Lying

Currently the Nonbelieving Literati are writing posts about, or in response to, The Postman by David Brin.

The Postman takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. After wars and famines and the breakdown of civilisation, people have -- yes, I'll say the word -- they have lost faith. They don't believe in their fellow human beings any more. People band into groups whose attitude to outsiders varies from apathetic to completely ruthless. The social contract has broken down. There's no point in showing compassion to a stranger who might never be able to repay -- who might, in fact, be much more likely to simply take advantage of your weakness to steal the things that you need to survive and leave you to die. So Gordon Krantz struggles across America as a sort of wandering minstrel, trading scraps of half-remembered Shakespeare for small things where he can and trying to survive off food found in the wilderness and valuables salvaged from the shattered cities, and finds himself, as the book begins, just about to enter Oregon.

Perhaps because of its distance from the major trouble spots in the war, or perhaps just because enough time has passed since the destruction, Oregon is the most civilised place that Gordon has seen. It's a borderland. Times are harsh, but the potential for civilisation bubbles around the edges. It only takes one thing to make a big bubble of civilisation.

All it takes is a lie.

Gordon's lie is initially inadvertant. He's found an old postman's uniform and he needs the clothing. Stopping at a little village he finds that the people there are nice to him because of it. He offers a nice reminder of the old world they miss. They give him food, a soft bed, even sex. They also give him letters.

Gordon Krantz, in his small way, has been trying to peddle hope for a while now. Maybe that's why he's chosen to try to survive through a little one-man show, through art. He doesn't like lying, but hey, the next village is rougher and the people are nastier and he starts to feel like maybe lying to people like that would be justified. So he blazes right in as an official of the Restored United States. It's a scam. But he has the letters to prove it, and by life-saving luck, one of the ones from the previous village is to an old relative, now living in this village.

Soon Gordon has convinced others to become postal officials of this 'Restored United States' (It's too far off to communicate with us, just take the existence on faith. After all, I'm here, aren't I?). There's a whole chain of post offices, restoring communications between people who thought they'd lost each other and bringing the hope of civilisation wherever they go.

Then Gordon discovers that his lie is not the only one. There's a whole other civilisation further along, based on the hope of technology -- and on a big lie supporting that hope.

Partway through the book, Gordon starts to wonder if America was a lie to begin with. "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . " Really? Are you sure about that?

Is justice a lie? Are we lying to ourselves when we think that there exists a true notion of justice? Mercy, charity, morality -- are these lies? If so, then they are lies which make all our lives better and happier and more worthwhile, and my commitment to the truth must be hampered by my love and respect for such notions. But perhaps they are not lies. Perhaps we can say that morality and charity and justice exist because we believe in them. They are ideas, and ideas exist only in the human mind as a matter of course.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that the Restored United States is a lie, but that the mere idea of such a thing can cause so many true and good things to spring up. It's a sort of stone soup. The real substance is given by the people themselves.

What will save us? We will. But do we need to be lied to in order for that to happen?

Physics and Poetry

Yes, it's another Nonbelieving Literati post [Edit: This one's about Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. How could I forget to say that?] . I'm late again, but, as I posted on the Exterminator's contribution, this one did sort of look like one that I should make the effort on. John Evo, responding to the comment, was kind enough to characterise me as a poet, specifically by saying "I'd definitely like to hear what a poet has to say about this". But did I read this book as a poet?

I started out reading as a physicist. What can I say? When I was younger I used to love the slide and switch of reference frames, the pure and perfect mechanics of Galileo, Newton, Einstein. The characters' names in this book even sort of look like arcane mathematical expressions with symbols incomprehensibly juxtaposed: Qfwfq, (k)yK, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_o. So when I read Qfwfq babbling away like an old man about how the Moon used to be closer to the Earth in those days, I started mentally checking the details. "She rolled around the sky like an umbrella chased by the wind". Well, the Moon would have to go fast. To be in orbit is to cross the horizon before you can fall to the ground. If the ground is closer, the Moon must reach the horizon more quickly! Indeed, the necessary speed bothered me a little.

This is how we did the job: in the boat we had a ladder: one of us held it, another climbed to the top, and a third, at the oars, rowed until we were right under the Moon . . .

What's wrong with this picture? I kept finding myself imagining the Moon falling until I realised that, at the distance I was imagining it, the Moon would probably have to be travelling a lot faster than the average rowboat. Ah, but isn't it fun to imagine that you could climb to the Moon on a ladder? Poetic license. Never mind.

Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up; you realised this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwin your legs over your head, until your feet were on the Moon's surface. Seen from the Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for you, it was the normal position, and the only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.

I was skeptical of this one at first. It is, however, true that the closer you get to the Moon, the stronger the Moon's pull. The question is, how close do you have to be? If the Moon is that close to the Earth, might not the point at which the Moon's attraction becomes stronger actually be inside the Moon?

A quick calculation informs me that I was wrong, however. As the distance between the Earth and the Moon increases, the point of equal gravitational pull becomes outside the Moon before the distance becomes greater than the Earth's radius! So that's all good.

"Cling together! Idiots! Cling together!" the Captain yelled. At this command, the sailors tried to form a group, a mass, to push all together until they reached the zone of the Earth's attraction: all of a sudden a cascade of bodies plunged into the sea with a loud splash.

Okay, this is not poetic licence. It's not my fault for being picky either. This isn't something I could fail to notice. It's blatantly wrong. In fact, there's a nice thought experiment due to Galileo that tries to disprove the above using basically that example. You see, bigger things do not fall faster than smaller ones. Not unless the smaller one is a feather, in which case the key phrase is air resistance. Without air resistance, all objects would fall at the same speed. With air resistance, well, the air resistance does not have to be as big in order to affect the fall of a small thing as it would need to be in order to affect the fall of a large thing. This is what creates the disparity. However, I can assure you that tying the lace of one shoe to the lace of the other will not make your shoes fall faster; it affects neither the air resistance nor the gravitational pull on each shoe. Similarly, coming together in a group will not make each person fall faster. Gravity does not check whether you are holding hands before deciding how hard to pull each of you!

Thus began an uneasy balance between science and poetry. The delight of these stories is in the way that they take a snippet of science and build around it an absurd flight of fancy, an almost narcissistic reflection of human foibles created around a simple detached fact. Moreover, although the science may sometimes be bent or broken, the humanity never is. Who cannot sympathise with the narrator of 'The Light Years', suddenly realising that the inhabitants of other galaxies have been watching him and worrying desperately about what they must think of him, but knowing that they are so distant that they will not see any improvement he makes to his behaviour for millions of years?

As with all stories that have an allegorical component, there is always a temptation to try to find the more commonplace 'meaning' behind the fantastical description. I suspect that, having begun my reading thinking like a scientist, I was slightly more prone to this than I might otherwise have been, and spent a certain amount of time reminding myself not to try to decode. The stories are sympathetic in their own right, and their meaning is in their sympathy. A reader should not need more.

Ah, but I loved the final story! I had settled down into poetry far enough that I could dispense with the science by means of a mere 'of course evolution couldn't really have this sort of purpose' and enjoy the pretty story of how we create beauty -- the beauty of a spiral, no less! How very mathematical. This book is not all true, but it is clearly truthful.

Orlando

Our last book but one for the Nonbelieving Literati was A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Having read that and rather liked it, I pulled Orlando off the library shelves a while back, took it into a cafe and began to read.

I loved it, I swooned over it, I laughed with delight. It's one of my favourite books ever, I think, particularly the first half, where the title character is male. Orlando is known, among other things, for the unabashed lesbianism in the second half. That's all very well, and I appreciated it for the ground-breaking daring that it was, but to me, it was passages like this that really stood out:

The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. ‘Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country.

Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.

Now, really! Oh, some may say that Orlando's legs may only be sighed over because he is somehow androgynous. Some may call the fact that Orlando is an object of desire a mere foreshadowing of his eventual femininity. Not I.

There is no denying it. I'm afraid I'm heterosexual.

***

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . .

There's many a fictional version of Shakespeare who has written that poem to some beautiful leading lady of the story; we love to wonder who could inspire such verse. In truth, however, it's probable that this famous sonnet was written to a young man -- and to me, this is a lovely thought. I've seen a few men I'd love to apply it to, men with sunshine in their smiles and a sloppy grace to their form. Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet is more than just a superlative love poem. It's a rare literary glimpse of the beauty than men can have.

I'm not sure that I love men in the way that men want to be loved. I wouldn't mind loving women. It might be as much easier in some ways as it would be harder in others. It's just that when it comes down to it, I'd much rather compare a man to a summer's day than a woman. Not every man wants to hear that.

Hush, now, don't say it too loud, but men are beautiful. It's one of the best-kept secrets of all time.

'Oxbridge'

This post is for the Nonbelieving Literati; I'm afraid it may be less comprehensible if you haven't read the book. We've been reading 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf.

I have been there.

I have been there, and they did not refuse me entrance to the library but bade me enter and write my name in a red book, as Newton once did. They gave me a room of my own with a desk and a bed and filled my mind to bursting six mornings a week.

Once a week I'd make my way to formal dinners, to sit with gowned humanities students getting drunk on nearly-free alcohol and discussing everything from politics to philosophy to pornography. We'd stay out late and optimistically propose meeting in Hall for breakfast the next morning.

They never did meet me, of course. Breakfast closes at 9am, no matter what day of the week it is. Nobody gets up for breakfast before 9am when they've been out drinking the night before. Nobody but me, innocently without a hangover, gazing out the window after the alarm had gone off and getting fired up on morningness like a child who has never seen the world before. I'd walk, run, dance through the garden, across the road, down the Avenue. I'd step with carefree possessiveness through those arches, into the nearly deserted Hall at breakfast on Saturday morning, and eat my fried eggs across from whichever portrait on the wall took my fancy.

There are no women on the walls.

I swapped Emmy Noether stories with another young woman one night. Did you know her father tried to stop her? And have you heard the quote about "Emmy is the centre of co-ordinates . . ."? And of course you know what Hilbert said, gosh but that was a good one.

We cling to Emmy Noether, just a little, we young algebraists and theoretical physicists. There are no women on the walls, but once upon a time in another place there was Emmy Noether . . .

Yet when I see the shallow layers worn away on the steps, worn down by the shoes of students -- those shoes are mine. Though they were all men, or most of them, their shoes are mine and my feet step in their footprints and they belong to me and I to them. Once this place was barred to us but we have found our way inside and the men who once lived here belong to us now, too. Their legacy is ours.

Our legacy will be yours, some day.

EDIT: The next book is my choice, and will be 'Zadig', by Voltaire. You can get it from Amazon or from a library, of course -- or if you don't mind reading it off a screen you can get it here for free.

Introducing Odo Hirsch

I read children's books. A lot of children's books. I never really stopped, because there was no way I was going to give up my favourite authors just because I was entering my teens. I do not think I have ever had enough favourite authors.

My pseudonym is taken from a children's book -- specifically this children's book entitled The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf, by Gerald Morris; Lynet is the eponymous Savage Damsel. The series of which it is a part is delightful despite being shabby in places: sweet and good and humble and humourous. It's also written by a Christian minister. Not, perhaps, the most apt pseudonym for an atheist blogger, but then, I never expected to blog about atheism!

Sometimes you can pick the books written by authors who take their Christianity seriously. I don't mean the ones who throw it in your face, I mean the ones for whom it shows up naturally, because Christianity is such a large part of their lives that they can't leave it out of what they write. I'm thinking, for example, of Madeleine L'Engle, who makes love the central empowering force for the side of good in A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. There's also Sherryl Jordan, a New Zealander like me, who pulled off a (halfway convincing!) World Peace ending in Time of the Eagle, achieved through the work of a character who survives by having faith in the purpose she believes has been laid down for her. You can see the Christian belief structure. Does it bother me? A little. Am I skeptical of it? Yes. Do I learn from it? Definitely. Do I like these authors? Oh, so much!

At the very least, I needn't be ashamed of liking Katherine Paterson -- she's another author who belongs in this category, perhaps the best writer of them all. She writes with such incredible sympathy for her characters (the same is true of Orson Scott Card). Moreover, we atheists owe her a vote of thanks. In Leslie (from Bridge to Terabithia) we have a sympathetic atheist character that we can be proud to be represented by: imaginative, intelligent, non-conforming, courageous. Paterson even goes so far as to take the cruelty of eternal damnation and slam it in the reader's face! Yet she herself is Christian. Her other Newbery-Award-winning book is Jacob Have I Loved, which deals with the problem of feeling that God might hate you. And yes, when I read her, or Card, or Gerald Morris, or Sherryl Jordan, or Madeleine L'Engle, sometimes I can't help thinking 'How can we duplicate this?' How can we duplicate that sympathy? How can we duplicate the good aspects that come (I assume) from having a community which encourages you to think about others and love them just as they are? More complicatedly, this emphasis on love, faith, God's plan and whatever isn't precisely the angle I would want to take! It has good aspects, and regular focus on those things as part of being actively religious can have a nice effect, but I wouldn't want to buy the whole thing. What do I want?

I have some answers. Daylight Atheism. A little familiarity with philosophy. Book clubs. Meditation without the surrounding mysticism? Humanist groups? Humanism, certainly. Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, various other authors who present a rich and complex worldview that deals with the atheist perspective . . .

. . . and one Odo Hirsch, who somehow captures the simple half.

I don't know that Hirsch is an atheist. He's notoriously shy with all personal data. This is an amusing example. This article is in fact the most detailed information I've been able to find about him on the internet (notably, he's worked as a doctor and as a business consultant, studied political thought at Cambridge, and did some work for Amnesty International). Let me say, then, that I would intuit that Hirsch is a non-believer in the same way that I might intuit that an author is Christian. Hirsch obviously has a deep philosophy, it permeates his work -- and God never shows up. Reading him is like reading one of my favourite Christian authors, except that I'm not looking at some fuzzy other-person's-worldview that I have to sift through, I'm looking at something that often hits me clear as day.

If I had to name some authors who can make me see simple goodness and light in the world when I'm tired and stressed and don't feel like reading something complicated, I'd name Gerald Morris and Odo Hirsch. Morris writes light Arthurian retellings that can laugh at themselves. Hirsch is something else entirely. When Hirsch writes one of his happy books, it's as if he's done the usual thing by writing a book for children in which all distress is minor and happiness prevails in the end -- but done it with an incredibly sophisticated notion of happiness. No pasted-on smiles, here. There are reasons why Hirsch's characters are happy. You can learn something about happiness by reading one of his simple little children's books. You can see the happiness in the world from having had it sketched out for you.

Frankel Mouse has perhaps the most obvious moral. I once read a review that described Frankel, his brother Berrell and the small, frightened mouse Michael that Frankel has taken in as a 'dysfunctional mouse family' and bridled. They're not dysfunctional! Berrell is dysfunctional. Frankel is about as functional as you can get. You might worry, I suppose, about the way Berrell stays at home all day and makes Frankel look for the cheese. Of the two, though, Frankel is much happier, and you can see that Berrell's unhappiness is entirely his own fault. Frankel's work gives him a purpose and an identity. "We are the cheese-stealers!" he explains to Michael. If Berrell is grumpy, it's because he sits in a corner all day and never does anything. No wonder he almost seems to welcome the arrival of daredevil Cousin Ruthie. Frankel, by contrast, dreads Cousin Ruthie's arrival -- but I think he does admit at one point that her fun-loving, adventurous ways do make life more exciting . . .

Other lighthearted works from Odo Hirsch include the ones about Bartlett the Explorer ("Inventiveness, Desperation, Perseverance!"), and the ones about Hazel Green, an inquisitive extrovert who has multiple friendships with the adults who run the various stores on the ground floor of the skyscraper in which she lives, and who is forever asking them questions about what they do. Hazel Green is in fact my favourite Odo Hirsch book -- central to the book is her developing friendship with the local math geek.

Hirsch can write characters whose lives are full of meaning, but he is also capable of writing characters who look for meaning. Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman has a bittersweet tone, as does Pincus Corbett's Strange Adventure. The latter describes a simple, reliable tailor who is tired of making boring things and starts a project of his own -- a colourful coat that can give him a new identity. Does it make him happier? Well, yes, it's better than nothing, but somehow I remember the story as being a little sad, all the same.

Writing for young adults, Hirsch seems to go in the opposite direction: Yoss is remarkably dark, as is Slaughterboy according to all the reviews (though I haven't read the latter). They're both coming-of-age novels, and they both deal with finding independence in a harsh world. Yoss is deep, to be sure, but it wasn't an easy read. Still, it showed me a side of Odo Hirsch that I hadn't seen before. He's capable of more than just sweetness and light. I was thrilled to see that Will Buster and the Gelmet Helmet includes some of the stronger themes of Yoss in a less dark, livelier fashion. Still, I think he's capable of taking that further. I'm waiting for the next step, the next book that blends happiness and darkness. Right now, I think he's still on his way up.

Nonbelieving Literati: Not the End of the World

'I don't like affectation. That doesn't mean I try and make everyone look like they just got up in the morning -- that would be a form of affectation too. I like to try and get behind the screens folks put up, get an image of the person they are when they think no-one's looking. Far easier said than done, right enough. Soon as you point a camera at somebody, they perform. Some do it more subtly than others, but they all play a part.'

'Dave made your pictures sound like, I don't know, psychological X-rays.'

'Nah. Nothing quite so wanky and sophisticated. But you can usually tell what I think of the subject without much in the way of in-depth analysis.'

Steff got back to his plate, oddly relieved to have headed off the discussion.

Many of his pictures were psychological X-rays. Fortunately, most people didn't recognise who of.

Thus do we hear the photographer Steff Kennedy's view of his own art in Not the End of the World. I can't help but wonder if author Christopher Brookmyre's view of his own writing is similar: self-conscious, with a hint of self-congratulation for the self-deprecation he allows himself in thinking of this work, coupled with an insecure, and justified, fear of wankiness.

The book is very quotable in places, witty and sometimes even profound for brief moments that don't quite string together properly. I was touched by Larry Freeman's thought that there are orphans, and there are widows, but there's no word for a parent who loses a child. Quite why Larry Freeman has to have lost a child is less obvious. It's irrelevant to the story, and it's not an aspect of his character that actually develops; it seems to be a bauble that figuratively hangs around his character's neck, something to make him seem more interesting, I don't know.

Indeed, Christopher Brookmyre's ability to develop or even convincingly describe character is -- I can put this no more simply -- terrible. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his stereotyped view of fundamentalist Christians, who conveniently justify Steff Kennedy's oh-so-hip contempt for them in every way possible. I'm sorry, but I don't buy that final scene where evil preacher ("Lex") Luther St John isn't willing to die for what he says he believes in. One of the scary things about fundamentalists is that many of them would just love to be persecuted and die for what they believe, and, whatever else you can say about Luther's character, he is portrayed as a true believer, and a terribly messed up true believer at that. You're telling me he wouldn't play to a martyr's script if you strung him up on a cross? Don't be silly.

Ah, but the fundamentalists are nothing compared with Madeleine. So let me just warn you, I'm about to get frank about some of my views on sex -- and, ahem, somewhat impolite about our author's apparent opinions thereof.

Madeleine, Madeleine, Madeleine. Maddy. Magdalene. Where to start? Our dear Maddy used to be a porn actress. She's one of the good guys, naturally, not like those evil fundamentalists who oppose pornography for prurient reasons, or those odd Dworkinites who think pornography demeans women in some way. Indeed, Maddy watched some pornography for a psychology class at university and understood immediately what the ramifications were and were not:

As she had quickly come to learn, there is no such thing as an 'experiment' in academic psychology, because that would suggest the prof was in some doubt as to what the results would be. He knew all along that sustained exposure to this material would make the depicted behaviour seem more natural, commonplace and perfectly ordinary; the effect was 'demystification' rather than desensitization. So a blow-job neither elevated the recipient male to a position of dominance and supremacy any more than it made the woman a debased slattern deserving of all contempt: it was just a blow-job. A pussy wasn't any kind of mystic portal to the sexual dimension: it was a pussy. The men were neither perverts nor superstuds for doing what they were doing; the women neither whores nor goddesses. They were all just people fucking. And it was no big deal.

Alas! I am not in a position to comment directly on this. However, the wonderful Greta Christina, who is resolutely pro-porn and does know what she is talking about, has written this about people assuming that the stuff that happens in porn is normal sex (when in fact most of the time the details are dictated by what looks good, not by what feels good). She has also written this about the complexities involved in supporting porn:

I also think that pro-porn advocates -- myself included -- need to stop pretending that there isn't a problem. We need to recognize that the overwhelming majority of porn -- or rather, the overwhelming majority of video porn, which is the overwhelming majority of porn -- is sexist, is patriarchal, does perpetuate body fascism, does create unrealistic sexual expectations for both women and men, does depict sex in ways that are not only overwhelmingly focused on male pleasure, but are rigid and formulaic and mind-numbingly tedious to boot. And we need to be trying to do something about it.

Christopher Brookmyre is having Maddy say a load of rubbish here. Pornography is fine. Fine! Nothing wrong with it at all! No possible objections! Any fool can see that!

So why, oh please, why was our dear former porn actress only doing it because her Daddy abused her when she was little? How does that fit into Brookmyre's script? Sure, porn is fine -- but nice girls only do it because they were abused as children. Madeleine is a nice girl, you know. Not one of those -- sluts!

You think it couldn't get worse, don't you? It gets worse. Having created this slimy contradiction in values, Brookmyre can think of nothing better to do than to have sex with it in the form of his Mary Sue, Steff Kennedy. Steff Kennedy is interestingly tall and blond. Steff Kennedy takes no bullshit and commits heresy on a regular basis (coool . . .). Steff Kennedy has watched one of Madeleine's porn videos, but it is only when he sees the real her that he becomes suddenly transported to the daft world of the desperately in love, where he feels cutely awkward and humbly oblivious to the obvious fact that -- of course -- she likes him too.

His stomach was churning. His bloody stomach was churning. He hadn't felt like this since he was about fifteen, and the worst of it was that it was for all the same reasons as back then. Thinking about what she looked like, what she smelt like, her smile, the sound of her voice. Excited by the very thought of seeing her, worried by the thought that she wouldn't show, nervousness multiplied with every unfeasibly long minute that passed.

There's more like that. A whole lot more. Remembering the patronising way the author had endowed the object of this stereotypical worship with a pity-inducing excuse for being a porn star, I wanted to spew. But I'd have settled for the author taking his hand off his you-know-what for long enough to write something that didn't reek of sugar and semen.

Instead, I had to watch as the evil fundamentalist Christians tried to use Maddy as a pawn, a tool to promote their ideology by forcing her to repent. Luckily, Steff comes up with the idea that saves the day! Then he head-butts her evil, abusing father so hard that the father is thrown to the wall, all while making cute sarcastic remarks with his hard-to-fathom (but very coool) sense of humour. It was nice to see Maddy take the stage and turn the tables on the moralising pundits who believed her dead, but I wished I could have seen her turn the tables on her author. He, too, is using her to promote his ideology, and he, too, does not respect her.

I know it can be hard for the best of liberals to entirely shake off the complex, powerful memes that surround sex for long enough to perceive the best way for people to enjoy their lives. Heck, I, for one, have had to concede with regard to my own feelings that sexual repression is not just a weird disease they had in the fifties. Finding the best way to view a sexual issue can take time and thought, and even then you won't always be sure you're right. I'd be more inclined to cut Christopher Brookmyre some slack if he wasn't so obviously wanking to the messed-up ideas that he blithely subscribes to.

Nonbelieving Literati: The Plague

For details of the Nonbelieving Literati, see here.

I have to write this post, because I don't want to read everyone else's until I've written mine, which currently means I'm avoiding some very interesting-looking posts on other people's blogs. It's not going to be easy. I read this book really early, and in the intervening six weeks or so, there have been lots of minor points that I might have liked to use The Plague as an illustration to. Instead, I am forced to write a big post that tries to get something across that relates to the whole book. Well, no matter. I shall make a start, and see how much of the important stuff I can end up fitting in.

Camus wrote this book in 1947, after the end of the second world war. He was writing in part from his own experience as part of the French Resistance, and also more fundamentally about crisis and how we deal with it. Thus we get this description quite early in the book:

[T]hey were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. . . . Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others, they forgot to be modest -- that was all -- and thought that everything was still possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible.

Camus isn't using 'humanist' in the sense of, say, the Humanist Symposium. I suspect he is referring to something closer to Renaissance humanism, and more specifically to the notion that men and women are, or should be, free to control their own destinies. We think we're free, he says, and we go on making plans, but in fact we are not free; certainly not so long as there are pestilences or invading fascists. The use of a plague -- a natural phenomenon -- as an allegory for an occupation -- a human phenomenon -- is interesting here. Whatever he thinks of the moral issues surrounding the behaviour of the German government and army, they are not the focus of this book. This book is not arguing that we should create a world which does operate the way we want it to. This book takes it for granted that there are pestilences of all types, at looks at how we deal with them.

It's most definitely an atheist book. The sole proponent of religious solutions to crisis is Father Paneloux, who suggests that we deserve crisis. The plague is God's punishment, says Father Paneloux, and we must submit willingly to die if that be our destiny -- and indeed take joy from the notion that what is happening is God's will. To this, the good Doctor Bernard Rieux (one of three main atheist characters) remarks with deliberate forgiveness that "As you know, Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem." Indeed, Paneloux is better than he seems, for he does join in with the volunteers who risk their lives caring for the sick rather than leaving the plague victims to their divine punishment. However, consistent with his views, he refuses treatment for himself, preferring to submit to God's will. One gets the impression that the sole saving grace of Paneloux's position is that he allows it to hurt only himself and any others who might be swayed to believe it.

The more interesting viewpoints are those of the atheists [or, at least, the viewpoints that discount or disbelieve in God - edit]. As an interesting pair, we have Doctor Rieux, whom I have already mentioned, and Jacques Tarrou, a traveler and philosopher. Rieux is the simpler of the two. He is a doctor, and the impulse to fight against the plague comes naturally to him. He cannot necessarily justify it, except insofar as he finds it impossible to do otherwise. Tarrou is both more complex and more confident in his viewpoint. It is Tarrou who goes to Rieux and suggests that teams of volunteers be set up to care for the sick, in full confidence that willing people will be found, despite the risk.

Rieux has a simple and uncertain theory of morality; Tarrou has one that he has given a lot of thought to. Both men, however, agree that the right thing to do is to care for the sick and attempt to minimise the hurt and damage as best they may, no matter that they must face the fact that there will be an awful run of tragedy before them that they are powerless to completely halt. By contrast, the journalist Raymond Rambert represents a different viewpoint. Rambert is not interested in the fate of those in the town -- "I don't belong here!" he protests, pointing out that he was only there to write a short article and now he is stuck, separated from his beloved wife because of the quarantine. One should not think of Rambert as an immoral character; he is portrayed sympathetically. Perhaps Rambert's strongest statement is this one:

"[P]ersonally, I've seen enough of people who can die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learnt it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves."

Rieux's reaction is very interesting: he agrees with Rambert, and tells him that Rambert's impending attempt to escape the quarantine is right and proper; his only protest is that "there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency." Rieux has a wife of his own who is sick (though not of the plague) and who was sent out of the town before the plague began. He, too, is missing somebody he loves. And, more deeply perhaps, I think if you were someone who was sacrificing and taking risks in order to try to save the lives of others, you might not object to there being those who grasp happiness with both hands. Then, at least, you might know that even if you lose out, others will still have the chance to be happy because of what you did.

Both Tarrou and Rieux are in general forgiving of those who think differently. Indeed, these words of the narrator (who is unnamed until the end) might conceivably convey something of the views of both men:

[I]t is not the narrator's intention to ascribe to these sanitary groups [of volunteers to care for the sick] more importance than their due. . . . [T]he narrator is inclined to think that by attributing over-importance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worst side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance . . . on the whole men are more good than bad.

Bearing in mind the allegorical nature of the book, this is a modest (but entirely serious) utterance on the part of Camus. For, of course, the sanitary groups represent the Resistance, in which Camus played a significant role, and in this passage he may be seen to be disavowing to some extent the hero status that was given to members of the Resistance after the war. I find myself admiring him -- not just for modesty in this aspect of the book, but also for the way he has chosen to tackle a harder question when there was an easy one standing by. The evils of the Nazi regime would have been on everyone's lips, and the heroism of all those who stood up to it would have been being lauded at every turn. In such a situation, to refuse the simple heroic story in favour of a forgiving, nuanced view of human behaviour that faces up to some of the most difficult questions that human beings can ask is an achievement indeed.

As regards the broader theme of the book, the most important analogy between the Resistance and the sanitary groups is that they are those who inspire everyone else not to give up:

These groups enabled our townsfolk to come to grips with the disease, and convinced them that, now that plague was amongst us, it was up to them to do whatever could be done to fight it.

This is, I think, a central message of the book. Fight back at the universe. Do not submit. Yet it is a bittersweet message. At the end of the book we are with Rieux, and he is alone. The friends he made during the plague have died or gone back to their loved ones. His own wife has died of her separate illness. He has no-one. And he reflects that it is certain that, some time in the future, the plague will strike again. The victory is never complete.

I told Rieux not to kill himself. I knew he probably wouldn't. And he doesn't even seem to think of it. That, too, is heroism. Rieux is strong enough and hopeful enough to keep going, even when the plague is over and he has nothing to fight for any more.

Nonbelieving Literati: The Sparrow

It all started here, when the Exterminator began a little atheist book club over the web on grounds that

[S]cientists shouldn’t feel that they’ve cornered the market on nonbelief. There are plenty of us folks in the humanities who also have no faith in faith.

The list of great and near-great freethinking authors, for example, is a long one. It contains, among others, such non-scientists as: Ambrose Bierce, Pearl S. Buck, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, H.L. Mencken, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, the above-mentioned Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and H.G. Wells.

I think it’s time we atheists draw some inspiration from literature as well as science.

Well said! I held off joining initially, but really, this is right up my street in some ways. So here I am, and, before I read what anyone else has written on the subject, here's my post on Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.

'So God just leaves?' John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. 'Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!'

'No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.'

'Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,' Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. ' "Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your father knowing it." '

'But the sparrow still falls,' Felipe said.

It's hard to tell where the author of this book stands on religious issues. She knows a lot about Catholics, but it's hard to say whether she writes from the inside or as an apostate. I know the Nonbelieving Literati have had more liberal, irreverent Christian authors before, so the choice of this book isn't necessarily a sign that the author doesn't believe in God. I suppose a web search or something might turn up more information, but if you ask me, that's cheating. I'll take the book as is and never mind the author, and I'll say this. The fact that you can't tell where the author stands is at least in part because this is a good book, a realistic book, a book that doesn't paint ideology into the storyline half so much as it allows the characters to be believeable. Many of the characters hold views I don't agree with. Many of them espouse reasoning that I consider to be highly questionable, and large parts of my viewpoint don't even make it into the conversation. But that's life. That's believeable. And I can't help but admire the author for being able to write with such sympathy for her characters, and yet such coldness when it comes to the pain she'll put them through and the problems she'll hand them that challenge the views they hold dear.

The book alternates between two timescales. One is an action-packed story of humanity's first contact with sentient alien life, a dare-devil trip to outer space to meet the inhabitants of a distant planet, propelled by faith and doomed to disaster. The other is the story of what the sole survivor has to deal with when he gets back to Earth, a tense emotional drama of misunderstanding interacting with deep trauma. Both on this re-reading and when I first read the book a few years ago, it was this latter story that was the page-turner for me. Action is all very well, but it's nothing compared to human interaction, and while there were many parts of both storylines that kept my attention, I found myself checking ahead to see when the next section of unpacking and unravelling the survivor's persective would be, waiting for the moment when they'd understand, and being fascinated by the developments in perception and misperception between the characters.

One of the major things that consoled me when the story went into flashback mode was the conversations. The relationship between the central characters is so obviously tightly knit, and their dialogue is witty and frank. It's also worth noting how psychologically interesting the alien culture is. The author is an anthropologist, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. While she has taken small liberties with the realism of the story line in having the aliens be so close (Alpha centauri? Could you be more obviously choosing stars for closeness?), and while it's hard to be sure how realistic her representation of possible alien biology might be, there's no doubt that when it comes to culture she has put some thought in. I can forgive her for small liberties in exchange for the tightly-imagined story she tells in that regard.

It gives to think that I am not more disturbed by this story. I know my mother found it pretty traumatic. Peculiarly, I think I read it like some detached, emotive God, feeling along with the characters in a limited sense but blaming no-one. Or perhaps I was a parasite, feeding off the emotion no matter how it hurt the characters who felt it. I cannot say I enjoyed the painful end, but I accepted it as a gift nevertheless, taking the emotional understanding that it gave. I don't know what that says about me.

Religious and anti-religious themes in 'His Dark Materials'

I have to confess, when I heard they were making a movie out of The Golden Compass -- the first novel in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequence -- the anti-religious themes in the book were the first thing I thought of. The comments on this post on Friendly Atheist feature a few comments that suggest that the Christian response is an over-reaction. If so, it was an entirely predictable one, for Pullman is an atheist, and he did write these books with criticism of religion in mind. On the other hand, this post on Beliefnet by Donna Freitas, a defence of His Dark Materials from a Christian perspective, speaks of the way Pullman's story can be read as affirming the religious principles on which some people build their lives. That I did not predict -- but it does not surprise me so very much.

The atheism of His Dark Materials is actually somewhat equivocal. In the fictional multiverse of the books, the Authority known as 'God' is an imposter who did not create the universe, and who is destroyed almost incidentally in the third book by the main characters without their even knowing it. It's almost a throw-away scene, one which, if the third book made it to the screen, might be cut simply for reasons of time. Unlike the depiction of the Fall from Eden as a very good thing (which, certainly, some Christians might find hard to swallow) the death of 'God' is actually not that major. However, while the books reject this authoritarian imposter of a God, they do also have an overarching notion of destiny and purpose, embodied in a mysterious substance known as 'Dust'.

What is 'Dust'? The book gives several possible answers: original sin, the human spirit, a substance attracted to an adult's conscious mind and engagement in life. For an atheist, giving this somewhat humanist idea a supernatural tilt is hardly terrible because this is a
fantasy book. A Christian, however, might see a hint of some true God in this idea, a God who affirms human beings in contrast to the authoritarian religion which crushes them. His Dark Materials reads to me like a humanist freedom cry, a blazing beacon of joy in experience, a command to live life richly and fully, unstifled by repressive religious notions. There are more than a few Christians who value some of the same things as humanists, so we should not be surprised that they also find value in these books.

I'll say this outright: Pullman's His Dark Materials sequence definitely strengthened my atheism. It made me much more likely to see certain types of religious notions (such as giving all control over to God, or such as the repression of sexuality) as antithetical to a life well lived. But if you do believe in God, Pullman's books won't necessarily seem to be fighting that notion overmuch. It really depends what sort of God you have.

I am not resigned: A meditation on tragedy.

The last Poetry Sunday at Daylight Atheism was Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge Without Music. The poem itself is a beautiful, sensitive, defiant meditation on death. Yet it is not of death that I wish to speak, or not death alone. Sublime though the poem is in its entirety, in the process of responding to Ebonmuse's particular emphasis on its quiet refusal to succumb to perfect acceptance of the inevitable I have been caught, caught entirely, by the final line alone.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. It's a small, simple idea that might have meant very little to another person, or to myself at another time. Knowing this, I cannot be sure that I am able to explain what it meant to me. Nor can I be sure that it will mean anything to you, if I do succeed in such an explanation. I offer my attempt at explanation nevertheless.

Ebonmuse writes, almost coincidentally, in that same thread that "Paradoxically, there can be true beauty in tragedy, for all that I would end it in a second if I had the power." Let this be my starting point, for, friends, if I had in front of me the magic wand that would end tragedy forever, I could never pick it up. No, never! The sweetest moments of my life have been those when tragedy fell away. How many lines of flaccid free verse have I wasted on the taste of tears? On the way despair becomes a lens through which the simple details of the world seem unimaginably good in their detachment from your pain? The simple fact is that I am not sure my life would be worth living if it had no tragedy in it.

The beauty that is in despair was an observation on which I built my view of the world. It was how I dealt with the reality of despair. Let me put this in a broader context. Human beings in general have a need to find ways to deal with the reality of pain and suffering. I do not speak here of the 'Problem of Evil' which plagues so many versions of conventional theism but rather the more simple part of us that cannot help but cry out at the unfairness and pain in the world: our own pain; the pain of those we love; all pain. Compassion can only exacerbate such a feeling. How do we deal with the incredible weight of suffering in the world? How do we deal with times when we ourselves are not sure that our own suffering will ever cease?

Religions have several different types of answers that they can give to these questions*. For example, we have the idea that we suffer because we deserve it. The notion of karma in Hinduism is the most extreme and obvious version of this. Those who suffer deserve to suffer; if you would avoid suffering, behave yourself. Believing in the ultimate fairness of the universe in this way may perhaps allow people to be psychologically reconciled to the suffering that inevitably occurs. It explains what people must do to avoid it, and gives people an excuse for not worrying too much about the pain of others. As freethinkers, of course, we may well be concerned about the consequences of people choosing not to worry about the pain of others! More importantly, however, we simply have no reason to suppose that there is any such karmic justice in place. The notion cannot be of use to us, even if we wanted it to be.

Another very common religious answer is to pull in the notion of a heavenly afterlife. Never mind that you are suffering now. Some day, you will live happily ever after, and so will those you love -- at least, they will as long as they belong to the same religion you do. This answer seems to rely on a willingness to be cold towards outsiders, but that is hardly a quality that human beings generally lack. Believing in heaven, people can struggle through, even if they believe their lives will never get better, by hoping for paradise at the end. Among atheists, the question sometimes arises whether (and when) we have the right to try to take this hope from people. I shall not try to answer that question completely, but perhaps I can shed some light on the extent to which there are atheist alternatives.

I confess I once naively placed a lot of confidence in the beauty that tragedy can produce. It's almost... karmic. Certainly it is at least a shift towards balance. After the storm, after the rain, the air is still and the grass is clean, and the shaft of sunlight coming down from the clouds can be a blessing beyond belief, even beyond belief in any God. I still do think that happiness arises in part by contrasts. I do not think I have ever thought that contrast was the only contributor to happiness, but nevertheless, my experience led me to play up this aspect of things. I had known the pain that comes when your world falls apart because you built it on false premises -- a healing pain from which you emerge somewhat subdued, but wiser and stronger. I had known small failures and deep loneliness, and found the small sweetnesses in each (I still have a radiant smile left over from when getting a smile back from a stranger really meant something). And out of this I could reflect that surely the world cannot be so bad when it gives you the soft rush of small joys in compensation for hardship.

Ah, but even Pollyanna had her moment when the 'glad game' just wouldn't work any more. And in real life the world is not required to miraculously restore to you the dearly beloved things it so coldly destroys. It is these moments when the narrative fails that are the hardest. How many deus ex machinas have I screamed at in the last few years? How dare George Eliot end The Mill on the Floss with a dubiously engineered death? (I expected better, having read Middlemarch). She's not allowed to die, she has to live. Live and suffer, Maggie. Live and suffer and show me how.

The worst tragedies are off the map. Jane Austen never wrote about what it was like when the man she loved died before they could marry. Think of it! This, at a time when marriage was the dearest ambition of every woman of Austen's age and class, to have the promise of that dreamed-of home, adulthood, security, love replaced with what might be (and, indeed, turned out to be) a lifetime of spinsterhood.

Knowing you are not alone can almost seem to make this sort of thing worse. Pick yourself up. Hearts are broken every day, Lynet, even worse than your so-narratively-wrong case. Oh, don't remind me of the sheer weight of broken hearts!

Of course, we know how Jane Austen dealt with her situation. Mansfield Park has a somewhat insipid streak precisely because our poor Jane, having given up hope in this world, was resolutely focused on the next. And since her novels improved after that low point, we may assume that she did, too, somehow. That option for making it through the rough patch is not open to me. What is?

Ah, well, I have options Jane Austen did not have. My life need not revolve around a relationship (hey, hers didn't either and she still managed a lot!). I can have a career. While away the hours until I die. I know I ought not to go gentle, but the imperative to take a hold of life seems hard, sometimes. If I keep working, will life stop feeling so flat?

And so I read Dirge Without Music, and, being asked to fully comprehend "I am not resigned", realised that I had pushed away that part of it the first time I read through. It hurts, not being resigned. How many times have I told myself that I'll just have to lump it?

Oh, help me, for I am not resigned. I am not resigned, and if I were resigned, not all the calm precautions and shaky rebuilding would ever be enough to restore the shine to my broken world.

Take me back, world of narratives and dreams. I know that beautiful things can die worthlessly. I know that many dreams disappear from our lives abruptly without so much as a 'goodbye'. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

When I finished crying and went outside, the sunshine seemed less incongruous. The grass was clean, the air was still, and my remembered loss still wasn't worth it, but I -- I wandered down the street with my radiant smile just a little bit easier than it was.

*I do not mean to imply that the non-religious ways of dealing with pain that I give later are not just as deeply felt by those with religion, too, of course -- L.L. Barkat's recent post would be proof against that assumption.

Stories

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't read The Amber Spyglass or 1984, and don't want to know plot points beforehand, don't read this (I say nothing for Brave New World because I doubt that prior knowledge of the stuff I'll say on it would make the book less interesting). I use both books to illustrate ideas in ways which give away part of the ending.

L.L. Barkat has been writing about stories recently, a subject that has to be fascinating to anyone who, like me, reads Terry Pratchett as much for philosophy as for laughs.

I need books. I've been reading one book after another ever since I first learned how. I need them for emotional expression -- I tend to feel like I haven't fully understood an emotion until I've felt it through a book character as well as through myself. Somehow, reading about someone else feeling something similar is the best way to validate the feelings that shape me (though seeing it on film or in a play is a good second). Books are my release. Books challenge my assumptions. I read books written at every level of heaviness, for every age group. I couldn't live without them.

A good story will often have all sorts of small threads, any one of which could be important to a given reader, as part of a whole which has a more over-arching message. When I first read The Amber Spyglass, I took away what I think was one of the main messages, the idea that you should lead your life fully and richly. By the end of the book, the world, nay, the multiverse, has been rearranged so that everyone must do this. Why? Because when you die and go to the world of the dead, the messengers will only show you the way out (to dissolve at last in the light) if you have a true story with which to repay them for their trouble. You must have some kind of story. If you are alive, you should live. And this highlighting of the importance of richly experiencing things is central to the book's later climax.

But when I re-read the book, years later, while I was interested to realise how it had influenced my philosophy, the most important thing to me was a smaller point, a mere expression of emotion. The Amber Spyglass has the best expression I've ever seen of what it's like to fall in love deeply for the first time and then lose it before it even starts. I needed that story. It's not actually a very common one; certainly I never found a pop song which lamented my love the way I needed to grieve for it.

Similarly, it was a minor realisation from George Orwell's 1984 that was most important to me the first time I read it. While the political insight is important, and I'm glad for that reason that I had to read it for English, the most important thing for me at first was when I got to the end where the authorities finally find a way to break him. I remember letting the book fall for a moment, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, transfixed, thinking Everybody has a breaking point. Logically, you can only value one thing above all else and it isn't usually anything particularly brave or noble; you shouldn't expect it to be. "Everybody has a breaking point," I whispered to the ceiling . . .

. . . and forgave myself.

Speaking of dystopias, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World had a rather important effect on me. It made me distinctly uncomfortable. I didn't really want to know the things it was saying. You see, my morality has always had a distinctly utilitarian bent. But Huxley's failed utopia is one which is designed to make people happy. They are brainwashed from birth to like being the way they are. If they get unhappy, there is a nice drug with few unpleasant side effects that they can take which will remedy the situation with perfect ease.

The whole set-up is creepy. Huxley creates this effect deliberately, mind, but in my view the creepy aspects that are hardest to put down to nothing more than culture shock are those which relate most strongly to the way in which the society of the book tries (with considerable success) to eliminate unhappiness from the world. Why? Well, maybe it's because the people who live there generally have no stories. Their lives are happy, if bland, but so devoid of story that even the comprehension of exciting, interesting stories is beyond them.

So that's how a story modified my view of the 'good' that we as individuals and as a society should strive to create. Sure, we should promote people's happiness, but we should also help their stories along. It's good to have a society in which people can dream for things. It's good for people to have a few problems (maybe not too many) and it's good for those problems to be solvable. Human beings need stories in order 'to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape', as Death says in Hogfather. Let's not forget it.

Potter and a proselytiser

The final Harry Potter book comes out in just over a month. Two years ago, on the day the sixth book came out, I made it to the bookstore at about half an hour past the release time (eleven in the morning, in New Zealand). There were multiple staff at work selling precisely that book; as I recall my copy was pre-ordered and I got hold of it fairly swiftly.

I didn't take it home. I have three little sisters, two of whom are huge fans! The only reason the other sister wasn't a fan is because she was only three, and far too young. But Mum was going to want to get her hands on a copy, too, and I didn't want my hold on the book to be compromised by anything until I had read it cover to cover. So I found a nice armchair in the local mall, opened the book, and began to read.

I paused after about two chapters to let the information so far imparted sink in. Didn't want to rush it -- I only get to read it for the first time once! As I glanced around the surrounding mall scene, I was approached by a girl who handed me a flyer.

It was shaped like a bank note and had '$100,000' written on it, along with 'THIS NOTE IS NOT LEGAL TENDER' in the place where an ordinary note would say the opposite. Around the edge, very small letters proclaimed the still more extreme worth of the message of Jesus Christ in somewhat doom-laden terms.

I looked up at the girl. She looked to be a few years younger than me, and was accompanied by another girl, still younger -- a sister? youth group friend? I couldn't resist remarking with some amusement "You're trying to bring people to Jesus by appealing to their sense of greed?"

Her smile as she shrugged and nodded was wry but friendly. And then she began her spiel.

"Do you know the ten commandments? You know, like don't kill, don't..."

"I could probably recite a few of them, but I might not be able to remember them all."

"Yeah? How many of them do you think you've broken?"

I tilted my head to one side. "I read a book recently, actually, that laid out all ten, interpreting them quite strictly, and I think there was maybe one that didn't apply to me." I know I must have smiled, thinking of it. I wasn't counting "don't murder" -- that's too easy. And adultery doesn't count either, because (a) I'm not married, and (b) if you think 'adultery' includes all sex outside of wedlock then I'm not actually always against it, so the fact that I was at that time (and regretfully still am) a virgin is merely an accident of circumstance.

She looked at me appraisingly. "You're quite humble, aren't you?"

I shrugged and smiled. I was flattered. "Sometimes, perhaps. Definitely not always!"

"I mean," she continued, "most people say 'Well, you know, I haven't killed anyone' " -- she mimicked the defensive tone recognisably but without exaggeration -- "so, no, I reckon you're pretty humble, really."

"I try..."

"D'you know about Jesus? Are you Christian?"

"I'm not," I returned calmly.

"You're not? Well, the thing is, if you've broken any of the ten commandments, God will punish you. You'll go to Hell. The only way to escape is through Jesus Christ, because He died for our sins so that we could be forgiven by God." Her tone was a weird mixture of earnestness and prattle.

"I have problems with the idea of Hell," I said. "It just doesn't seem reasonable."

"We've all sinned," she explained. "We're incredibly wicked, and --"

"I disagree!" I interrupted passionately. "I think we're all pretty beautiful, really."

"Well -- me, too."

"So how can you say that we deserve Hell?"

"Because -- well -- there has to be justice, doesn't there? What if we're talking about a murderer? Somebody brutally murders someone, and you're saying God should just let that person straight into heaven?"

"Well, maybe. I don't really hold with hurting people unnecessarily -- although I suppose some sort of punishment might be needed as a deterrent. Aside from that, it gets tricky. . ."

She looked at me doubtfully.

"Look, personally, I don't think I'd give a murderer more than maybe . . . thirty years? Fifty, maybe. I dunno. But seriously, can you honestly say you agree with endless torture? I just don't see how that could ever be justified. I mean, ten thousand years, perhaps, maybe we're all really terrible -- maybe some people deserve a billion years, even -- but eternal hellfire?"

"Maybe. You're a good person, I think. I mean, most people don't think they've broken very many commandments, but when you actually look at it -- don't have false gods, that includes anything you place above God, and then there's don't lie. . ."

"Actually," I said, catching a fragment of memory, "I think the one about lying might have been the one I didn't break. . ."

She looked at me doubtfully, and, considering what I'd just said, I frowned a bit myself -- why had I thought that?

"Well," she said, "bye. Keep the note. You can use it for a bookmark."

So I did.

After I'd finished the book, after my sick flash: "Oh, my god [sic]. Oh, my god. Harry is a horcrux. He's got to be. It's right there between the lines. But this is J. K. Rowling, so you can never really be sure. . ."

. . . after all of that, when I had a spare moment, I went back to our bookshelf and pulled down the piece of Christian exhortation I'd referred to in my conversation with the Christian girl. And there it was in black and white: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Why the author of the book didn't choose to extend it to all lying I'll never know. If he'd done that, he'd have got me. But, no. He started with saying that it didn't just refer to lying under oath and went on to include stuff like repeating nasty gossip about people. I could remember reading it and thinking:

Okay, so he's started with something I'd never do and now he's going on to talking about something that I've always seriously objected to and never been particularly prone to. . . . Have I ever done something like that? Ever? I think -- oh, no wait, there was that one time I felt really terrible about -- wait, no, that was just me laughing at something nasty that somebody else said. It was bad, but it doesn't actually fit this crime.

Good grief. Has this guilt vendor actually missed me? I think he might have. . .

Book Review: 'Adverbs'

Adverbs is the third book by Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, under his own name. I haven't read the other two. I also haven't read A Series of Unfortunate Events, thinking it wiser to avoid a book that looked likely to rely on the misfortune of its main characters to get a laugh; I have never been able to enjoy books like that. Still, ever since I saw a book entitled Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorised Autobiography, I've known that Lemony Snicket had my kind of sense of humour. So when I saw Adverbs, I jumped at the chance to read a book by the same author, aimed at an adult audience.

It's a book about love: love immediately, obviously, arguably, particularly.... Each chapter is named for an adverb and reads like a self-contained short story. But as you read, you realise "Hang on, that's that other guy's ex-girlfriend, oh, and wait, that other character must be the boy we saw a few stories back, all grown up!" I'm still finding new character links when I re-read. The most moving adverb, for me, was often.

"[D]o you really love that husband?"
"[...] Often I do. Yes. Often I love him and he is always my husband."

She really does love him. You can tell. In the jumble of oddly-shaped loves in this book, to love your husband of several years often is to say that this is a pretty wonderful relationship, and a real one at that.

The story is quirky; paradoxically, this gives the writing an immediacy, a real sense of reality. It feels stranger than fiction! It isn't just the characters that recur; the recycling of images and themes in contexts that give them new meanings had all the eerieness of a good sestina. The word 'love' in this book is taken in all its complexity and contradiction without any attempt to clarify or define.

It works. It works beautifully.