–Alexander Larman in The Spectator reviews two new books about religion: Twelve Churches by Fergus Butler-Gallie and God, the Science, the Evidence by Miles-Yves BollorĂ© and Olivier Bonnaissies. The article opens with a brief reference to the religious writings of two British authors:
In Philip Larkin’s 1954 poem “Church Going,” the narrator walks into a deserted English country church, and observes that it isn’t up to much. Larkin writes that there is “a tense, musty, unignorable silence/ Brewed God knows how long,” feels a sense of “awkward reverence” and, on the way out, “Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.” It is one of the great vignettes of church-crawling, as the practice is generally known – wandering into an empty ecclesiastical space, not being wildly impressed and strolling out again, unblessed by the visit.
Yet for Larkin, that it will be “A shape less recognizable each week/ A purpose more obscure” is a tragedy, even for a non-believer. Even this second or third-rate building, in his eyes, merits the recognition that “A serious house on serious earth it is,” and the universal desire to embrace religion will be inevitable, “Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.” In other words, “the twitch upon the thread,” as Evelyn Waugh wrote of the pull of Catholicism, is more powerful than any carefully (or carelessly) reasoned defense of atheism, even if we are constantly being told that belief in a Judeo-Christian deity is an anachronism and that we should instead embrace Allah, Buddha or Jeff Bezos, depending on our particular view of divinity…
The Spectator article is available here.
–Another article in The Spectator considers the death of the Great American Novel. This is by Michael P Gibson who, after an obituary of his subject, looks for some hope of a rebirth:
…But while it’s true the mainstream literary beast lies belly-up, gasping for its last breath, something fervent is stirring in the cultural underbrush. There may never be a single novel that dominates conversation at cocktail parties across the nation again, but there are little polities of the mind emerging, building their own canons like medieval monks illuminating manuscripts in hidden scriptoria.
Take the TradCaths. This small but spirited tribe is resurrecting G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh – not American authors, sure, but they will form the foundation of a counter-canon that’s booming in sales of reprints and in homeschool curricula, while the secular slop of literary fiction wheezes on life support. In short, the center cannot hold, but the fringes will flourish. And there is one niche with a strong counter current that interests me most…
The article concludes with this:
…Meanwhile, the established, respected, highbrow world of literature, the gatekeepers to the professions and the petty tyrants of the administrative state read their canon on a sinking Titanic.
The future of American fiction is not in New York’s publishing houses, nor in the pages of the New York Times. It’s tribal and alive in the shadows, where stories are written not for prestige but for truth. It will belong to those who win.
Here’s a link.
–As if in answer to Michael Gibson’s cautious optimism, the New York Times offers a review of a new novel entitled Amanda by H S Cross. Here are the opening paragraphs:
H.S. Cross’s “Amanda” is a historical romance of a grand, old-fashioned and very British variety, with hints of L.P. Hartley, D.H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh — an impressive feat for an American author writing many decades after them.
The novel opens in the 1920s with Marion, a mysterious governess in London who is being haunted on several fronts: by her short-lived marriage to a violent man in Ireland that prompted her to flee for a job at a printing press in Oxford; by the loss of her beloved brothers in the trenches of World War I; by “the Talkers” she hears speaking to her inside her head; and, most recently and desperately, by her abrupt defection from Jamie, the upper-class university student she fell in love with while in Oxford. Without him, Marion carries on in “the waiting room that was her life,” facing “the grubby truth, the one that would kill you: She missed him.”…
–Critic and TV presenter Mark Lawson, writing in The Guardian, takes the occasion to note 70 years of outstanding programming on ITV, beginning in 1955 and going to 2025, considering one program each year. The 1981 selection was easy– Brideshead Revisited:
The north-west franchise Granada openly aspired to be a BBC beside the Manchester Ship canal, most provocatively parking its tanks on the lawns of the country house classic adaptation with this 13-part version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel about Catholic nobs. From Jeremy Irons’s mournful narration via a cameo from Lord Olivier to the honeyed photography, it terrified the BBC, as planned, and remains among the greatest TV dramas.
The only comparable literary adaptation came a few years later with Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown.
–Finally, a story by Laura Fernandez in the Spanish paper El Pais describes the opening of Spain’s first pet cemetery. Here is the header:
Bury a loved one in Spain’s first pet cemetery.
Founded in 1972 in a small town reminiscent of Ludlow, the setting of Stephen King’s famous novel, this cemetery is named after Evelyn Waugh’s satire about a poet who buries pets: ‘The Loved Ones’
