One could be forgiven for thinking that this book might fall into the Dan Brown/Da Vinci code “genre” to go by the title, but you’d be wrong.  There is a narrative device of two journals which alternate and one of these is necessarily hidden away and secret.  Perhaps secret is the wrong word, but there is a big “secret” which is only revealed towards the end of the book.  It is hard for me to talk about plot specifics without revealing this secret without “spoiling” the plot.

I was really quite taken with the way this book covers the sweep of an entire century, yet does so in a very engaging way by literally covering the life story of a woman from the last century to this.  All this in the context of Ireland.  There always seem to be questions I am left asking myself after reading a book, and I think the more of them I have usually is a pretty reliable indicator as to how good the book is or at least how much it engaged me.

For this book one question was if Sebastian Barry were Irish and another was whether he started the book with the ending in mind and some sort of plot outline.  For the former a quick google has revealed that he was Dublin born and is indeed Irish, as I expected since the book is immersed in Irish culture and history which was one of the reasons I so enjoyed it.  This also enabled me to learn a lot of history and background both of the troubles and of the recent revelations of abuse cases endemic in Ireland and a few other island nations (such as the island of Jersey where a residential childrens’ facility apparently had many many historic abuse cases).

As to where he started his planning of the book - well Google is less revealing of course and we can likely only speculate.

But this does lead me to the last thing I am curious about, which is how many readers are surprised by the final “twist” to the plot.  As the interleaving narratives progress we are left wondering if they will overlap in any other way than their perspectives on Roseanne’s life (it is told in the first person from the beginning and in third person from the end).  The third person is not the narrator per se, but another character in the book.  I found this plot device immensely satisfying and it gave Mr Barry a lot of opportunity to show what a fine writer he is.

To conclude - thoroughly recommended!  And please please do leave a comment to let me know if you were totally surprised as you finished the book or if you, like me, had intimations as to what was to be revealed before it was!

Over my holidays I took quite a few books with me, the majority on my ereader and two in paperback format.  I finished one of the paperbacks and found, as usual, that I was not going to get much further with Proust on my ereader!  Since the other paperback was not so appealing it was really nice that my uncle lent me a copy of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg.  I’m still reading this, but it is the main subject of the posting.

Before I start though let me just say a little about the book I finished reading.  There would have been an earlier post for this, but i was on holiday from being online as well as from London!  I had been under the impression that I was reading a first novel when i started “The Savage Garden” by Mark Mills but at book group I learned this was his second novel.  It did not really show as such to me.  I found it gauche and the inclusion of gratuitous and vaguely salacious sex scenes did not improve matters.  A contrived plot sees a young graduate in Tuscany, where he shows us how attractive and modest he is when the local women seem to flock around him and swoon.  Methinks the author is playing with his own identification with the main chracter.  The writing is equallty inept in the florid use of analogies and similies - as one member of the reading group pointed out, describing the touch of a woman’s thigh as “dough like” is not really a fabulous idea from the female point of view!  It did however work as a piece of holiday reading, one can flip through and get it read fast enough without troubling oneself that life is too short to read such things.  Think of it as reading pap to relax from more enjoyable and worthwhile reading.

When it comes to the subject of my posting though, I need to turn to the first book I mentioned above.  As you can clearly see from Wikipedia the author is a truly remarkable man!  I cannot quite believe that he started out in life as a shepherd and only in adult life became a more or less self educated author.  More than that, he managed to write a work that has come to feature as a classic work with a particular appeal as being of great historical interest.  It is entirely possible that this may attract a contemporary audience, if it is true that Ian Rankin is collaborating on a screenplay as my uncle tells me.

I cannot complete my opinions of the work yet, given that I am still reading it, but already I know that it appeals to me on two levels, both as a novel in it’s own right and as a work of great historical interest.  Perhaps it could be compared with something like “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins as an exciting read.  Of course the Wilkie Collins work has been adapted for stage and it appears Hoggs may make it to screen, one of the reasons the comparison sprang to mind.  If I have the time and given that I was on holiday in Edinburgh the work also appeals to me as a historical sourse informing me about Scottish History and the reformation.

There is yet one more level on which I enjoy the work though!  It deals with the idea that a person can act in the name of Religion and perpetrate acts which are anything but religious.  In this case Fratricide, marital rap, and more all feature!  But the character believes he is acting in accord with “God’s will” and this absolves him of personal moral responsibility.  Could this arguement not equally be applied in modern times as one we need to consider in facing the challenge of terrorism and so forth?

But to come back to the title subject - please consider this edition of the work, from Edinburgh University Press if you have any plans to buy it.  Although the original text is standard (and readily available online and in numerous paper editions) a good deal of the pleasure in this work is the considerable body of historical notes and research around the book and it’s author.  Incidentally there is a preview of the work at Google Books and the link above takes you there..

This is not the only reason to get a particular edition, there remain one or two more.  Perhaps the cover picture can be extremely annoying or misleading.  If you are bothered by such trivia then it can be a reason!  On the other hand I have another work (James Joyce’s Ullyses) where I expressly chose the edition I bought because it actually has a different text, one agreed as authentic after considerable study.

So these are the reasons I think the choice of an edition of a work really matters!  I wonder what YOU think?  Feel free to add comments!

Has it really just been a week since I last made a “religious” post?, It seems so.  This is quite a time of change, and the clocks moving from BST to GMT accentuates that to me.  But I want to share a couple of aphorisms and a context that gives them a more serious context.  So again this will be one of the more (gently) didactic posts. 

=====================================

To start with the light side - two jokes:-

What do you get if you cross a Druid with a Bhuddist?

a. Someone who hugs trees that are not there.

———————————————————————-

There is a Bhuddist monk on vacation in New York,  He goes up to a Hot Dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything”.

————————————————————————

OK three jokes technically!:-

The hot dog salesman takes the £100 bill the monk offers and passes him the hot dog with all the trimmings.  The monk waits and then says, “Where’s my change?” to which the vendor replies, “The only change can come from within”.

=====================================

Now, I share these not just because I think they are very funny, but to make an observation.  I think I may tell both these jokes to someone next time they ask if I am a Quaker.  If they laugh at neither I shall not try to answer their question, but enquire as to their spiritual progress.  If they laugh at the Druid one only I shall proceed with caution.  If they laugh at both I shall enquire which they prefer, and should it be the Druid one I shall proceed with caution, but if they prefer the Hot Dog joke I shall observe that our humour is as one and they may be closer to Quakerism than they know!

On a seperate subject I apologise for the number of posts which were purely about the site breaking - and I am going to set a lot of them private now - so the detrirus may no longer be visible.

There are also to be some odd posts coming in Movember connected with my NaNoWriMo project, but I have decided to separate these by making them an unusual time - so more than three years away from the here and now, that may confuse you at first, but hopefully shall become clear!

Addendum:- My plan seems flawed in it’s thinking having told the jokes to a number of Quaker acquaintances with varying results now!

Yes, maybe that is a touch tautological, maybe antonymic (bit of a contradiction in terms) but then that depends on where you are coming from spiritually.  For many faiths light and religion go hand in glove anyway.  In any case, it’s Sunday and I’d like to try to lift my head above the domestic disharmony that overshadowed the weekend (nothing serious, just seven year old tantrums and stuff) so for better or worse here is my stab at a post aimed in a vaguely spiritual direction.

A little while ago I “dugg” this article which I somehow googled towards (Disclaimer; that is not my newspaper of choice, and I have no recollection how I chanced on the article).  It prompted me to muse a little on human nature and how Religion and society interact.  I’m participating in a series of Sunday sessions entitled “twelve Quakers and…” which tonight is dealing with “… and God”. No doubt that played a part in my looking into the article.  Quakers often have issues with the big G in God and the big R in Religion.  Although Wikipedia defines Quakerism as fundamentally a Christian faith there’s actually a bit of a schism over that, with the Universalist Quaker Fellowship at one end of the spectrum and “evangelical” Quakers at the other.  I’ll confess I once made a wiki edit to remove Quakers from the Christian category of religions, but it did not even last 12 hours!  Guess that tells you which end of the spectrum I am at (either that or I’m a bit of an anarchist)!.

Coming back to the article, it seems Dorothy Rowe has quite a back catalogue of self-help psychology publications, but this is surely a piggie back on the Richard Dawkins book.  I was most provoked by her assertion that “No religion accepts us as the person we know ourselves to be” because I cannot think of anything that jars more with my Quaker faith!  Of course there does remain the question of how far I “know myself”, but setting that to one side I do feel accepted as I am within the Religious Society of Friends.  It is interesting how something has to be provocative to get the thought process going.

I know what she is referring to and I can recognise it in many faiths, particularly fundamentalist ones, but to me this is almost the antithesis of religion.  At the very least it surely shows sloppy thinking on her part?  I do enjoy examining religion from a polytheist or atheist point of view though.  I find it more spiritual and thought provoking than any belief in certainties.

When I tell people I am a Quaker I have to prepare myself for questions like “are you a Christian?” and “what do you believe in?” and “Do you believe in God?” and my responses have evolved and are always changing.  I’ve never really tried a silent response, the Quaker silence can freak some people out and in this context would be misconstrued.  Early on I might proffer a few Fox quotes like we believe “in that of God in everyone”.  I have cited the example of a Quaker who got into a heated parking space dispute before Meeting and when asked - “But how can you fight with me over this space, you’re a Quaker?” replied with - “Yes!  That’s WHY I’m a Quaker!”.  I have tried talking about the sharing of common values (like peace, simplicity, community, discernment, charity).  I have been prepared not to snigger or take offense when people think I am Amish or that I can be polygamous (both have occured!).  People become confused by our lack of sacraments, it seems they need a certain amount of “smoke and mirrors” before they can regard something as “religious”.  I think Quakers hold the totallity of life as their sacrament, and since that makes religion somewhat all-pervasive it becomes hard for others to recognise.  I guess it makes Quakers particularly sensitive to Ellas position rather than Siegfrieds?  But the majority of Quakers are very much empowered and driven to aspire to change things in this life, so I think the comparison with Ella ends there.

I am now considering remembering this quote and citing it as the antithesis of what Quakerism means to me.  Perhaps the approach of telling people what Quakers are NOT, whilst exhausting, might be more productive in the long term than trying to sum up what we ARE?  I already see a pitfall though, because the mis-conception that I find the most irritating about Quakers is the commonly held belief that we are “wishy washy” or somehow will not commit or be pinned down on what we do believe.  This misconception is even harder to correct because, believe it or not, Quakers are highly mistrustful of words when it comes to spiritual matters.  If you look into Quaker history you’ll soon see they are people of action not afraid to commit and usually highly principled (EG if called to “take an oath” in court Quakers would refuse, George Fox having set a Quaker precedent).

This has probably been one of my longer posts.  I hope it did not seem like a sermon!

I have not adopted one of those blogging “code of ethics”; so I’ll say here that any comment other than spam will be allowed to stand.  You can even say “God’s a s**t”, but that will not be very original in this context!.

You will sometimes find me indulging in a little light word play (as when I began this post).  That is part of the reason I added Wordie to the sidebar.  Similarly the Digg flash widget is partly there so that I can “Digg” things I want to flag as possible future post material.  I would appreciate feedback if anyone finds the site becoming too cluttered - already I think I have reached the limit and possibly exceeded it.  My thinking on that subject is that since many of the extras are there to be handy for me as much as any reader I may have two different sidebars and only load the “bloated” one when someone is logged in - that way first time visitors and casual readers will not be troubled by my twittering or “Digging” etc.  Those that want the extras can log in to get them.

Right - well that will give me some coding to play around with tonight, after me and my Friends have discussed our views on God!  Incidentally God is big enough that we do him for two months in a row!

By the way (if any readers are left!) I’m also aiming to upgrade my Chyrp! Blog software to v2rc2 this week - I’ll try to put up a “back soon” page while the work is in progress… But I know I don’t have THAT many readers just yet!