Lent, by Jo Walton

In this book, a Renaissance monk talks theology, changes history, suffers, and dies. His name is Girolamo Savonarola, who did historically do all those things, and if you aren't interested in him or in the theology, this isn't going to be your book. The first chunk of the story is straightforward historical sightly-fantasy, with Girolamo going about being a monk, trying to do his brotherhood and Florence good -- and, as it happens, being able to see and banish demons as one aspect of that.

Because this is a Jo Walton book, Things Happen -- not in a flashy way, but in a, "This isn't quite the book you thought it was" kind of way. (There's something quite important I'd been spoiled for, but I didn't know the why of it, so I had a lot to wonder about in the early parts).

As a teenager, I used to wonder why people didn't write books in which religions other than theirs were true. Why shouldn't a Catholic write a book which assumes the truth of Bhuddism, in the same way Taoism runs through Le Guin, Mormonism through Card? That has ceased to seem at all strange to me – it's hard to write out of beliefs you don't actually have, and if you're doing that, the beliefs are probably going to be foregrounded, instead of diffused through everything the way Le Guin and Card do it. But that, with the foregrounding, is Lent's project. It's set in a world where a particular version of Renaissance Christianity is simply true. Tweaked a bit, but not in a way that changes the religion's central emphases and problems, I don't think. Which I find satisfying. A premise that doesn't undercut itself, true to the intellectual worlds in which the characters lived. (Worlds which I know about through... Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, mostly. There may be some circularity to my feeling of knowledge about this).

I don't, somehow, mind the fact that the premises Lent is true to are premises I hate. There is no version of the Christian God I believe in, but the ones I disbelieve most stridently are the ones who have a Hell. Lent has a Hell whose vileness is no more softened than its God's goodness is diminished: not statements I think anyone can finally reconcile. Yet I'm more interested in a book which assumes their reconciliation than I would be in a version where God turned out to not be that good, or Hell that bad.

Walton's book's -- I want to use the word 'solid.' They don't feel packed with riches, they feel co-extensive with their own ideas, workings out of themselves which are in every way sufficient. (Well, though I still wish Lifelode hadn't had a plot). But for parts of, say, Necessity and Lifelode, both books where gods are real, I've thought I disagreed on some level with Walton in terms of leaving room around the outside of a narrative. Sometimes I want haziness, more sense of an undiscovered world. (I would have liked to end Among Others knowing even less about fairies, for example). But Lent leaves a great deal of theological mystery in place, and I think that's both because it suits a practiced religion,* and because satisfactory explanations of how omnibenevolence can result in Hell have to involve something unimaginable. I like Lent's version of that. In fact I like the story Lent tells with Christianity more the more I think about it. It wasn't what I expected, but things I thought were faults in it turn more to virtues the more I think them over.






*When I was hanging out at Victoria University's Anglican chaplaincy a lot in first year, talking theology among other things, it took me as well as the people I was talking with a while to realise that I was making my “and then what could make sense of that” speculations as though the faith was a fantasy novel. The answer was often, “Actually, God didn't put that bit into the book, so while it sounds good, it would be dangerous to assume it was either true or false.”

I've had a very positive experience of Christianity, all told. At my hall of residence I was a participant/spectator for a conversation between a passionate atheist and a Bible literalist who didn't believe in evolution. The atheist as much as said, "Everything you believe is wrong", and the literalist's response was, "No it isn't, but that's fascinating, please explain further," with a combination of intensity and sunniness which was a pleasure to behold. The one conversation I've knowingly had with someone who seriously believed I was probably going to be damned was respectful and interesting, and everyone who tried to convert me or hoped for my conversion (except those pamphleteers one Easter) did so simply by opening the doors and saying, "Have a look at what we do in here." The scariest demonstration of faith I've witnessed was an obviously loving father sitting down with his sons and their circle in the Catholic Workers' house they'd founded, describing all the ways in which he and his wife had over the years sacrificed opportunities, money, and preconceptions in order to help others, finishing by saying, "It's wonderful what you've built here, it's wonderful how well you're doing, and it's good that none of you have yet been called to shed your blood in the service of Jesus Christ, because this way you can still do more." A conversation which my self-interest-hedged morality shied away from like an intense heat. All of which is to say that while I know of the damage forms of Christianity can do, most of my actual memories about the religion tend positive, and I suspect that makes a difference to my ability to read with pleasure about the monastic life and grant Hell as a temporary assumption.

The Surgeon's Mate, by Patrick O'Brian

The trouble is, I don't really want to write anything specific about this book, because it's book seven. I am so enjoying the Aubrey and Maturin series. At this point I am happy simply when the main characters act like themselves, which they very reliably do: Stephen, enthusiastic natural philosopher, subtle-minded surgeon who will never learn not to fall off the sides of ships or out of their rigging; Jack, no man more astutely daring when adjusting a ship's sails to wring the most safe speed out of the wind conditions, no man worse-suited to a life on land, getting into debt and sleeping with the wives of superior officers with a cheerful misguided certainty that everything will be fine which can be quite painful to read. Each helping the other through, each looking at the other with the deeply loving superiority of someone more than half blind to his own faults, each the other's closest friend. Whenever I hope their mistakes will pass without consequences, I'm secretly also pleased in my certainty that they absolutely won't. But their virtues never entirely escape reward, either.

There are books I can read when half asleep, and books I take with me on holiday for sheer easy pleasure; these books are the second but not the first, because O'Brian writes with indirection (often puts his best jokes in it) and generally requires one to be conscious enough to visualise the physical layout of a situation in some detail. He has set pieces involving ships where I read along going, 'I have no idea exactly what's happening, but I know exactly what's generally happening!' and on the other hand there are set pieces where I feel I'm seeing it unfold, the ships changing sail, trying to intersect each other's courses. (I'm not sure whether the difference is complexity or writing clarity so much as my state of mind). His descriptions of life at sea have such reality that I've been reading his voyages and battles for seven books and they aren't growing any more repetitive than social interactions do. He gives exposition to people who have interesting motives for saying it or interesting ways of hearing it. (In book one a lot of the necessary 'here is how ships work' material is softened considerably by being told to Stephen, who barely grasps a word of it. In this book, the plot of the previous two books is summarised by Jack to a woman he wants to impress, which... goes well enough that it goes badly). When I turned to the first Temeraire book after this, even the addition of dragons didn't stop the world feeling thinner and less lived-in, but on the other hand these books give me a baseline such that I felt a vivid sense of the whole of Patrick O'Brian's version of the Navy occurring offstage at all times. (And oh my lord, there are officers in the O'Brian version who would cope badly with the social implications of hatching a dragon egg). O'Brian can set up and deliver a set piece over chapters or book-quarters; he's also delightfully willing to set up a plot point exactly as though it was going to unfold conventionally and then render it irrelevant. In this book, Stephen and Jack spent a while working simultaneously on different solutions to the same problem, and there's no telling which if either of them will succeed or if they're going to cancel each other out disastrously and be rescued by someone else.

Of this book in particular: well, I wondered if that would happen, and I am most interested to see what follows. There was something I thought ought to have gone horribly wrong which didn't, which both saddens and gladdens me. There, a most useful report.

I must also regretfully say that this is not a book in which Stephen transports a problematic and unusual animal by ship. Neither beehive nor sloth. I will be expecting one in the next book.