40BFL 13: Birthday Letters

Ok - so I haven't done so well in writing reviews of my favourite 40 books in Lent. 13 is a little disappointing - in fact at 31% it is pretty much 'unclassified'. I blame Roaring who has been silent for some time.

Anyway, it's Good Friday so I thought I would make one more entry. Good Friday, number 13, it all seems somehow appropriate, and, as I have been reading Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters for the past few months, it seemed like a good fit.

I've always liked Ted Hughes' poems, particularly Crow; but I hadn't read Birthday Letters. I actually usually prefer Plath's poems and love The Bell Jar, which features as an image throughout Birthday Letters. I only picked up a copy after reading 'Last Letter' published in the Oct 2010 New Statesman. Hughes is a great storyteller, but it is the way he shocks with perfectly selected words intensity of emotion and change of mood. Repetition of words and sounds produces a cumulative effect, preparing the reader for the disaster they know is coming, only to delay, and then with perfect timing deliver the fear and loss. A life possessed of so much tragedy finds its lethal expression of grief:

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: 'Your wife is dead.'

Birthday Letters is the most intense autobiography imaginable. It is like Groundhog Day, where every day is repeated but somehow ends in the death of the lover. Bill Murray swimming against the pull of the waterfall in every possible direction but everytime getting pulled back into the abyss of churning water. Plath is painted in such bright colours you long for her, believe in her, feel the rawness of her emotions, the brightness of hope, love, passion. But always the dark shadow of Hughes' failure and her death - harrowing, exhausting to read. I never read more than one a day.

Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy moments
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes.
I jigged through those gestures - watched and judged
Only by starry darkness and a shadow.
Unknown to you and not knowing you.
Aiming to find you, and missing, and again missing.
Flinging earth at a glass that could not protect you
Because you were not there.

Ten years after your death
I meet on a page of your journal, as never before,
The shock of your joy
When you heard that. The the shock
Of your prayers. And under those prayers your panic
That prayers might not create the miracle,
Then, under the panic, the nightmare
That came rolling to crush you:
Your alternative - the unthinkable
Old despair and the new agony
Melting into one familiar hell.

('The Visit')

So much tragedy. The sense of fate and predetermined agony hangs over it all:

Spain was what you tried to wake up from
And could not. I see you, in moonlight,
Walking the empty wharf at Alicante
Like a soul waiting for the ferry,
A new soul, still not understanding.
Thinking it is still your honeymoon
In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,
Happy, and all your poems still to be found.

('You Hated Spain')

One last quotation.

As I paused
Between your mouthfuls, I stared at the readings

On your dials. Your cry jammed so hard

Over into the red of catastrophe

Left no space for worse. And I thought

How sick is she? Is she exaggerating?

And I recoiled, just a little,

Just for balance, just for symmetry,

Into sceptical patience, a little.
If it can be borne, why make so much of it?

'Come on, now,' I soothed. 'Don't be so scared.

It's only a bug, don't let it run away with you.'




What I was really saying was: 'Stop crying wolf.'

…
...Then the blank thought

Of the anaesthesia that helps creatures

Under the polar ice, and the callous

That eases overwhelmed doctors. A twisting thought

Of the overload of dilemma, the white-out,

That brings baffled planarian worms to a standstill

Where they curl up and die.



You were overloaded. I said nothing.

I said nothing. The stone man made soup.

The burning woman drank it.

It's Good Friday - an apt time to meditate on grief, suffering and misunderstanding. These letters are as good a way in to thinking about the mess of being human as anything written.

40BFL 12: Sexing the Cherry

The novel most people think of when they hear the name Jeanette Winterson is Oranges are not the Only Fruit. Usually you hear the word 'auto-biographical' in some relation to it and of course 'lesbian'. As it happens both are not so much incorrect as incidental. She would, I am sure, be as puzzled to find it in the biography section of a Bookshop as she would be annoyed to find it in the Queer section. But it is the case with all her novels that the biographical - or perhaps better the personal is painfully, honestly, barely at the forefront, confessing itself to the reader.

Mothers can be difficult. Oranges is honest about this - though often with affectionate humour. It is the only book of Jeanette's that Mrs Winterson read. This is a shame really because the Dog Woman, to me, is an apology for difficult mothers and there is something in Sexing the Cherry that seems like an attempt to reach out here; if not to understand then at least to accept difference.

Sexing also continues the clear themes that run throughout all JW's novels - they are always about the attempt to escape, there is always the presence of transcendence - at the edge of the novel's world and the reader's, - there is a preoccupation with honesty - about the nature of feelings, of language, of our experience. They make you think. No matter how convoluted her plots, the diversions of magical realism, of parody and pastiche, what she writes about is what is most real: Love - how we lose it, how we run away from it, how we cling on to it and how it burns us.

This for me makes the best sort of writing. A free imagination tied to intensity of feeling and a bold, observant, scrupulous honesty. Sexing is a great read. It's an historical romp, it's an imaginative adventure, it's a philosophical experiment, it's a revisionist myth-making. It's funny, it's sweet, it's thought-provoking. And it's short. Praise God for short novels.

Some people say that's she's quite hard to read. This is laziness. It's true there is a lot of reference to other poems and novels - she has a super memory - and you'll hear Eliot, Browning, Byron, Marvell and many others alongside a crooked Bible and a wonky copy of myths and fairytales. But it stands on its own feet and - at the end of the day - if you don't start reading somewhere when will you ever get back to reading English Literature A to Z?

I first read this novel to help my mum. She was writing a paper on it and wanted me to trace the biblical refences in it. It took a long time and eventually became the impetus for my phd proposal. In a way that is probably the best sort of response. It is a novel about self-discovery - tracing the lineaments of the face you see in the mirror - and following it like the mystics used to describe the itinerarium intus, the journey of the soul. I read her more recent, and more obviously autobiographical, Why be Happy when you could be Normal? today. It has the same searing honesty, the same wit, the same genius for a turn of phrase. She is postmodern in all the good and interesting ways - through telling stories, petit recit, the awareness and deconstruction of power, the playfulness, parody and pastiche; but underlying it all is a quest for truth and a spirit that hungers for transcendence.

Sexing the Cherry is all of these things. It should make you want to leave home - whether or not that means getting out of your chair. It should make you want to think - which requires imagination and passion.

40BFL 11: Wuthering Heights

I read this book in one sitting, which is rare for me - I have all the attention of a goldfish that got dropped on its head as a guppy. But sometimes a writer can catch you by a thread of your soul and something of theirs snakes around yours and before you know it you're breathing their prose like you wrote it. Something of me is trapped in Wuthering Heights. If you haven't read the book you should know that it's not a pleasant thought.

Part of why it's a genuinely very clever book is that it's told by an idiot - a banal simpering man who is the very antithesis of the characters who arrest our concentration. But this idiot narrator is for most of the book himself recounting the story of the nurse. The astute reader will notice that this nurse is in fact the primary enemy of the story - she singlehandedly destroys Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship at the crucial moment and so causes the terrifying grief and tragedy that ensues. We learn through the text itself to mistrust the text. A tale told be a villain told by an idiot. What follows is an intriguing test of reading. Can we sort through the layers of subjectivity and see the world as it really is?

The truth is that we get glimpses, mostly revealed in the most gut-wrenching and disturbing prose so fraught with emotion that it leaves you in a distempered state of anxiety for days. At the same time our own fury is amassed at the very tellers of the story, who frozen in print are unable to admit, to suffer and enable the release of our own wrought feelings. (A similar effect is achieved in Ian McEwan's Atonement though with nowhere near the force.) As an exercise in subjectivity Emily gives us a haunted text - haunted by the reality of tragedy. This is not various angles on certain decentred happenings as one might find in a postmodern novel; this is a moral disaster and tragic ruin of lives, obfuscated by the complexity of character, guilt and stupidity - but the truth is there - as bare as a corpse in the living room.

I read one page again and again and I can't get beyond it:

I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

It is how St Ignatius wants you to feel about Jesus. And if you don't feel it towards the person you're with; after reading it, how could you ever want to stay with them?

40BFL 10: The Forger's Shadow

This book reminds me of a friend I have not heard from in nearly a decade. Seeing it gives me a wry smile of nostalgia and the return of an ambiguous range of emotions, such as I think all people experience when confronted with a particular year of their life - especially if it was a somewhat tumultuous one. The friend used to tell the story of the author of the book taking a class on Shakespeare's sonnet 129. He read the poem:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

and then began his paper: "Well it's about wanking isn't it?" (I think it was the author of this book - but as I said it was nearly ten years ago. Stories like that though tend to stick in the mind.)

Anyway, this is a fabulous book. You feel like it's revealing what lies beneath - the the dark shadow cast by the bright colonial power of the canon. For anyone interested in the murky, mysterious and entirely prevalent category of "authenticity" it's an absolute must-read. It dispels many common-place illusions and reveals a triumphant score-settling history of forgery, counterfeits and plagiarism. The breadth of material this guy engages with is breath-taking but it is also a master class in how to maintain a consistent, original, persuasive argument from start to finish. I remember a tutor telling me at some point that it is useful when beginning to write on a day to read a little of someone whose writing you really admire, someone you want to write like. Well this is it:

Deep in the Dialogues, then, Plato admits that there is an argument that questions his abiding binaries of, say, original and copy. For Gilles Deleuze this is a constitutive philosophy: 'God made man in his [sic] image and resemblance. Through sin, however, man lost the resemblance while maintaining the image. We have become simulacra.' Maybe. But if so we need to reinvent the simulacrum as a post-Platonic entity. This simulacrum is our reality, but in our being we remain haunted by the chimaera of authenticity. We can overcome this authenticity by craft and by making, and in rebellion, and in becoming inspirational; and we can overcome it too in that poetry which is all this and still more. Is the simulacrum the postmodern word for the daemonic? It has returned. It dwells herein: a flicker, a recurrent beat; whatever stirs the heart:

the progeny immortal
Of Painting, Sculpture and rapt Poesy
And arts, though unimagined, yet to be.

This is how it called to me in a dream, a dream of fire and writing, of the breath of life:

The wandering voices and the shadows these
Of all that man becomes, the mediators
Of that best worship, love, by him and us
Given and returned, swift shapes and sounds which grow
More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind,
And veil by veil evil and error fall.

Prometheus, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act III

And the heart beats...

Even if you had no idea what the hell he was on about - the force, almost a sneer, of the single word sentence "Maybe." the mythological, primal language, the manifesto call to arms... That's as good a finish to a book as you'll ever read.

40BFL 9: The Darkness of God

What could you follow Illuminations with but The Darkness of God? Having gone to Yale, Denys Turner is the biggest loss to British theology in a long time. I often feel guilty that I didn't make more effort when I had the privilege of being taught by him - actually I remember with acute embarrassment asking him for an extension on my extended essay deadlines because I was at hockey practice most days preparing for the blues game. (We won 3-1 - ha!) Not the greatest mark of pedigree in a wannabe theologian and I must say I have lived every bit up to the promise shown there. At Cambridge I excelled at punting, short corners and coxing in last night's clothes, but the greater loss is mine.

This is the best entry into mystical theology. It's the sort of book you wish everyone had read because then you'd be dealing a lot less with the frustration of people's sunday-school theology. In a nut shell, it gives you a two-for-one deal. Firstly, by managing to present an intellectually defensible idea of God. And, secondly, by challenging spurious contemporary notions of 'mysticism'. Turner has a life long preoccupation of correcting experiential readings of John of the Cross, Julian et al. and shutting out all that voodoo, woowoo nonsense. He does it, I think, in every book he's written and quite right because it is really annoying.

The general thrust is a sort of historical tracing of one path of theology brought about, he very successfully argues, by the coming together of two narratives: Plato's analogy of the cave in the Republic and Moses ascent of Mount Sinai. These stories play on the imagery of light and darkness and ascent and interiority, where the seemingly contradictory metaphors get resolved. The dark, smokey mountain of Moses ascent is equated with the blinding light of the sun coming out of the cave which plunges the philosopher into greater darkness on re-entry to the cave; while in Augustine's journey into the soul, where God is within and I am without (another Turner favourite), where I most approach the centre of my being I am also raised in the encounter with God - the ascesis of the soul.

The language of contradiction is important because it's at the heart of this theology. Essentially, from St Denys we receive the understanding that the cataphatic and apophatic pathways to God are part of the same process. We name God by everything in creation as everything bears its creator's imprint - caterpillars and slugs - even spiders and wasps - through higher categories of goodness, power, knowledge, to the radical difference of the transcendent divine to all creation. This is the cataphatic way. But then begins the apophatic way, which is to say that actually God is nothing like anything in creation because God is uncreated, but to go further saying we cannot even say God is good, powerful &c. because God is not good like anything we know - a good stool, a good dog, a good human. Then further again to say God is not actually truly different, because to establish difference requires a frame of references - triangles and squares are different (both are shapes); but how would one say salmon and quantum mechanics are different? talking about God is even more different. But this takes us back into the cataphatic approach because, for example, say we start from a basic principle that God is male. The temptation is to say in negation "AHA! God is not male, I'm getting somewhere here!" But actually no - it is better to say God is male and female. If we say God is not male we may think we have a handle on God's gender - he is neuter or asexual like those angels in Dogma. If though we say God is male and female, there is more truth in the contradiction - we are closer to understanding something about God. So it turns out - as the Heracleitan epigram to Four Quartets has it - that 'the way up and the way down are one and the same'.

Anyway that was very long winded. Basically it's a great book that returns a bit of sense and imagination to theology. And it's a joy to read - particularly the penultimate chapter on St John of the Cross, which contains a lot of truth and wisdom together with some personal and searching theology about depression and selfhood; combining all those requisites for truly great writing: honesty, clarity, insight and imagination. It's this chapter that first got me reading St John who is one of the few to successfully combine being a good theologian and a genuine poet. More from him later.

40BFL 5: I and Thou

This little book is simply the best written work of philosophy or theology I have read. It is literally poetry for the soul. It gives a wonderfully simple account of transcendence and the divine and it is the only work of philosophy I know that gives a properly convincing defense of a personal God. The beauty of it is that the whole work is premised on an incredibly simple idea - essentially that there are two ways of being in the world, either in an I - It relationship or an I - Thou relationship. The former is concerned with utility and experience, it's understanding is set in the past, and it fundamentally treats the world as a collection of objects. The latter does not separate the world into objects, but knows only present relationship understood as mutual, connected love. But it doesn’t turn this into a preachy binary. I - It relationships are important, but it is through I - Thou relationships, with God, other people and the world that we experience transcendence: ‘without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man’.

Anyone who has read T. S. Eliot’s later poetry and plays will feel the resonance strongly. But in a sense culture is full of this kind of philosophy - whether it’s Gaga’s You and I, Michael Jackson’s Earth Song, and We are the World, the Source’s You Got the Love. Obviously half the time the principle is expressed in totally sentimental ways, or becomes simply about a feeling rather than relationship, but the fundamental human ability to experience transcendence in a relationship with God, other people or the natural world is basic and recognised by many who would not think of themselves as particularly religious or philosophical.

What it also recognizes is the precarious nature of transcendence. Like Schleiermacher (coming later), and like we had earlier with Mackinnon, transcendence is not something that can be systematically figured out and described, nor is it bottled within institutions (though systematic approaches and institutions are necessary), but it is something that needs to be continually sought and refound, as Eliot said ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’; or for Buber, ‘It is not possible to live in the bare present’ - ‘God, the eternal presence, does not permit himself to be held. Woe to the man so possessed that he thinks he possesses God!’

The work also has a persuasive ethical side to it that remains relevant. So when he talks about society, the ‘mechanical state’ has its place but not without also ‘living mutual relation with a living centre [and] with one another’. True community must be a ‘community of love’, just as true marriage is only sustained by ‘the revealing by two people of the Thou to one another’.

There is so much more that could be said about this wonderful little book. Written by a Jewish philosopher, it is a landmark work of Christian theology - which is not to usurp it but to find in it a basis for dialogue and inclusivity. It is written with wisdom and poetry which is all any of us can really hope for, and it is ethically demanding - both in terms of our practical love of others and how that is related to our vocation and salvation; the fear being that:

‘the continually growing world of It overruns him and robs him of the reality of his own I, till the incubus over him and the ghost within him whisper to one another the confession of their non-salvation’.

40BFL 4: Matilda

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

No, not that Matilda. This one. The Matilda who voraciously read, whose family didn't understand her, whose unused intelligence enabled her to do magic, who fell in love with her primary school teacher (didn't you?). How many hours I sat, concentrating on pencils, willing them to rise in the air. Sadly, they never did, but I felt less alone knowing Matilda was reading outside the 5-8 section too ("I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books").

Also: Danny DeVito, I love your work!

What I learned? Books will take you anywhere and everywhere, clever and angry girls will always beat bad grown-ups, and if you really need to, you can make your own family.

Matilda said, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable..." 

40BFL: 3. The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Men [sic] have always had to choose between their subjection to nature or the subjection of nature to the Self. With the extension of the bourgeois commodity economy, the dark horizon of myth is illumined by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition.

This is a book that everyone ought to read at around the age of twenty. The quality of the writing is such that - for those who persist and read the whole - the result is almost certainly going to be conversion. It is the philosophical equivalent of the Christian Union for the lonely undergraduate. Its literary equivalent is nothing short of the Harry Potter series.

And this is a good analogy because its goal is to make you believe the story it is telling - a very convincing story. The story is that the entirety of human history can be read as a escalating series of attempts to gain mastery over the natural world. This begins with myth and primitive religion - attempts at basic natural science and magical appeals to trees, spirits, the weather &c. - before extending through more and more transcendent religions to the joy of science. The ultimate goal presumably is the atomic bomb where we can blow the whole thing to shit if we want. Along the way anything that harks back to our nature has to be suppressed and purged. So today religion harks back to superstition, just as witches used to; women generally with all their ickiness and bodily fluids need to be kept out of the way, anything that we’ve stomped on on our way to the top of the tree (preferably a metal tree house), the mad, the sick, less developed cultures, needs squishing and keeping out of the way.

Essentially it’s the story of someone who’s really insecure doing everything they can repress their primal fears.

These sorts of metanarratives are always charming. People like Freud and Marx of course wrote convincingly and had loads of people follow along behind - the principle of declaring that all history is really just about one thing is bound to make for good reading because it simplifies the world for a minute isolating what’s really important. This sort of thing still happens today, usually with more qualifications, but Charles Taylor and John Milbank attempt the same sort of genealogical historiographies.

You need to read this book when you’re twenty then because you need to see that ideas can change the world - to gain that passion for believing that thinking and writing matter. And this is a great book because it’s a powerful invective against the will to domination. It propels the reader to seek out the underdog, the unwritten history, to question authority and self-certainty: ‘In the general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men [sic] from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’.

The truth is history is more complicated. There is plenty of evidence of how various religions, including present day religions, actually draw people back into their natural embodiment, return people to the mythical ille tempore. Equally science is not purely about the control and subjugation of nature. The Enlightenment itself moved humanity on in leaps and bounds to unmasking the domination humans practice on one another. History is not about one thing, and while sometimes being reductive brings to the foreground something worth fighting - or investigating - it can also mask a whole lot of other stuff.

Like Harry Potter this book is worth falling in love with, but then you have to move on. Otherwise you’ll be left fighting shadows in the dark, paralysed with insecurity, or going on and on about the same old thing, denouncing everybody and everything as ‘right wing’ or ‘imperialist’, bitching that Anne of Green Gables is "like so bourgeois", like a broken record.

40 Books for Lent: 2. Anne of Green Gables

Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me, what you know about yourself.

Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn't worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury... but if you let me tell you what I imagine about myself you'd find it a lot more interesting. 

 As a child, I had three literary heroines. Jo from the Chalet School, Jo March, and Anne Shirley.

All three had ambitions to be writers; they were tomboyish and blunt, they were forever getting into scrapes, they thought boys a waste of time, they wrote plays and let their imaginations run wild and they all had fierce mothers/ big sisters/ adoptive aunts who pushed them to become great women. They were my icons.

Anne, with her 'carroty' hair, temper, and flair for the dramatic, was possibly my favourite (though I still have a hankering to call my first child Josephine).

I was talking to a red-headed 12-year-old girl recently, and she was telling me about how much she likes Nicola Roberts, who made last year's best pop album (fact). She made her feel less isolated.
It was really important to me, as it still is, to have relateable icons whether in print or the media.

Anyway, the Anne books are full of cheesy, homespun wisdom, but they emphasize the importance of family, faith ("Mrs. Hammond told me that God made my hair red on purpose and I've never cared for Him since"), and in doing things for yourself even if you are just a girl, a girl with red hair. When you're being called names in school, it's a good thing to remember that someone has already broken a slate over the boy's head. (I dreamed of being brave enough to do that throughout my schooldays - still do, sometimes.)

It is the books that I read before I was ten that probably have had the greatest impact on me, and I will never depart too far from their philosophy. Remember when you dreamed you could be anything? Well, I had a kindred spirit who taught me it was true.

40 Books for Lent: 1. The Problem of Metaphysics

Ramping and Roaring has given up television. Part of the reasoning was that this would allow R&R more time to read - novels, theology whatever - something more constructive than Cougar Town, Gossip Girl and Dawson’s Creek. I spoke to Roaring earlier though and it seems on this first tv-less night she spent most of her time skipping about the internet. I, on the other hand, picked up Alex Preston’s recent The Revelations. I read a review in the FT while tipsy and immediately purchased it on Amazon along with another book I’ll probably never read. The Revelations though has immediate entertainment value. It looks basically like an amusing take on the Alpha Course with lots of psycho-sexual drama. Rofl.

All this is by the by though. Given this new attention to reading, Ramping and Roaring through Lent is going to bring you its top 40 books-that-have-changed-the-way-we-think. It’s a good chance to think through the ideas that have shaped the way you think and if I can persuade Roaring not just to do twenty different reviews of Gone with the Wind, we might discover some interesting, little known works…

So my first book, my number one book, is Don Mackinnon’s The Problem of Metaphysics. A bit heavy to start with but I really think that more than any book this one resonated with me and changed the way I saw the world. It came out of his Gifford lectures and so is relatively short and readable. I remember hearing an amusing story about him, where his wife went into the bedroom one day to find his trousers lying on the bed. She thought ‘oh hell’ to herself ‘he’s finally lost his marbles and gone out without his trousers on’. Turned out he had just gone out and bought a new pair. For all his reputed skattiness though and despite not actually publishing a huge amount (part of the last generation who weren’t continually harried to publish or perish), reading between the lines, he has influenced the main voices in contemporary theology as much as anyone.

Essentially, The Problem of Metaphysics gives a really convincing account of metaphysics, teasing out the relationship between transcendence and language. What is so splendid is the way he pulls it all together with such a wide array of anecdotes and examples from history, literature and art. He speaks authoritatively on Plato, Aristotle and Kant, as might be expected, but is just as lucid and impressive on Shakespeare, Sophocles and Cezanne. More than anything, it is a work that is convincing at a human level - it is one of the rare works of philosophical theology than genuinely conveys a sense of wisdom. My supervisor once explained that he understood God as a sort of matrix for understanding reality. In these terms this book was incredibly helpful to me in explaining God.

I have never been much interested in the specialist. It is not within me and I would never make it as a footnote precise academic. The people I find interesting then are always polymaths - those who can illuminate an area of life and keep it tied to all sorts of other areas, but most of all retain the ability of speak to everyday life. Mackinnon does this here better than anywhere else I’ve found. His analysis of the Good Samaritan and the Raising of Lazarus are exemplary as homily, philosophy and ethics. His development of parables, tragedy and presence are masterful. It is the only work of theology I’ve read twice cover to cover and it deserves at least this. It is to philosophical theology what Madonna is to pop music, having influenced an entire new generation of theology while yet remaining unique and fascinating in itself. Go buy a copy.