Culture

On the southern edge of Kensal Green cemetery, beneath the wall that separates the graves from the Grand Union Canal, is a memorial inscription that would stop a Duns Scotus in his tracks. At the top of the heart-shaped marble there is a fading photograph of a man in his middle years, and then beneath some touching messages of love and regret, a single, enigmatic line of inscrutable theological subtlety ‘FROM ODDS ON TO ODDS AGAINST.’ It is hard to know what to make of that — ‘From certainty to doubt?’ ‘From scant rewards to a last, triumphant pay-out?’ — but for any self-respecting angler still on the other side of that wall this is the very definition of Heaven.

Taming the Gods is an extended essay about the secular state, something which would until recently have been regarded as a non-issue by English-speaking readers. The separation of Church and State is taken so much for granted in the West, that one can easily forget how recent and local its origins are. Religious beliefs, wrote Edward Gibbon, are ‘considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful’. As usual, Gibbon was fathering on the Romans the instincts of enlightened Englishmen of his own day. For the secular state was born in 18th-century England, and adopted by Revolutionary France.

Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Follows, marks a deliberate change from past form. Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Fol lows, marks a deliberate change from past form. Gone are the musical, metaphorical sentences and the fanciful narratives, and in come realism, character and dialogue. It’s not all completely new, in that the novel is set partly in 2024, and partly in Bush’s Texas in 2006; but then again the 2024 of this novel is merely the present day with even more governmental nannying and some unlikely-sounding ‘telescreens’ (which sound like a view of the future as conceived in the 1950s).

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. Born in 1892, she buried painful experiences all her life, telling no one, apparently forgetting — but they came out in her stories and novels. Her most famous novel, The Good Earth, has never been out of print and has sold millions of copies in many countries.

Not only Webster but most of us are much possessed by death. Even if we don’t see the skull beneath the skin, we enjoy the thought that it’s there and look forward to the day when it will turn to dust so that we can sing its bygone glories. Notoriously, the ancient Anglo-Saxons allowed their Roman buildings to fall into ruin and then wrote elegies to mourn their passing. The rise of Greek cities left the countryside to languish outside its walls and gave birth to bucolic poetry. Trains and planes proclaimed the end of parochialism and allowed for the rebirth of patriotism. Likewise with new technologies. Photography proclaimed the death of painting, before the birth of Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is one the best works written in English in my lifetime. He is a truly great storyteller, and the details of his myth, as well as the rich gallery of characters, live forever in the reader’s memory. It upset many religious readers, especially in America, because of the fact that the central villainy of the Gobblers, child-stealers controlled by the Magisterium, are a Blake-inspired vision of Church Christians. (And rather a prophetic picture of what is now revealed on a daily basis in the papers about the activities of the Roman Catholic clergy).