Story connoisseurs

So I was reading this interview with a children's author.  I have read nothing he has written and can't give an opinion on the quality of his work, but his response to a question interested me.

Is good storytelling a lost art today?

I would say the opposite. We in America today are some of the most sophisticated story consumers history has ever seen. Most adults are so exposed to narrative that they’re almost a little inoculated to it. It’s very hard to impress them.

Haven't you ever had the experience of watching a movie or reading a book you loved as a child and finding it wasn't as good as you remembered it being?   Or watching an old black-and-white movie that won multiple awards and being underwhelmed, finding it treacly and obvious?  I know that The Pickwick Papers was considered so uproariously hilarious that it launched Charles Dickens' writing career, but I have tried to read that book and found it completely leaden.

Now, granted, what cultures find funny changes over time and the studio politics and the power of personality have rendered Oscar choices inexplicable on occasion.  But perhaps it's simply a measure of our culture, or we individually, simply becoming more sophisticated evaluators of story over time.  Perhaps it's not just that Hollywood is turning out more dreck than usual these days; perhaps Hollywood has always churned out bucketsful of dreck, but we're now more choosy though exposure to decades of films.  Excellent story, whether in book or movie form, is always going to be in the minority compared to the mediocre or worse.

Book review: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

The twenty-third book I read in 2017 was Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall.  This book was on my wishlist for quite a while before I read it, and I ended up being disappointed by it.

Obviously the subtitle is an overstatement, but that's not the source of my disappointment; rather, I was expecting a historical view of how different cultures were shaped by their geography, whereas Marshall's book is much more focused on current events.  It's not his fault that he didn't write the book I wanted to read, but it will definitely date the book. For instance, the chapter on Western Europe discusses the stresses that the Greek economy has put on the European Union and the possibility that it may lead some Southern European countries to break with the EU -- but there's nary a word about Brexit, which clearly took Marshall by surprise as much as it did the rest of the world.  (Of course, Britain's geography could help explain why it feels separate from the Continent, but Marshall doesn't address the possibility.)

Also, Marshall bemoans the artificial boundaries imposed in Africa and the Middle East by colonial powers as a major cause of civil war.  Isn't the alternative -- if tribes had been allowed to define for themselves who was in and who was out and where the demarcations were between their territories and their neighbors -- simply ordinary war?  Is crossing national boundaries to seize resources by force somehow less morally reprehensible than taking them from your fellow countrymen?  I'll concede that not having to cooperate with people you judge to be outsiders might eliminate some conflict, but a neighboring tribe having diamonds or minerals or oil or access to an ocean port in their territory will still tempt invasion; witness the first Gulf War.

I did learn some things: for instance, that Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan and that its economic development is hampered by the fact that most of its country lies in a flood plain and suffers from seasonal inundations.  That DAESH is an insulting way to refer to the terrorists of the Islamic State, as it rhymes with several unsavory Arabic words.  That trade and peaceful coexistence of people groups thrived in Europe because of its easily navigable rivers, while the dangerous rivers of Africa and South America kept peoples isolated from each other and retarded the growth of civilization.

Marshall concludes the book, in an optimistic tone that would have fit the 1960s better than the 2010s, by looking forward to what he considers the inevitable expansion of humanity to other planets.  He wonders if the nations of Earth will continue their competitive and acquisitive ways, rushing to plant their individual flags on other planets like Columbus on San Salvador, or whether moving past a global perspective will encourage humanity to band together as a species, as Virginians and Pennsylvanians became Americans in the latter 18th century.  I am cynical enough both to doubt that science (and our current panic to make sure everything is "safe") will overcome the technological hazards of interplanetary travel and colonization of planets nonconducive to human life and to wager that the only way we will overcome our differences will be if we encounter a larger enemy.  But that's a sci-fi film.

Book review: Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster

The Mother-Daughter Book Club series induced me to seek out Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, as it is the featured title in book three of the series, Dear Pen Pal.  Thus, it and its sequel, Dear Enemy, became the twenty-second book I read in 2017.  (Even though they are separate works, the edition I read was a two-in-one.)

Daddy-Long-Legs is an epistolary novel made up of letters written by seventeen-year-old orphan Jerusha Abbott to the anonymous benefactor who finances her college education.  She knows only that he is a trustee of the orphan asylum where she has spend her childhood and caught but a glimpse of a tall man walking out the door.  Based on that impression and the condition that she send him monthly letters reporting on her progress, she begins writing to him as Daddy-Long-Legs.

For much of the book, I was wholly delighted, wondering how on earth I had managed to miss this book while reading extensively in the plucky-orphaned-girl genre (i.e., Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna, etc.).  Eventually, however, I understood how this book had been excluded from my childhood: its extolment of Darwinian evolution and fervent socialism in particular. 

In addition -- spoiler alert --
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In addition, there's something creepy and off-putting today about a grown man anonymously grooming a teenage girl to be his bride, and the later triangle of Judy, Jervie, and Jimmie McBride is unfair in many ways.

Dear Enemy is Daddy-Long-Legs's sequel.  The letters in this instance are written from Judy's friend Sallie McBride to Judy (and others) after Judy has persuaded her to take over the orphan asylum where Judy was brought up, the John Grier Home, and run it in a more humane and progressive manner than Judy enjoyed.  It is not as successful as Daddy-Long-Legs but still a good read. 

Book review: The Other Worldview by Peter Jones

The twentieth book I read in 2017 is The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity's Greatest Threat by Peter Jones.  Jones's proposition is that all worldviews boil down to what he terms either Oneism or Twoism; that is, that either the universe is all there is and if there is a God or creator He is somehow a part of it, or that God exists apart from His creation.

This is a clever delineation, in one sense, in that it allows Jones to sweep scientific materialism, classic polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and the New Age movement into a single category.  Twoism as a term, however, suffers from confusion with dualism, a concept that it has nothing to do with, and Jones is, indeed, forced to address the issue and clarify his meaning early on. In addition, Jones must classify Islam and Judaism as Oneist, though they are non-Trinitarian and thus, in his mind, insufficiently Oneist.  In the end, I'm not sure the conceit was worth the hoops he has to jump through to support it.

The early chapters on the rise (really, the renaissance) of Twoism are very interesting, as the author draws a line from classical paganism through the Spiritualist movement, Jungian psychology, and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, revealing some rather surprising connections.  (Jung was certifiable, yo, attributing his psychological theories to an occultic spirit-guide with wings and horns named Philemon, who arranged a personal introduction to Gnostic deity Abraxas and entrusted Jung with the responsibility to become prophet of a new religion and save the world.  I couldn't help but recall Niles Crane's discomfort with Daphne Moon's claims to have psychic power over and against his scientific worldview and wonder what he would have thought if Frasier hadn't ended a year before the publication of The Red Book, which contained Jung's private diary of his spiritual experiences.)

As is often the case with "what's wrong with the world" books, however, I found the later chapters rather meandering and inconclusive.  Once the author has identified the disease, one rather expects him to point to the cure.  Given that Jones is an orthodox Christian, however, he can provide no cure but the one prescribed in the Bible: the necessity for human beings to place their faith in Jesus Christ and wait for God to put things right.  There is no public policy solution or twelve steps to a better, more vibrant you, which is anticlimactic.

In the nitpicking category, I'm not at all sure which side of the circle on the cover of the book is supposed to be the "good" or Twoist side: the black stripes or the red web.  In addition, the cover blurb from the foreword by R. C. Sproul announces that the book is "for every concerned American -- and especially for every Christian who weeps at the graveside of his culture," which a) is the purplest of overly dramatic prose, and b) suggests that a Christian worldview is coterminous with 20th-century American culture, which would certainly be news to 99% of Christians who have lived in the world anywhere else ever, including the apostles and church fathers.