjects become mere information for the sake of specialised career paths, and I don't see genuine self-driven collaborative free-thinking learning stuff pushed very far in most educational institutions today*) changing much very soon. But hey, big picture, things are changing all the time, particularly quickly and unpredictable at the moment, so never say never. I'd strongly recommend looking through this book if you want some genuinely helpful tips that will help you cultivate an approach to learning which will help you do it naturally and organically all your life; maybe like me you're lucky enough to already have that kind of approach to learning, maybe you know it's within your potential but schools and college and whatnot never unlocked your capacities for curiousity to enough of an extent for you to really get into the swing of it. But it's never too late! Well, unless you're in some kind of vegetative state, in which case good on you for managing to read this blog - and watch out for bedsores.

* The Philosophy and Politics Departments at the University of Sheffield (where I undertook half** my undergraduacy and a part-time Masters in Global Political Economy) being thankfully something of an exception.

** The other half being economics, to which the above critique was entirely fair.

the Rest of God

This book by Mark Buchanan is a deeply encouraging, highly insightful exploration of what we mean when we talk about 'Sabbath' - how in the scriptures it is of great significance in people's maintenance of their relationship with God, and therefore care of one's own soul. Personally I found it a challenging and simultaneously wonderfully encouraging book - as I think in myself I've recently got far too used to the notion of Sundaily churchgoing as just a thing, part of routine, and it all blends into normality a bit too much, and perhaps this is even happening in the culture of the wider church around me as I often find myself on these such Sundays concerned more with rota'd responsibilities than with throwing myself in awe at the feet of the sovereign God of the universe... who made the Sabbath, and also us, who defiled it. Stark. Every chapter has a thematic focus that would warrant a whole post in itself to unpack as there's so much richness to the joy and truth of what Sabbath is and means that I'm not even going to bother trying to list the themes,* you can have a scroll through the contents page on the Amazon preview if you really want but if reading liberating words about the reality of God's plans for human rest and flourish sounds like your kind of jam probably just read the whole book. It's that good. Probably one of the main Christian books I've read this year I'd recommend to all Christian readers, and even to non-believers - who may not get behind much of the theology but there is an abundant wellspring of wisdom here that can be applied to work and play and rules and reflections and so much in between - it's really good. Mark writes with everyday relatability, and it often feels more like reading the blogpost of a friend than an actual book of theology, as the humility and wisdom with which ideas are presented involves you in his journey of just resting with God - it never seems dry or essay-like. Also, every chapter is appended by a liturgical passage that helps process the learning points of the main text in ways that help bring it beyond academic ideas and deeper into worship, praise and rejoicing in the good ways of the Lord of the Sabbath - what more could you want?



* Okay, one chunk of insight affected me so much that I'll have to share it here - there are two distinct Greek words used for time in the New Testament texts. Chronos is the linear sort of time which has to be measured, rationed, managed carefully with the knowledge that it is a scarce resource that once lost cannot be regained. Kairos on the other hand is the gift-opportunity kind of time - to be inhabited, enjoyed; surely of course recognizing it is only for a season, but with a depth of purpose that fills and redeems the time spent. Mark drops this early on in the book and draws on the contrasting natures of time recurrently throughout, and for someone who'd never heard of this subtle-yet-poignant distinction, it was a mindblowing exhortation to both look at ways of better managing my own chronos while better living in kairos - as they're the same time, really, aren't they?

Total Church

This book by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis was one I've been meaning to read for years while somehow simultaneously feeling like doing so would be largely redundant, as its two authors were the founding elders of the church I grew up in, and therefore its theology had already broadly been thoroughly absorbed by my adolescent self in the form of a life's worth of sermons, pastoral care & conversation, and even hymns (written by Tim).
   Glad to say - reading it was a highly rewarding experience even if not particularly insightful in the sense of exposing me to new forms of presentation or argument about what the gospel is and how it does, or should, work - the premise is simple: if churches are intentional communities centred around the gospel, then that gospel is manifest in both the content (words of truth around which those church communities are unified) and the mission (actions & life-patterns within this community springing from those truths, which are to be shared in the wider world and affect every element of life). According to the blurb comments, this book was apparently considered 'provocative' when it came out - but reading it over a decade down the road it's a wonderful testament to the robustness of post-Christendom evangelical missiology that it basically echoes (or rather pre-echoes) mostly the same kind of ground that I would consider hegemonic in the field, albeit without becoming academic or wishy-washily impractical (as some texts can, maybe, be criticized of doing). The book itself is extremely readable, and draws helpfully on both biblical underpinnings to their ideas and experiential examples of things working out in contemporary efforts. After an introductory pair of chapters exploring what 'gospel' and 'community' mean in this context and the particular challenges of pursuing the fullest overlap of the two (which is what a church, in the total sense, is meant to be), Tim and Steve then apply this robustly simple framework to various areas of Christian living - including evangelism, social involvement, church planting and world mission, discipleship and training, pastoral care, spirituality, theology and apologetics, children and young people, and how we conceptualize success.
   There could be much more to unpack from the ideas presented in this book - but since this is not presented as a manifesto, rather an ascertainment of the way church already is (or at least is meant to be), the parameters discussed in here may be flexible enough to be readily applied to anything not covered here. Overall I think most Christian readers would find helpful food for thought in here, in terms of approaches to missional living and community particularly, and would recommend this book to believers looking for workable roadmaps to keep their witness relevant while rooted together in the gospel.

Mostly Harmless

This book by Douglas Adams is the fifth and final instalment of his cult classic trilogy,* and before I dive into discussion I'd like to gently warn any readers that unlike the four posts about his previous four novels in this series, this post WILL CONTAIN THOROUGH SPOILERS for the WHOLE SERIES, because without giving some context for the characters and events portrayed in the books I won't be able to meaningfully reflect on their themes or any implications I may have decided to draw from them in a way hopefully efficacious in communicability to the readers of this blog - unless those readers have also already read this whole series, and are just reading this for the same reason I'm writing it,*** in which case I can only congratulate you for your evidently excellent taste in both sci-fi-comedy novels and weird niche blogs.

   I should also probably gently warn you that I love this series; this reading was my fourth time working through the whole collection of five (previously aged nine, fourteen and seventeen) and even between those occasions there have been many a quiet in-between-other-books moment where I've sauntered casually back into their pages to revisit certain poigant/funny/both/all three bits. I've also seen the film adaptation by Garth Jennings multiple times (having viewed it in the cinema as a kid, and it was one of my first ever DVD purchases), watched the old TV series (which is alright I guess) and used to listen to tape compilations of the original radio series in bed as a kid - all of which probably shed some light on the deep almost-obsessive relationship I have had with this series and, as you may gather from either knowing the series already or from what you're about to read in the following reflections (combined with the bizarre aggregation of events comprising the books as hintingly described in previous posts), its impact on my cultural tastes and philosophical sensibilities cannot be understated, in a developmental sense. Therefore I am quite apprehensive about having to try to describe and reflect upon them in such a way as this post; much like when I tried to do a systematic analysis of Salinger - and I've reached the laziest-way-of-remaining-constructive attitude of just going for it in what is already perhaps-too-strongly a stream-of-consciousness gonzo style.
   If you're going to read this whole thing, you may want to make sure you know where your towel is first. But worry not - we'll get there, you zarking froods.

   First though - key/amusing events of fifth book. Arthur - whisked away from his happy life back on Earth with Fenchurch; is hopping from planet to planet looking for anywhere he may call home which reminds him of his actual one. He finally settles in a cushy job as the sandwich-maker for a primitive but endearing tribe of people, only for Trillian to turn up to drop off their daughter - Random - whom Arthur hadn't known existed. Meanwhile, Ford has been investigating the Hitchhiker's Guide offices, where strange plots seem to be afoot, including the Vogons; a significant element of this is the realisation that to save money, the Guide is no longer actually producing the book for which it is famous, instead saving an inordinate amount of money by now just producing one single 'book' in the form of a multidimensional quasi-omniscient bird-robot thing. In any case, Ford, as well as this bird, wind up with Arthur - where he, Ford, and Random then hop through dimensions on voyages apparently determined by the bird; during this they see Elvis Presley in a bar somewhere - but I digress; and do eventually find their way back to Earth, only to quite outrageously improbably end up in a club with a name that Arthur recognises as being the place where his nemesis [see] foreshadowed that Arthur would have to encounter & kill him at before our hero Dent could, himself, die - which, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, he then does, just in time for Earth to be destroyed [again] by the Vogons, who by this point are really rather sick of all the multidimensional fuckeries getting in the way of their destruction of this silly old planet for the construction of the hyperspace bypass.

   Okay.
   Now for the dense bit.****
   The core themes of the series I'm going to divide into five chunks - appropriate, no?
   These are:

1. The human comfort zone*****
2. Meaningful perspective, and the tendencies of [1] to impinge on the attainment thereof
3. The constant froth & business of our universe, which ambiguously effects [1] & [2] as well as making life by-and-large generally rather unpredictable & stressful
4. Innate metaphysical & phenomenological tendencies within [1] & [2] mean that even when beings, natural or supernatural, are to whatever extent able to find or bestow upon others any kind of satisfactory resolution to [2], experiential limiting factors tend to render such meaningfulness either impotent or transitory
5. Reflective conclusions that given all this, the best we can do is not think about it all too much & just get on with life as best we can

   Sheesh. I'm regretting this already.

   Here we go:

ONE

   This is the driving force of Arthur Dent's character - and while the inciting event of the first book, the wholesale destruction of first his actual house and then his entire planet, are obviously quite extreme versions of the threat to this - his desire to rediscover some semblance of generic human comfort is what keeps him hopping across time and space as he does throughout the series, but for his brief respite in the fourth book. It's also a root to the developmental arc - expressed primarily through his relationship with Trillian; his initial attraction to her in the pre-first-book bit stemming I think from an allurement to her sense of adventure, which as we all know was too much for him to match up with, and she ended up going off across the galaxy with Zaphod while he went home alone from that fateful Islington party. The nature of the pair's budding romance is hindered by Trillian's blunt fact of just coping better with interstellar life, and though Arthur does grow across the series in this regard, he still never quite gets much of a handle on how to navigate all this mess with much aplomb, hence the meta-fuckup with Fenchurch [with whom the almost-normal re-settling in the fourth book is as close to Arthur gets in the whole series - but it was not to last; we'll return to Fennie later on] and the literally 'Random' [good subtext-disguising there Douglas] daughter stemming from the series' main human romance - since the other factors thematically at play here render the pursuit of [1] and [1] alone totally unviable, if not for us in real life, then certainly for the characters in these stories.

   Humans though do generally live with this as their chief pursuit - a fact I'm not confident enough to go as far as to say Adams himself disapproved of necessarily, but certainly one he saw the drawbacks to, hence the low regard more intelligent races tend to hold humanity in - namely, dolphins and mice.

TWO

   Given that life, what with the universe and everything, can make the maintenance of a properly-comforting comfort zone somewhat difficult, it is an innate tendency among the intelligent species to seek deeper meanings, or proper perspectives. This is always best as something sought rather than thrust upon you - as the Total Perspective Vortex to which Zaphod is submitted in the third book is literally a high-degree punishment - but even the cleverest of advanced races do tend to seemingly consistently only get so far before then lapsing back into the baser pursuits of [1]: even by the End of the Universe itself, all the richest and most successful of the cosmos's inhabitants don't seem to have anything better to do than go to a restaurant to watch the firework display of The End... these dalliances with outrageous excessive luxury also lie precedent to the planet-construction business of Magrathea, where the wealthiest citizens of the universe could order custom-built worlds to their exact specifications - if nothing else this is a superlative caricature of [1] taken to its maddest extremes. And one is left wondering if there weren't something perhaps more meaningful they could have been doing with their efforts?

   But of course, there is - and the pursuit of meaningfulness in perspective is still very much sought by the hyperintelligent beings otherwise known as mice, as they commission the Magratheans to build a computer to answer these kinds of questions - namely, The Question, that ultimate bottomless 'why' of life, the universe, and everything - and the computer they built, Deep Thought, does in fact come up with an answer, but then necessitates the secondary building of an even more complex computer - so vastly intricate that even life itself would be part of the meta-calculatory mechanisms - in order to work out The Question to which the answer was of course forty-two, and this computer was, of course, Earth.

THREE

   But the universe is a strange, and busy place - neither basic comfort zones nor quests for any kind of meaningful perspective can expect to persist long entirely unhindered by all of the cosmic traffic flowing unceasingly left and right and back and forth and through whatever prepositions are most appropriate to use of journeys in hyperspace. A poignant embodiment of this fact is Agrajag - the being who self-styles as Arthur Dent's nemesis, on the really quite reasonable, if imponderously improbable, grounds that every time Agrajag lives a life, Arthur Dent kills it, only for it to be born and reincarnated in myriad forms to once again meet its death at Arthur's hand, slippers, fishing rods, or sheer happenstance proximity. Things do just kind of happen and we won't always know why, and to expect a kind of cosmic fairness to be naturally emergent from all this doesn't hold much water in the grand scheme of things. Another example I'll give for this is the planet of Krikkit - its inhabitants being a race so warlike, so mindlessly destructive, that its surrounding powers had to construct for it a concealment lock to keep the world completely separate from the rest of the universe; and without wanting to delve deep enough that I'll need to try to explain the entire plot of the third book, neither this scheme nor the planet's inhabitants was, in the sense of cosmic justice, entirely cricket. It's an exceptional series of dense subtextual points made in a kind of stupid pun, which is entirely forgiveable when you layer in the consideration that it also leverages a weird but effective & unique angle on talking about all of this in relation to English culture. But I won't get into that here.

   So this particular thematic chunk obviously routinely upsets [1] and adds all kinds of odd complications to [2]; though there are a couple of these latter type woven into the series that I'll discuss a bit more fully. The computer designed by Deep Thought to work out The Question, which later came to be named by its inhabitant-components "Earth", seemed to be doing its job more or less fine as far as anyone could tell until the second book. Here it is revealed that during the prehistoric periods of Earth's operations, a spaceship full of the most useless middle-class off-scrape of a race biologically very similar to humans called the Golgafrinchans crashed on Earth, and it is heavily implied that by weight of numbers, superior technology, and generic idiocy, these people pretty much wiped out the cave-dwelling actual humans who had been part of the planet's calculation system - though the further questions as to whether interbreeding or some other systemic operational factor may have rendered the Golgafrinchans' offspring as being the new Earthlings and so having the developmental capacities necessary for continuing the working out of The Question - alas, Douglas doesn't tell us these things. What we do know though is that even if they had, and I think there's good reason to suspect this [see notes on Fenchurch below] - it would have all come to naught anyway, as the Vogons then destroyed the Earth; in the first book and again in the fifth. An interesting aspect of the Vogons' part in all the mess of the universe is also worth touching on, as they aren't necessarily what one would call evil - they're very much just unimaginative bureaucrats doing their jobs. Which isn't to say that one couldn't consider them evil - I think they largely are, but not like they're bloodthirsty destructors of the typical trope - it just opens an interesting meta-ethical door here.

FOUR

   This one is partially emergent from [2] but also features a number of metaphysical and cosmic points that I think are more just reflective of Douglas Adams's humanistic agnostic worldview generally. We'll start with the paradox of advancement - that as beings get to be more technically and whatnot 'developed' it doesn't necessarily have anything like any kind of meaningful concurrent 'advancement' in those beings' general levels of contentment as is the root of [1]. One place where this is brilliantly comedically sketched is in the bit-part character Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged - a being who, through a ridiculous and irreplicable mishap, found himself immortal, and promptly got extremely, horrendously bored of it all, eventually making it his mission to fly around the whole entire universe personally insulting each and every other living being, for no other reasons than that he can, and it seemed to him a worthwhile endeavour - one which nobody else would have the time to commit to. Another is of course Marvin; the manically-depressed robot who is one of the series' main characters. While we're never given a huge amount of insight into the extent to which [2] or for that matter [1] are salient elements in Marvin's life, it is, he makes abundantly clear throughout, a matter of fact that his immense cognitive capacity does nothing to alleviate the crushing sense of depression he lives with; and while you'd do well to point out that this is an innate feature of his Genuine People Personality programming by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, it does also seem throughout that at points that the possible apprehensions of a rational holistic explanation for why the universe was in actuality all okay would have been a balm to his cybernetic mind; but we will come back to this in a moment.

   'Deeper' meaning or insight is sought by most of the characters throughout the series, in a range of forms and places, and to a variety of successes. An interesting and thoroughly amusing exploration of the nature of spiritual questing can be [it may or may not be there intentionally to this point, but it's certainly there if you wish to smell it as thus] sub-read into Arthur's encounters with oracles in the fifth book - he goes wanting easy answers or a handy hint at where he might at least start looking for them, and comes away having only been bamboozled by nonsense, impossibilities, and overpowering bad stinks. Adams was, as I mentioned, an agnostic - and while religion/God and the skewering of thus is dealt with by the Guide itself in excellently flippant but not entirely irreverent manners [ed. I say not entirely because it posits its points on the grounds of both comedy and generic experiential logic, and given the absolute borderline-irrelevant mess that English Christianity looked like - especially from the outside - in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I think it's entirely reasonable to take his points as a jocular but sincere critique of Christendom at face value, which of course, to the shock of absolutely nobody, the Church of England hasn't: in much the same manner as Monty Python's critiques] - the only times we really see religious figures do much in the series are still pretty interesting, but do little to deeply or seriously aid the [2] problem. The first of these is when the prophet Zarquon - a pretty obvious sci-fi analogue of Jesus/Mohammed/Zarathustra/etc - shows up at the Restaurant just before the universe is about to end, only to be interrupted before he can divulge his final revelations, by the context itself. The second is a phrase inscribed in thirty-foot high fiery letters on the Quentulus Quazgar mountains - purportedly God's final message to creation: it just says "WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE" - which in absolute cosmic terms is obviously a joke, but in the context of the plot it does seem to be some consolation to Marvin, who dies at peace shortly after having it read out to him.

   Okay, and one last bit - Fenchurch; and here we'll be going back to the whole of Earth's original programming for the finding of The Question - on the very first page of the first book, we're told that "a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." While I'm not confident we're ever told this explicitly, I think Douglas leaves enough breadcrumbs throughout the series that we can infer that A. this girl was Fenchurch and B. this realisation was her cognizance of the ultimate Question, or at least something close to its developmental approximation. In bleak reality however - Douglas Adams did not know The Question, or if he did he didn't include it in anything he wrote; and got around this contrivance for plot purposes by the space-time wobblange that happens somewhere between the first and fourth books, as by the time Arthur meets Fenchurch, we are told that some time ago she had a profound realisation - as well as noticing that the Earth was destroyed - but whenever things then got rebooted she had forgotten the realized truth-bomb that prompted it, and is now only slowly recovering psychologically from the whole thing.

   Here's where my reflections get really weird though. Imagine if you will, the generous benefit-of-the-doubt extended: the quantum entanglements of all manner of improbable nonsense where life may imitate art or art life or both-and - and of course I'm not saying this having had some kind of specialist secret insight, it is a purely fantastical but deeply intriguing speculation: I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams really believed that humankind were clever enough, and weird and crazy enough, that the positing of an idea such as that Earth is a computer designed to calculate The Question, as well as the selection of a specific number [42] as 'the answer', would sow psychosociocultural seeds of an ilk capable of someday, utterly uncontrollably and yet as if inevitably, sprouting into the real possibility that someone who'd overthunk things, or just happened to string together a brainful of requisite connective elements - using this jocular springboard as an inspirational fertilizer - somehow manage to phrase the problems faced by sentient life in such a manner that it could be formulaically or whateverwise simplified as such and the whole existential mash of Life, the Universe and Everything cogently brought to fruition in a single Question; probably something rather simple, when you've boiled it down that far. I have no evidence to support this hypothesis but sheer paranoid excitement, and I most certainly amn't claiming to have 'cracked' it. But that brings me onto the final point...

FIVE

   So - yeh, life is a beautiful hot mess and it can be tough.

   That's the driving undercurrent to Ford and Zaphod's characters, I think - though Zaphod deals with it by pushing himself ever deeper into [2] as well as the attainment of a higher state of luxurious [1] - while Ford: he's a pure-bred Taoist, if you ask me, plain & simple; he seems to have mastered the artful navigation of a mad, unpredictable universe with all the poise of a - well, an experienced interstellar hitchhiker who's so good at the game he makes his living writing contributions for the very book that helps people who want to do what he does as well as he does it, and so the book of the Hitchhiker's Guide itself also is a balm to these other stranger plot elements by helping simplify the mess and madness, to facilitate easier travel. This is why the betrayal of the bird-guide in the fifth book hits home so well, as well as the spectacular applicability of its cover-slogan DON'T PANIC.

   One arena where the series takes this attitude to its max is in the meta-implications of how Douglas deals with the scientific quandaries involved in making any faster-than-light travel work in ways explicable to skeptical readers - which is to say, he just doesn't bother, instead devising cop-outs that are still cop-outs but that are so ingenious that you don't need to care & you certainly can't deride them for creative laziness because they're some of the funniest most original concepts in science-fiction - for one, the Heart of Gold's infinite improbability drive [which is also the catchall source to explain literally everything that may seem outrageously improbable which happens to its passengers throughout the series] and the bistromathics used later on by Slartibartfarst's ship for number two. How do they work? As far as the reader should be or need be concerned, they just do, so calm down and don't think about it too closely. A similar approach underlies the Somebody Else's Problem generators.

   Final thought - all of what I've said here can be brought to its fullest, most insanely perfect genius in the scene in the second book where they go to meet the man who, so it is apparently the case, makes all the decisions that run the whole universe. He's just a man, without notably superior intellect or wisdom or other such faculties, with no capital or infrastructure or otherwise resources to his name but a cosy shack on a rainy planet where he lived with a cat. The sole things that stand out about the man are his childlike curiosity and humility, taking nothing for granted and always willing to believe he could be wrong about anything and everything, even things he already thought he might have in some time or place thought he knew to be true. As Zaphod and Trillian concede as they leave the man's shack; "I think the Universe is in pretty good hands, don't you?"

And whatever kind of faith Douglas himself had in Earth or humankind or anything beyond the realms of our own knowableness, I myself can attest quite assuredly that I do indeed, that is, think the Universe is in good hands - as with respect to the many, complex and strange caveats we must append to this consideration with all that humanity have built, done, destroyed, thought & said & written - God alone is in charge, and God is good, and though perhaps not the easiest of presences to see or hear at work in the Creations there is, if you listen, much more than radio silence there.

   And I hope, if you've read this far with your brain intact, you've learned the same main lesson that I have from all this: don't over-analyse escapist fiction through any systematic holistic philosophical lenses. It's arguably some kind of satisfying fun, once you've done it; but you'll almost certainly sprain summat in the process.
   Not to mention the backlog you'll accrue on your blog...

* See following links for the first, second, third and fourth. The first post contains a bit of a probably-less-thorough-than-this-one** explanation of how I approached the series as a whole in order to write reflective responses about it - basically, the first four are little more than rough random-detail-selections to give flavours of what each book is about while not going into much actual synoptic detail about actual plot or themes or anything, because I'm going to do All of That in this post.

** I don't know, I haven't written most of it yet. Such are asterisks.

*** Why not?

**** Full disclosure - this post, though dated February 2018, is being written in June 2020, as for a variety of reasons I won't go into here, this blog suffered something of a backlog over the last couple of years and this fucking post was - not the lynchpin, nor the critical mass, of this, but certainly kickstarted the whole thing as I realised that to even begin to do justice to my own attempt at a synchronized systematized analysis of my reflections on the meanings underlying this insane, sublime trilogy in five parts was a task not easy to rise to. But I'm ready, I've worked through most of the backlog, and refreshed my thoughts on Douglas Adams's crowning work - and hence, above.

***** Which, for sake of simplicity [as we're never actually informed exactly what race Ford or Zaphod or etc are, and the series was written by a human so obviously will subconsciously be applying innate human tendencies as projected features of alien psychonormativity] I here use as an inclusive term for the comfort zones of pretty much all the chief characters we're meant to empathize with throughout the pentalogy, regardless of whether or not they're technically human; with the sole exception of Marvin.

The Outsider

This book by Albert Camus probably doesn't need much of an introduction. It's a shortish novel (or longish novella) that lays out, in narrative format, one of the most enduring and harrowing portraits of absurdity in the human life committed to paper. An enormous amount of literary and philosophical commentary on this book already exists, probably in far greater depth of critique and shade of nuanced understanding than I can be bothered to lay out in this mere blogpost, so true to the spirit of the book I'm not going to write a proper post about it at all (because truly, what is the point?) and instead am going to break all my own rules by giving you, in reverse order of their probable significance to the reading experience,* a curated selection of spoilers from the story.

• The main character, Meursault, shoots a man of Arab descent five times on a beach halfway through, partly because of a complicated situation in which a group of Arabs and Meursault and his friends (including Raymond, who owns a gun) have been threatening each other, and partly because it was a very hot sunny day.
• Marie, to whom Meursault gets engaged, wears an attractive hat when speaking as a witness in his trial.
• It's only when complaining to a prison guard about the unfairness of his confinement that Meursault comes to realise that he is being deprived of freedom as punishment. While in prison, he passes the time by reconstructing memories of his room at home.
• Meursault is condemned to be decapitated, and when finally visited by a priest, he is provoked into a rage and starts roughing him up.
• Meursault is not a friendly man, but he does happily accept an invitation from a man called Raymond Sintés to drink wine and eat black pudding together. This blossoms into a friendship in which he soon finds himself writing poetic letters on behalf of to a girlfriend whom Raymond is cheating on.
• Everyone smokes cigarettes, constantly.
• And apparently Celestés is the default go-to restaurant.
• Meursault's mum dies and this causes him a great deal of awkwardness when her friends and the staff of her care-home find it odd that he doesn't seem to care.
• Salamano, an elderly man with no friends or family and only a dog that he calls names and pulls around, becomes very sad when this dog runs away or dies.

   All this in mind, this novel is not one that can be spoiled by spoilers. Camus' writing style and the atmosphere he creates both in environment and in Meursault's mindset are deeply unsettling for their stark absurdity blended effortlessly with a levity, a sensuality, which makes the protagonist sympathetic at times (usually until he says something) - and this twists your perception of the whole thing, meaning however outrageous or alien Meursault may seem at times, ultimately the strangest character in the book is the world he lives in itself, which is basically the same as reality, and all kinds of micro-frustrations and sadnesses lie beneath both surfaces.

   Basically, worth reading. Also I realise that by the addition of this final paragraph-and-a-bit I have betrayed my own previously declared intentions for this post. So what?

* Which, because significance is a subjective and arbitrary element of reality merely tacked onto anything which the ones who perceive it wish or are compelled to deem significant for whatever reason, means in no particular order.

the Children's Classic Poetry Collection

This book, compiled by Nicola Baxter and illustrated by Cathie Shuttleworth, is designed as a means of introducing children to the magic of poetry in such a way that they will be captivated and spurred into a lifelong interest in and love for the craft.

   I can only say that it seemed to have worked on me. This book was given to my family when I was six years old by my teacher at the time (Miss Smith, you're almost certainly not reading this, but regardless, thank you) as a 'well-done-for-not-dying' present when I spent some time in hospital. I was already a fairly bookish child, and the broad selection* of verse accompanied by simple and engaging illustrations truly captured my imagination; though that said, my interest in poetry then plunged once I discovered the joys of (in this order) sci-fi, fantasy, literary novels, and non-fiction, and only two or three years ago did I to whatever extent revisit the purity of non-prosaic linguistic forms - but even almost two decades after this book was gifted to me, when I had forgotten the bulk of its contents and even most of the illustrations had so far faded from my memory that they didn't even strike me with déjá vu this reading, it brought me a deep and strange comfort to realise that several of the poems contained within I was able to recite (Ozymandias and the Jabberwocky in entirety, and portions of others), and if that's not a testament to the profound impact on one's cultural subjecthood that books like this can have if bestowed upon people at appropriate times in their life, then I don't know what is.

   With my revisitation concluded, I am going to return this item to the bookshelf in my parents' house (where I found it yesterday and asked as I flipped it open in surprise 'no way, was this the one given to us by Miss Smith when I was in hospital?'), in the hope that another small child may someday have a similar experience.

* It contains verse by Williams Blake/Shakespeare/Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walters Scott/Whitman, Roberts Browning/Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Emilys Brontë/Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Edgar Allen Poe, Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow, and a few others, including more than a handful of anonymous rhymes.

Pollution and the Death of Man

This book, by Francis Schaeffer (and with a final chapter by Udo Middelmann)* is a fairly short and readable but still very academically potent exploration of how well-exposited biblical theology can shine new and profound light of insight into the ecological crisis faced by contemporary society. I feel this blog has already delved so thoroughly into both aspects of this intersection in topics, and so this post will mostly be hyperlinked so as to maintain some degree of brevity.**

   The book places the ecological crisis into context of Christian narratives of creation, fall and redemption, and seeks to draw on scientific understanding as the powerful force that it is for explaining how things in the world work. Pantheistic naturalism and materialistic atheism are both dealt with in Schaeffer's typical aptitude for negotiating philosophical complexities, and the picture worked towards here is a hopeful and proactive one, in which people who do give a shit about our planetly home (a broad category that hopefully includes Christians, and this is gracefully increasingly becoming the case as a mainstream norm, at least in the egalitarian-liberal echo chambers I'm part of, but in churches these are never as potent in their constrictive insidious-ideological force as they are in secular activism, or further afield) try to become part of the solution;*** especially since during the reign of Christendom the church's capacity to exist as a counter-cultural alternative community which spoke truth to power was blunted by its proximity to those same powers - and even cursory surveys of historical developments of social and moral norms reveal that the Western established church does indeed have a lot to answer for in terms of helping construct and maintain a relationship between human society and the rest of the natural world which has been anything but shalom. Fortunately, the church is not a static entity, and as the vast ripples of the reformation continue to break in the rock pools of newly-changing contexts (which bring with them new challenges to the world demanding gospel-grounded responses from the church) there is always hope.

   This is a must-read for Christians with an ecological conscience so that we may better advocate the significance of stewardship to those of our brothers and sisters who 'just don't get it' yet. It would probably also be a very interesting read for people of other (or no) faiths who share these concerns about nature - as there is an unshakeable spirituality to biology, and even perspectives whose foundations you disagree with may prove to be illuminating or thought-provoking in ways you cannot foresee. Or - even if you're the hardest-cored atheist - this would be a fantastic source of ammunition for asking the kind of questions that will really make your well-meaning Christian acquaintances squirm.

* And a pair of appendix essays; The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis by Lynn White Jr. and Why Worry About Nature? by Richard Means - both of which add wholesomely and enrichingly to the discussion sketched out above.

** If you really want to know, I'm two months behind on this blog, and so am catching up with posts on a large stack of books most of which I found extremely interesting and quite relevant (some very) to my aggregate interests and attempted understandings, which is why lots of these posts are quite short, if still trying to capture with accurate sincerity my actual personal responses to each.

*** I use this term in a broad sense: the church is God's chosen vehicle of participatory work for the reconciliation of humanity and our world to His will, but by no means can or should we fully expect justice, social or ecological or otherwise, to be achievable by any other than divine means - and since to speculate as to the nature of this process is by definition to think eschatologically, there must be a degree of humility there, and clear recognition that we cannot discern the details of God's plans.
   However, we can from our understanding of His intentions and character form clear directions and intentionalities for human action - something only touched on in this book as it deals mostly with the core outline of how the issue and Scripture intersect, but fortunately there is a wealth of other books and resources about ways in which this can go further. I'm particularly excited by the growing vocality of the church in opposing exploitative and unsustainable (not to say idolatrous) tendencies implicit in the capitalist system; hopefully popular consciousness of this will extend to critique the whole ideological justifications for this economic model, and open space for imagination of grace-based forms of organisation which are far more conducive to global equality and sustainability.

the Gospel According to the Son

This book by Norman Mailer is a novel, and yet carries a persistent acuteness of tone and perspective as it walks through the first-person narrative of Jesus, told by Norman Mailer's version of Himself; I'm not going to say a great deal about it because otherwise I'll end up writing an enormous post peeling apart speculative layers of Exactly Just What Is Heresy and Where Does Art Stand In Relation To This, and basically I would like to skip that (as it's quite late and I'm writing this actually a few weeks after I've actually finished the book so a combination of wanting-to-get-off-my-screen-based-appliance-before-bed and it-was-that-long-ago-most-of-my-juicer-ruminations-have-dissipated-anyway is in effect) and just affirm that while this book does embellish upon the Biblical Gospels, it does so in the self-conscious medium of a novel, a literary format designed to embroil its lone audiences in worlds of empathy and imagination and brokenness and nuance - much like the world Jesus inhabited in ways far messier than word-for-word portrayed in the formal accounts. Any theological liberties it takes it does so with an careful caution which maintain the religious integrity of its main character, while by taking those liberties in the context of a (superbly written) novel allows Mailer to powerfully and poignantly explore what can only be speculated as to the inner life of someone who thinks God is trying to tell him summat uniquely important. As an exercise in literary practice for those who already believe that Jesus was fully divine and fully human, this twist - subjective narration of the most well-known story in history - makes for excellent and thought-provoking reading, and I am quite confident agnostic readers may also enjoy the fresh retelling of familiar scenes in ways altogether 'less preachy' than perhaps generally perceived to be accessible.