Uncertainty As The Path To Resurrection In Dante's Commedia

The Christian holidays have become largely divorced from their original meanings. In some ways this is helpful, allowing them to be days of universal celebration rather than exclusively serving a single section of our theologically diverse societies. Christmas is these days about giving, gratitude, and reuniting with loved ones, rather than specifically a celebration of Christ's birth. Christ's story encompasses those qualities, but what is celebrated are the shared values rather than the event itself. Though most are aware of Christmas' religious origins - it's right there in the name - the connection is not necessarily made between those origins and the values it now represents. This inevitably leads to the hackneyed complaint that Christmas is just about 'capitalism', which says more about the complainer's inability to understand the value of giving than they might have wished.

Easter is further divorced from the reasons for its Christian celebration than Christmas. In part, this is because the name does not tie in so obviously. According to the Venerable Bede, a seventh-century monk known as the 'Father of English history' for his ecumenical writings, the month of Christ's resurrection was called Eostremonath in Old English, named for the goddess Eostre. The association between the two stuck even after the name of the month changed. Aside from the loose symbolism of eggs to birth, the idea of resurrection has been lost in how we celebrate Easter today. In search of that original meaning and how it relates to our contemporary lives, we should look to one of the great works of the global literary canon, whose narrative not coincidentally begins on Maundy Thursday, just before Easter Weekend: Dante Alighieri's epic poem, the Commedia.

William Blake & The Mythology Of Imagination

William Blake is best known to many through 'Songs of Innocence And Of Experience', his collection of poems taught in schools. In these poems, Blake contrasts two states of human existence: innocence, or the state of childhood, in which one sees the world with open eyes and an open mind, and experience, in which one's perception has been shaped and restricted by social forces and one's own inhibitions. The two states do not exist independently of each other and most of the poems in one book have a counterpart in the other, reflecting how innocence must grow to survive in the world of experience, and how only through experience do the best parts of innocence become valued.

These themes reflect concerns which echo throughout Blake's wider body of work in various forms. Blake was enraptured by interdependent dualisms, particularly the Biblical mythology which captured the imagination with stories of man's fall and rise, and organised religion's manipulation of those stories to maintain power and subjugate the masses both spiritually and sexually. Though sadly little known these days, Blake authored a prophetic mythology of his own, one of the great unrecognised works of the English literary canon, imagining how man could rise out of the subjugation of religion, education and rationalism and enter a state of pure imagination

Go Set A Watchman book review (Archive)

[These articles were originally written around 2014-15 for a separate outlet whose redesign has resulted in several of my pieces being lost. I'm republishing a number of my favourites on this blog for posterity.]

The circumstances surrounding the publication of Go Set A Watchman have been sufficiently well documented and debated that there seems little need to retread that ground here. Whether or not you choose to buy the book as a result of its questionable journey into print is one best left to your own conscience rather than a thousand words of a reviewer wrestling with his. The core matter to be dealt with is simply whether or not it is a worthwhile book. My answer would be an emphatic yes.

It must be noted that it is a tremendously challenging book, a long way from the moral simplicity of To Kill A Mockingbird, the novel it was later redrafted into but to which it now serves as a pseudo-sequel. Much has already been written about Atticus Finch being revealed as holding pro-segregationist views – with, as might have been expected, plenty of people popping out of the internet woodwork to let everyone know it was obvious to them all along, even if they didn’t say anything at the time – and Scout, here known by her birth name of Jean Louise, struggling to deal with the idea of her father not being the paragon of virtue she had long looked up to.

The Times They Are A-Changin': The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 1969 review

I'm not usually a big comic book reader, but have made a note of following Alan Moore's work ever since falling in love with the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume. Funnily enough, I only picked it up after watching the grotesque distortion that was the movie adaptation, where I adored the concept of a Victorian Justice League of sorts, fighting crime in the realm of popular fiction, and was desperate to see if the original work did it justice. Needless to say, I haven't looked back since. Amazing to think that first Volume is now over ten years old.

I was both wildly overexcited and a smidgen apprehensive when it was announced that Moore and series illustrator Kevin O'Neill were planning a three-part epic following the League as they fought a supernatural threat over the course of an entire century. On the one hand, it was going to be the League on its biggest scale yet; on the other, I adored the Victorian arcana of the first two volumes and disconnected slightly from the more psychedelic content in the Black Dossier. The idea of moving completely out of that era was a little worrying and whilst the first entry, 1910, was close enough that it felt much the same as ever, 1969 brings something new to the table. Fortunately, that's a very good thing.

  

Book Review: Carte Blanche

I don't read very many new books - classics are easier to find, and more reliable in quality - so don't expect book reviews to become a regular feature on the blog. I am, however, a huge James Bond fan, so the prospect of a new entry into his literary canon - even after Sebastian Faulk's less than distinguished effort, Devil May Care - is irresistible. Since my passion for the character is most likely shared by a fair number of my readers, I thought I'd write up a review for Jeffery Deaver's novel, which is out in the UK now and released in the US/Canada on Tuesday, June 14th.

The novel pulls Bond into the 21st Century, where he is now a veteran of the Gulf war and recruited into a black ops secret service outfit inspired by Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive, a clandestine World War II spy organisation - unofficially, but brilliantly, known as the 'Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' - famous for its huge number of foreign moles and amateur agents who performed great deeds in sabotaging Nazi operations. One of its most famous agents was Christine Granville, whom Fleming used as inspiration for his first Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. I, for one, can say that using the SOE as inspiration for a post-War spy department is a spectacularly good idea, because my novels do so in almost (almost!) exactly the same way as Deaver's - should I be annoyed, or flattered? Either way, it's a shame he doesn't do anything more with it than give Carte Blanche a bit of historical perspective. Honestly, Jeff, if you're going to nick my ideas...