Bibliography, November 2019

BOTM: D. Lessing, The grass is singing (1950)

M. Brearley, On cricket (2018)
T. Holland, Dominion (2019)
U.K. Le Guin, The real and the unreal: selected stories, volume 2 (2012)
A. Munro, Something I've been meaning to tell you (1974)
S. Tighe, Rethinking strategy (2019)
B. Wilson, The Hive (2004)
J. Worth, Call the midwife (2001)

It has been a mediocre month, and surprisingly so. I'm a big fan of many of the authors on this list, but it is clear I was not reading their best work. Of the stronger ones, Brearley was very enjoyable, but I have read lots of this kind of thing before; ditto Le Guin. More interesting was Lessing, both on its own merits, and in the context of when it was written. Its racial politics are clearly progressive for 1950, and in themselves unobjectionable, but it would be inconceivable to write such a novel now, with the black voice almost completely silent save as a foil to the disintegration of the whites.

A lengthy and specific coda now follows on Dominion, which I expected to be my favourite, but wasn't.

Good things first. This is a well written, very enjoyable, canter through the history of Western Christianity. Tom Holland writes nicely and has a great eye for interesting detail and insightful extrapolation, as well as good asides. As a narrative history, it's very good. But that's not the limit of the ambition of this book - it wants to show that Christian heritage drives much of the modern west's values, and are unique. I found both of these problematic, especially the latter.

Part of this I think is an unwillingness to do the major work, which I'll come onto, but there are also more minor questions of accuracy, noticeable perhaps only to people who have been over this ground many times before. Ulfilas, bishop to the Goths, is described as only really ministering to Christian captives on page 186, but six pages later is translating the bible into Gothic. Wittenberg was not, in 1517, 'poor and remote' (p.295), but the residence of one of the seven Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. These don't really matter, but are suggestive of a desire to ramp up the rhetoric at the expense of detail. Personally, I also found irritating the fact that Gregory VII, who animates a lot of this book, is interchangeably referred to as Hildebrand (his given name), though I accept that's personal only.

The central role given to Gregory is however, excellent. Canossa here is given its rightful place in the Christian narrative. The hinge of that narrative is the early part of the second millenium, and Holland does it well, though I would have liked to see more on Innocent III. This experience is western European only - this is after all, a history of 'the making of the western mind' - and is the first of my major objections: the book skates over the clear implications of this focus. Whatever we are talking about cannot be intrinsic to Christianity if it doesn't describe the experience and thought of the Christians to the east of the Adriatic, and indeed those east of the Euphrates. Holland knows the eastern church perfectly well, but much of what he claims to be Christian would I think be hugely undermined by an assessment of the Byzantine church and state.

Even more serious, and I think fatal, is the lack of engagement with any comparative religious analysis. Frequently, things are referred to a unique or unprecedented, but I just don't think they are. I'm not an expert on eastern religion, but it's very clearly not unique to Christianity to love the poor, nor even for the nobility to do it. Ask anyone from the subcontinent. I'm less familiar with some of the comparisons around sexual mores, both monogamy and homosexuality, but again, the only comparisons are classical and occasionally Islamic.  That's Holland's specialism, but I don't think it's credible to make claims about the distinctiveness of Christianity in a book, whose excellent index (for which many commendations) has a sole reference to Hinduism and none to Buddhism.

As I write this, I wonder if I'm being overly critical. For I am sympathetic to the view that Christian history has shaped modern thinking, and that many modern assumptions owe much to particular strands of thought in our Christ-drenched, though also classically influenced, backstory. Books that tell that story are welcome. And this makes clear the distinctions between parts of the ancient west and parts of the Christian west. However, to expand that thesis requires a lot more than is present here. I understand anyone not wanting to spend more time on Buddhism than they have to, but then they shouldn't make the claims contained here.