Catching Up

So I'm falling behind... Here are quick reviews of several books I read to finish off the year.

The Elephant Man - Christine Sparks, 1986

A novel based on a screenplay based on the true story of "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, there are some genuinely moving episodes here, but mostly it got me interested to read the actual true story. It does have a good message of love and compassion for handicap, and the writing is effective and straightforward, if there are a few contrived scenes designed to go for the heart-strings.

Arbitrary rating: 3.5 out of 5 thrumming heart-strings

The Swarm - Arthur Herzog, 1974

The Andromeda Strain with bees, and a way more boring command center for the scientists that are going to save the world. There are about as many bee sex scenes as there are human sex scenes. The best parts were the exhaustive presentations of real-life bee research.

Arbitrary rating: 2 out of 5 scaremongering attempts

The Island - Peter Benchley, 1979

This third novel from the author of Jaws strikes an uneasy balance between popular and serious fiction. Essentially a hybrid of Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, he portrays a modern society of pirates who capture a journalist and his 12-year-old son. I can't say he's off-base on human nature, and his action writing is taut and realistic, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant to read.

Arbitrary rating: 2 out of 5 uneasy balances

The Deep - Peter Benchley, 1976

A honeymooning couple diving in Bermuda find a WWII wreck containing millions of dollars of morphine, on top of a 400-year-old Spanish wreck filled with fabulous treasure. When their find is discovered, they are caught between an unresponsive government and a dangerous drug syndicate. This is a very well-written adventure/thriller, but once again, realism trumps fun, and the characters aren't sympathetic enough for me to truly care (for example, the main character is a man who has left his first wife and his children for a woman half his age).

Arbitrary rating: 2 out of 5 dangerous drug syndicates

The Lurking Fear - H. P. Lovecraft

The Lurking Fear (Lovecraft, 1916-1939)

If The Whisperer in Darkness and The Haunter of the Dark showcase Lovecraft's unique genius for horror and weird fiction, the round-up compilation The Lurking Fear showcases the author's missteps, mediocrity, and pent-up racism, though it does have a few short stories worth reading within its cold pages.

After reading some of these more conventional horror stories, I see Lovecraft's limitations as a writer. In the absence of truly creative and gripping conceptions, Lovecraft is reduced to transparent foreshadowing and verbose hysterics. His themes seem to fall within a few categories:  reverse evolution, tainted bloodlines, ancestral curses, and doomed artists. The strongest of the reverse evolution stories, "The Lurking Fear" is notable more for its grotesque violence and disjointed timeline than its ability to inspire terror. There are some additional prose-poem dream studies and myths here, like "The White Ship", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", and "The Quest of Iranon", which have subtle tie-ins to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and reveal the despairing poet always hiding behind Lovecraft's macabre imaginings.

We do get some excellent horror stories here that are worth a note:

• "The Temple" - Some rare humor, as Lovecraft lambasts a WWI German U-boat commander whose pride sacrifices his crew to an underwater vengeance.
• "From Beyond" - A scientist creates a machine that allows him to see the dreadful beings and powers that surround us each day.
• "The Outsider" - A prisoner in a dark tower tries to escape, but is there anywhere for him to go?
• "In the Vault" - A corner-cutting gravedigger traps himself overnight in a vault with several fresh caskets.
• "Cool Air" - A mysterious doctor whose specialty is prolonging life keeps the temperature in his apartments exceedingly cold.
• "The Rats in the Walls" - An American returns to his ancestral home in England, only to uncover a family curse that starts to manifest in terrifying ways.

These stories are good, but The Lurking Fear as a whole is for the completist only.

Arbitrary rating:  3 out of 5 macabre imaginings

The Haunter of the Dark - H.P. Lovecraft

The Haunter of the Dark (Lovecraft, 1920-1943)

After reading all that serious stuff, it was time for fun. The Haunter of the Dark compiles a generous helping of Lovecraft's finest horror/sci-fi stories with all the Randolph Carter stories, including the bizarre fantasy-horror epic The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Let's start with the Dream-Quest. Unpublished during Lovecraft's lifetime, it chronicles Randolph Carter's quest through the Dream World to find Kadath, the residence of the Great Ones. Driven by a dream of paradise that he is convinced the Great Ones can make a reality, Carter travels far and wide, braving dark horrors and enlisting ghoulish help before he comes to his cataclysmic destination. Throughout the journey, Lovecraft ties together several of his earlier stories, myths, and prose poems (most of which are included in this volume). His imagination is grandly unbridled in this sweeping, Tolkien-esque tale, and alongside The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, another great novel unpublished in his lifetime, it might be his weird fiction masterpiece.

A book of Dream-Quest and its related tales would be plenty, but on top of this we have a dazzling array of classics:

• "The Haunter of the Dark" - A young man accidentally calls forth an ancient evil from a desecrated cathedral.
• "The Shunned House" - A truly unique and creative twist on the haunted house story.
• "The Colour Out of Space" - After an asteroid crashes on a farm, an insidious substance saps the life out of the land and the family.
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth - A stranger in a blighted town must run for his life when he learns about the strange cult of the inhabitants.
• "The Dreams in the Witch House" - A student suffers from increasingly vivid and disturbing dreams, while mysterious kidnappings are reported in the poorer regions of town.
• "The Thing on the Doorstep" - A man worries for the health of his friend, a reclusive student of the occult whose wife's dark knowledge is even more arcane and dangerous.
• The Shadow Out of Time - A professor loses five years of his life, during which his personality changes and he conducts strange research. Upon regaining his personality, he has no recollection of what he did during that time, but he is haunted by weird dreams of an eldritch, Cyclopaean civilization.

As if this wasn't enough, we get his weird poetry cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth", the "History of the Necronomicon" snippet, and a lengthy essay entitled "Supernatural Horror in Literature", which might be the closest thing to a statement of artistic intent Lovecraft ever wrote, before it devolves into a list of novels and stories he likes. The only misstep for me is "Herbert West - Reanimator", a gruesome yet scattered update of Frankenstein. On the whole, this collection makes a stunning case for Lovecraft as a true pioneer of horror and science fiction.

Arbitrary rating:  4.5 out of 5 grandly unbridled imaginations

The Bondage of the Will - Martin Luther

The Bondage of the Will (Luther, 1525)

While I was in a Reformation-era mood, I thought it might be fun to read a primary source. Boy was I right!  Luther's book on the omnipotence of God was written in response to Erasmus' Diatribe, which maintained man's ability to choose to follow God of his own free will (and which, as a matter of course, accused Luther of heresy).  Luther is not only surprisingly readable, but his fiery passion positively blazes on every page.  Add in some good old-fashioned wit and creative insults to his debate opponent, and who knew polemic writing could be so vivacious?

I wish I could do Martin Luther's style justice. He is undoubtedly learned, but he doesn't flaunt his learning, and he is very direct and easy to read. He dissects Erasmus's book methodically, yet the argument does not drag or flag over the entire 400 pages. He writes with a passion that could be observed in your pick of Internet news article commenters, yet with a precision and erudition that is decidedly absent from that forum. I'm sure there is a bit of self-interest involved -- how could there not be? -- as he defends his arguments and beliefs against the aspersions Erasmus cast on them, but on the whole, his passion is for the accurate expounding and applying of Scripture to the question at hand, which is, "Do humans have a free will to choose to follow God, or is God truly all-powerful over our will?"

This is a question that has divided Christians since the beginning and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  Luther supports his arguments in favor of God's omnipotence very convincingly, both from the Bible and from example. The most convincing to me is this: that a claim to free will with regard to sin and salvation is meaningless. We are all slaves to something, whether it is pride, fear, envy, self-interest, or God.  We do not have the power to choose to discard sin any more than a prisoner can choose to walk out of his locked cell. Luther emphasizes the full power of God, who came down to us and broke our chains. His love secures our redemption and frees us to follow him, yet we had no power to obtain that freedom on our own.  And while we do appear to choose our reaction to this freedom, our will is still not free to make the choice. Either we recognize God's goodness and are unable to do anything but come in humble love and thankfulness, or our will is still enslaved, our prison is too familiar, and we wrap ourselves up in the broken chains.

I'm probably getting way out of my depth here, but that's about the gist of it. I think we are given a little more freedom than Martin Luther allows, since I think freedom is required for love, otherwise God would have truly made us robots and left the one tree out of Eden. But on the whole, this is a stirring, yet readable, theological masterwork.

Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 vivacious polemics

Foxe's Annals of Martyrs

Foxe's Annals of Martyrs

When reading Owen Chadwick's history of the Reformation, he mentioned John Foxe and his lengthy martyrology compiled in the late 1500s.  I figured such a classic was worth tackling - however, I'm not sure I did... The best I can tell, this is a small subsection of Foxe, heavily updated and adapted to the late Victorian/early Edwardian reading public.  (There is even a quote from Tennyson.)  I could find nothing about who originally wrote, edited, or published this, or even what parts of Foxe it paraphrased. So this is easily the most mysterious publication I've ever read!

Once again, it is history, so authorial identity aside, I'm sure the facts are fairly stable. The author's intent is not merely to record history, however, but to inspire and caution Christians of any age with the examples of their ancestors in the faith. This little volume covers about the first 1200 years of Christianity, but it particularly focuses on the persecution of the early church under Roman rule.

The brave men, women, and children (yes, children) who humbly died for their faith speak a powerful testimony even 2,000 years later. The book does not deify all martyrs, though. There is plenty of condemnation of the zeal for martyrdom, and of over-excited people who provoked their own deaths from a rebellious or antagonistic spirit. The author also examines false martyrdom, or those who hoped for earthly glory by earthly sufferings -- one of the later church leaders to die under the Romans made sure to bequeath some relics to his followers on the day of his execution for future worship ("Real live relics, get your relics here!").

Martyrdom is definitely a hard topic.  I hope that I would stand by my beliefs when faced with pain and death, but I also know how wimpy I am in everyday life. The thought of censure or disagreement alone usually silences my tongue, and this is on meaningless stuff - movies, TV shows, political opinions, and so on. And of course, if real danger does come, there also rises up a host of un-Christian motives to resist it, whether it be the desire to impress people with your steadfastness, to stick it to the man, or just to refuse to conform. It can also become a kind of trump card - "They must be right, because they are dying for their beliefs."  In fact, persecution and martyrdom can be (and has been) used to justify just about anything. Ultimately, God knows the hearts of everyone, and the only heart I can really attempt to know is my own.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 mysterious publications

The Penguin History of the Church

The Penguin History of the Church

The Early Church (Vol. 1) - Henry Chadwick
The Reformation (Vol. 3) - Owen Chadwick
The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (Vol. 4) - Gerald R. Cragg
The Church in an Age of Revolution (Vol. 5) - Alec R. Vidler

After reading Mangalwadi's book about how the Bible shaped western civilization, I realized that he knew a lot more about my history than I did.  So I dove into this history series to try and supply what my college Western Civ class distinctly omitted.

I'm not sure how to review history books, other than to affirm, "Yep, that happened."  For a professed fiction junkie like myself, I found the reading surprisingly enjoyable, with plenty of spice and humanity, rather than the oppressively academic laundry list of people and events I was afraid of encountering.  Owen Chadwick's account of the Reformation in particular brings that turbulent period to life and reveals Chadwick as an empathetic yet incisive observer. Each of the historians brings their own lens to the period they cover, and it is interesting to read their opinions, interpretations, and judgments alongside the historical narrative.  I suspect the authors are all British, since the later volumes especially seem to focus on the Anglican church rather heavily, and the Greek and Eastern Orthodox churches are almost entirely ignored after Volume 1, but I guess you can't cover everything in a relatively short space.

My take-away points from this educational romp:

1) It is almost frightening to see how quickly human pride, bickering, vindictiveness, and the need for control crept into the early church.  Though I guess it is impossible to keep human nature out of anything involving humans, it's still crazy to me that an oppressed and persecuted people professing God's love so quickly had "leaders" rise up and cause deadly internal strife over minute points of doctrine.  More fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I suppose -- we have to be equal to God, fully understanding everything and pinning Him down to our own definitions.

2) It is equally frightening to see how quickly the same problems crept into each successive reformation and evolution of the church.  I had no idea that early Lutherans and Calvinists were still burning heretics at the stake -- again, you'd think the testimony of their own martyrs killed by the Catholic church would be enough to drive that notion out -- but it's a case of me judging history by my own understanding.  It was inconceivable to that world that the religion and the state be at all separate. Religious dissent was a form a treason. And before I get quick to judge, we still have types of "thinkcrimes" to some degree in our society, even they are more subtle in form and punishment.

3) I truly did not have a concept of how much time has passed between Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and the current day.  Vol. 1 covers 400 years - that is longer than the U.S. has been a country - and then Vol. 3 (I didn't have Vol. 2 on the Middle Ages) picks up 1,000 years later - and that is still 500 years ago. So many people lived and died, so many changes happened, and so many things stayed the same. It's mind-boggling.

4)  In the face of so much human frailty, error, violence, time, and sin, it is a revelation of God's grace to see how the Gospel was preserved clean through flawed humans and even more flawed institutions. To hear writers from the first century AD quoting the same scriptures that we are reading today is just phenomenal. The thread of grace through history shines brightly and remains unconquered by humanity's best attempts to eradicate it.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 threads of grace