Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow

This is a gem.

It's a novel first, a science-fiction novel second: in other words, it has rich characters, a compelling plot, and leaves you with much to think about. The SF element is done seamlessly well with good hard science and coherent thinking about another world and how it might work.

The plot is all about a Jesuit mission to another culture, what happened there, and how it affected the hero, a Jesuit priest and translator. I suspect Mary Doria Russell gave her story an SF context only because on earth, most of the strange tribes have already been encountered, if not by Jesuits then by their Protestant missionary cousins, or by Western pagan neo-colonialists (aka loggers and drillers).

Underlying the whole tale all are deep questions about God, about faith, redemption, surrender and devotion.
It really is a wonderful book, and shows perhaps how hollow much of the rest of the SF universe really is. (Not that that stops me enjoying it: it's just that this book is so much richer.)

It rightly won prizes. This is the only SF book I would recommend my wife should ever read. It's a wonderful novel, not to be missed.

The Story of Christianity by David Bentley-Hart

The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith by David Bentley Hart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A happy mix between the church histories that overdo the lavish at the expense of the comprehensive, and those that overdo the comprehensive at the expense of your eyesight. David Bentley Hart appears to have read everyone, from all the Gnostics, through Nietzsche, to the Russian devotional mystics, and that, and his own Eastern Orthodox faith means that his church history isn't skewed just to the Western (heard of St Herman of Alaska? Me neither). I found hardly a misstep in the book. His hobby of unravelling the myths and fairy tales that New Atheists tell to their children at bedtime (for a fuller account of which, see his 'Atheist Delusions') informs some of his chapters, notably those about the early modern period. My favourite of all the church histories I have read. Get someone to give you this book for Christmas.

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Anthony Flew: there is (now) a God

There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Enjoyable, brief ramble from the former to the probably final state of philosopher Antony Flew's thinking, particularly about God, and including how he changed his mind from atheism to Deism. It is bookended by a lengthy introduction and an appendix by the actual writer of the book, Roy Abraham Varghese, and another by the biblical scholar of the hour, Tom, or NT, Wright. Flew took care to write, and personally sign, his own introduction.

Here's a quote, cue unreasoned, buttock-clenching joy from theists and wailing and gnashing of teeth from his former atheist pals:

I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what is traditionally called natural theology. It has no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith. (p93)

The 'pilgrimage of reason' soundbite could not be more perfectly chosen to delight and infuriate in equal measure.

The book is a good read. The Internet is also a good read, seeing some atheists build a case against the book using the same kind of tactics usually employed by cigarette companies, traffic lawyers, climate-change deniers or creationists, on the lines of 'the old boy lost it, very sad, and was bundled into the back of a van by evangelicals and forced to sign a script someone else had written for him.'

Actually, the book is clear that Flew became a Deist, and never stopped personally rejecting all the received religions. He didn't believe in an afterlife. He thought Christianity was the best available religion, but he didn't claim to embrace it, despite the admittedly gorgeous scholarship of N T Wright. All this is in the book. It's nice to find good and honest atheist commentators who recognize this, and who agree with the broadsheet obituaries of Flew, not least in the New York Times which put some journalistic resource into investigating the circumstances of the book. Flew had his marbles and after a lifetime of brilliant atheist philosophical discourse, took to believing that the universe was created by an infinite, immutable, omnipotent, First Cause. Flew's widow agreed that that was his position. The jeers and hoots coming from the Theist side may be in bad taste, but perhaps we should be allowed our little moment of fun. Remember, we also have to put up with Creationists and Republicans, and sometimes even have to call them 'brother'.

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Eliza Grizwold: The Tenth Parallel

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Accept no substitutes to a writer who travels to wild places and talks to people. Eliza Griswold (what a wonderful name, like something out of Dickens or Harry Potter) explores in her book the peoples of latitude ten degrees north of the equator. She concentrates on the human geography, the conflict between the desert and the sown, the aristocratic nomad and the dirt-digging farmer, and-- which is her real purpose -- between Islam and Christianity.

She's either fearless, or crazy, in her pursuit of former terrorists and other dodgy characters, as well as of the people who are perhaps just the collateral damage in this turbulent region-- the two Muslims who were to be caned for suspected adultery, who just wanted to marry so they would not be shamed, for example. She meets plenty of missionaries and zealots on both sides. On the way she is led to Christ by Franklin Graham, Billy's son, an experience that was evidently more satisfying to him than it was to her. Halfway round the world she meets a former mujahideen trying a new career selling beauty products. And on and on.


Eliza Griswold resists cynicism, stereotyping and the urge to fit what she is seeing into some coherent analysis.. The perhaps-overlooked daughter of a radical, liberal bishop, her very puzzled poking around in this confusion is to me almost a vital sign of a living faith. I loved the contrast she sees between her own nail-chewed hands with the worthily worn ones of her mother. This is doubt as the penumbra of bright belief; the opposite of faith is apathy and cynicism, not this.

. I only have one little caveat which is that her library-work isn't always quite as excellent as her reportage. Her footnotes sometimes lead us to other popular accounts, not authoritative sources, and there's the odd place where she's surely oversimplifying: 'Under the Roman Empire, the practice of Christianity was punishable by death until 313, when the Roman emperor Constantine officially legalized it.' (p 78).


What fun it would be to have such a fascinating person, and such a fine writer, round for dinner. Failing that, read this lovely book, after which you will know more, and understand less, about the people at the join between Islam and Christianity , an area mightily unwritten about and largely unknown to the Weatern world.


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Siddhartha Mukerjee: The Emperor of All Maladies

Best read when neither you nor anyone close to you has cancer, and so you can enjoy the story dispassionately, this is really good read. If only it were fiction. It's a biography of an enemy, its first appearances, its identification, and then the millennia-long human quest to find ways to kill it -- a story of knife-attacks, poisoning, irradiation, prevention, and now the subtle mapping of proteins and pathways in the cell, and the design of exquisitely shaped molecules to block them.

It's also a human story of politics, hubris, self-experimentation, and luck, all lashed into a froth by the deadly urgency of the task.

The author, himself a cancer doctor who clearly rides the rough road alongside his patients, left me with two conclusions.

First, like driving terrorists out of a city, cancer is being pushed back, block by block, though with many casualties. Survival rates increased by one percent per year for many years from the mid-1990s. No magic bullet here, then, just the patient accumulation of fine medicine.

Second, though, cancer does what living things do: multiply, mutate, adapt, innovate, fight on, refuse to die. Its strengths are life's strengths. In cancer, it's as if our own life-force slips its bonds and turns on us. Surveying current medical horizons, this book suggests that we may largely conquer cancer in the sense that perhaps one day few people will die young of it; but it will conquer us in that, in old age, even when everything else can be healed, it will be waiting for us.

My only criticism? One gets the impression that only in the United States has anyone fought cancer at all, with that collectivity of wusses known as 'Europe' just throwing in some not-much-needed logistical help now and again -- rather like the Iraq war.

Pulitzer prizes (unlike, in my view, many other prizes) are a reliable indicator of a good book. This super book puts all the dread things we see when people enter cancer wards--the chemo, the surgery, the remissions --into their proper places within a coherent, constantly interesting and rather gripping account.

Arthur C Clarke: The Fountains of Paradise

All Arthur C Clarke's books have the same underlying theme (though in some books it is underlying more deeply than others). The theme is 'Science, not religion, is the true locus for transcendence and wonder'. This theme is explicit in The Fountains of Paradise when a great mechanical elevator to the stars supplants an ancient religious stronghold and one chapter ends with this memorable summary of the religious point of view: 'the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.'

I think this is Clarke's most personal book. Set in the fictional land of Taprabone, which is about 90% Sri Lanka according to the author, it's rich and vivid with detail about the land that he adopted as his home. It also comes as near as Clarke ever came to describing his personal life, the transcendent joy he felt while diving, weightless, adrift from all his worries; the being carried around the house by his personal staff. (Clarke suffered from polio and was wheelchair-bound for many years.)

Clarke is not at is best when describing politics and world affairs in his envisioned 22nd century. He is at his brilliant best when he is describing people in their battles with the laws of physics, and with envisioning alien life. This book starts in his weaker area but ends in his strongest. I think Rendezvous with Rama was better; but this is one of his best, and certainly his most revealing.

China Mieville: Kraken

Kraken by China Mieville

If science fiction was purring happily forward through the disciplined and physics-rich imaginations of, say, a Stephen Baxter or an Alastair Reynolds, then China Mieville has grabbed the steering wheel and done something with the car that I didn't even know you could. This--the first of his I've read-- is an astonishing, exhilarating book.

Sometimes a writer comes along who does something so drastic to an area of fiction that it is never the same again. I imagine Tolkein did it with fantasy; Terry Pratchett did it again when fantasy was already becoming too autistic and too generic. Douglas Adams blasted a hole into the kind of SF that made human progress the new religion: his machines didn't work, his ultimate dreams descended into farce and technology was an annoyance.

Kraken is best described as urban fantasy, and it takes us into a London-behind-London of warring cults, angels, sentient bits of Unix, Trekkies working magic, fire that devours backwards in time, and distinctly odd branches of the Metropolitan Police. Oh, and the many-legged bottled giant squid of the title. It's hardly science fiction, though Mieville's other books have three times won the prize that honours that arch-materialist Arthur C Clarke, who was himself, of course, a genre-changer by adding robust physics to the space stories from pulp magazines. Mieville's is a world where scepticism has pushed religion out of the front door, only to find the supernatural crawling, flying and oozing back in through every wall and floorboard.

A couple of caveats. The protagonists seem to have the kind of invulnerability more often bestowed on the likes of Indiana Jones or Harry Potter, which takes the edge off the supposedly ancient and all-conquering powers with whom they fight. And while Mieville's sparse, slightly wild writing is a delight, I got weary of the endless streams of f-words with which he populates his characters' dialogue.

Once you recover from the shock of realising what Mieville is doing, you find a compelling plot like a set of Russian dolls, plenty of a suspense and a satisfying ending.

A brilliant book, a literary Tungusta, which I absolutely loved.