Superstition & Science - Derek Wilson

 Wilson provides a terrific introduction to the development of Western Thinking between the Reformation and the Age of Englightenment - roughly 1500 to 1800.   He covers all the well-known thinkers and adds as many that I, for one, was either unfamiliar with or had not explored.  Wilson provides well-considered summaries to their individual contributions and relationship with one another, without ever losing narrative drive essential to the book's success.

Personally, I suspect the discovery I will taken away is the Wesley brothers, John and Charles.   I was brought up as a Methodist, albeit an Independent Methodist, and have long been an atheist.   I remember the Wesleys, Charles especially, from the hymnbook at Sunday morning service.   I stopped attending a month after my twelfth birthday and never considered them again.   Now Wilson has given me fascinating insights to their ideas and their lives.   For instance, I knew nothing whatsoever about their missionary work in the US.   I can't help but wonder, why Georgia.   And I know full well I will have to find out.

Original Sin - Peter Gill

 Having rediscovered the work of Peter Gill, who was big when I was a drama student first time round, with The York Realist, reviewed below, I was keen to read more.   I picked up Original Sin, first produced at the Sheffield Crucible in May 2002.   This is, in fact, the edition published to accompany the premiere.

Original Sin is Gill's take on Frank Wedekind's Pandora plays, Pandora's Box and Earth Spirit, which I had tried to find when I was originally a drama student and couldn't find.  I still haven't read them but they are now on my must-read lisr.

Pandora, of course, is famously Louise Brooks in the Pabst movie.   Gill shifts the timeframe back to the era of Oscar Wilde.   Gill's object of desire is Angel, who has risen from the gutter to be the adored idol of society.   He has been raised by newspaper magnate Lionel Southerdown and is now being painted by society artist Eugene Black.  From there, everything falls down.   Black kills himself for love of Angel and Southerdown manipulates Angel into shooting and killing him.

Angel flees to France with his adopted brother, Henry Southerdown, now his lover.   Henry is ruined in a Stock Exchange scandal and Angel ends up touting for trade in a Whitechapel slum, where he shares the ultimate, gruesome fate of Wedekind's Pandora.

Gill's play is epic in length, scope and achievement.   Everyone around Angel is motivated by sex and money, yet Gill is such an expert in characterisation that Angel is absolutely no angel.   I kind of always knew his ultimate fate (I might not have read Wedekind's original but I have read a good deal about it) but was intrigued to discover how it came about.   That's the whole point.

I was impressed by The York Realisr.   I was extremely impressed with Original Sin.

The General - Alan Sillitoe

 Sillitoe's second novel couldn't be more different from his first, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.  One thing they do have in common, I suppose, is the compressed timeframe.   Aside from the unnecessary thirteenth chapter, The General (1960) takes place over three or four days.

A war is raging in an unspecified part of Europe.   A symphony orchestra has been sent by train to entertain frontline troops, only to be ambushed and taken prisoner by the enemy.   The enemy do have a name, the Gorsheks, and they seem to me to represent the Russians - the initial capture is by Cossack-style cavalry who are gunned down for taking prisoners by a middle-ranking officer.   The officer takes the orchestra to the General, who delays their mass execution.   Standing Orders dictate No Prisoners.   The General enquires about making an exception.   The reply is machine-like and unequivocal: execute them immediately.   But still the General delays.   He gets the orchestra to play for his officers.   He searches for a way out of his dilemma.

The General is a parable, rather than a character study.   It is about the incongruity of war and art, the battle between logic and sentiment.   It is well done and quite entertaining.   Apparently Sillitoe wrote many more novels over his lifetime, none of which I have ever heard of (save, of course, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner which is a novella and also something of a parable).   I'm guessing he continued in the mode of The General, not Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

The Last Office - Geoffrey Moorhouse

 Moorhouse's specialism is the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace and its context, the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Thomas Cromwell on behalf of Henry VIII.   In this study Moorhouse focuses on Durham Abbey, which was unique in many ways.   It was part of the fortress of the Prince Bishop who was technically also the abbot of the abbey; in practice, the Prior was the head of the religious.   The Bishop, meanwhile, was the King's deputy in civil and legal matters in the whole of the North Country and held court in the castle adjoining the abbey.   When Henry VIII made himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, found himself in a dilemma.   Fortunately for all concerned, Tunstall was a lifelong equivocator and Durham Abbey was neither in the forefront of dissolutions nor, in the end, resistant to its fate.

Moorhouse is a great source on the Dissolution and in particular its forerunner, the Visitations of 1535 and the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the monetary appraisal that sealed the fate of all religious houses.   No value, of course, was put on their service to local communities, which became ever greater the further they were from London.   They provided hospitals and hospices, alms and alms houses, shelter for the homeless, the orphaned, and the mentally ill.   They drove and underpinned local economies, providing work for local labourers and artisans.   All that was wiped away in less than a decade.   That, not love of supersition and mystic ritual, was what the Pilgrims rose up for.

Moorhouse feels obliged to continue his narrative post-Dissolution.   Given that Durham's transition was peaceful and measured, I personally lost interest.   Notwithstanding that, I find Moorhouse indispensable to my research into the English Reformation. 

The Colorado Kid - Stephen King

 In 2004 the creators of the yet-to-appear Hard Case Crime imprint wrote to the greatest living US writer to see if he would be interested in maybe a couple of quotes for their noir reprints.   The reply came from King's agent.   Would they like to publish his short mystery novella The Colorado Kid?   Oh yes they would, and publishing a major writer - as major as it is possible to get - gave Hard Case instant credibility.   King continues to publish with them.  Joyland is reviewed on this blog and Later sits on my to-be-read pile.

Mine is the 2019 reprint, which includes Charles Ardai's introduction, which is great, and illustrations which are variable.   The story itself ... I called it a novella above, because of its length, but in tone it is a long short story.   It is essentially an account of a 25-year-old mystery (thus set in 1980) told by two old geezers who run a smalltown newspaper in Maine to their twenty-year-opd summer intern.  Back in 1980 two teenage runners found the body of a forty-year-old man lying on the beach.   Naturally this drew the attention of the then middleaged newsmen.   The police weren't interested as there was no obvious foul play involved - the man died because some steak got stuck in his gullet.  But other elements of the case intrigued the journos.   Why did the man carry no wallet, no ID?

Eventually another intern, who was working with the police back in 1980, comes up with a clue to the man's identity, which only reveals more odd facts.