Also, behind the voice of Reverend John Ames, there is the huge presence of the author, Marilynne Robinson. She cannot disguise herself and I found it impossible to forget that she was there with her earnest conjectures on the Christian life and experience and her theological speculations.

Robinson writes like this:

This morning I did a foolish thing. I woke up in the dark, and that put me in mind to walk over to the church the way I used to. I did leave a note, and your mother found it, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, I suppose. (The note was an after-thought, I admit.) She seemed to think I’d gone off by myself to breathe my last – which would not be a bad idea, to my way of thinking. I have worried some about those last hours. This is another thing you know and I don’t – how this ends. That is to say, how my life will seem to you to have ended. That’s a matter of great concern to your mother, as it is to me, of course. But I have trouble remembering that I can’t trust my body not to fail me suddenly. I don’t feel bad most of the time. The pains are infrequent enough that I forget now and then.

The doctor told I had to be careful getting up from the chair. He also told me not to climb stairs, which would mean giving up my study, a thing I can’t yet bring myself to do. He also told me to take a shot of brandy every day, which I do, in the morning, standing in the pantry with the curtain drawn for your sake. Your mother thinks that’s very funny. She says, ‘It’d do you a lot more good if you enjoyed it a little,’ but that’s how my mother did her drinking and I’m a traditionalist. The last time she took you to the doctor, he said you might be more robust if you had your tonsils out. She came home so sick at the thought he could find any fault with you that I gave her a dose of medicinal brandy.

She wants to move my books down to the parlor and set me up there, and I may agree to that, just to spare her worry. I told her I could not add a moment to my span of life, and she said, ‘Well, I don’t want you to go subtracting one from it, either.’ A year ago she would have said ‘neither.’ I’ve always loved the way she talks, but she thinks she has to improve for your sake.

There is, no doubt, some brilliant writing in there. But to my mind Gilead was a great disappointment, coming several years after the almost perfect Housekeeping.

Reverend Ames is writing a memorandum to his young son, a record of his thoughts and whatever he thinks might be of use to the young man when the Reverend has died. To begin with the book has around two-hundred pages of tedium, and had it been penned by anyone else I would have left it well before the half-way mark. Only in the last fifty or so pages does it become meaningful and moving, and for this reader that was too little and far too late.

Disappointing. Could do better.

You see this is what annoys me so much about grammar freaks. They act as if language is rendered completely incomprehensible by the odd misplaced apostrophe or semi-colon. But the things they get their knickers in a twist about are very rarely anything to do with actual meaning.

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After Iraq, it is clear that American military might is no longer a sufficient gateway to power. America has to work with its allies. That is one of the great lessons of a post-neocon world. A few years ago, Condoleezza Rice said that in the Middle East, the Americans will do the cooking and the Europeans can do the dishes. Can you imagine the national shame for the French, who are so keen on gastronomy, to have America — the nation of McDonald’s — insist that they will do the cooking? That was hard to swallow. But in all seriousness, Europe needs to get back in the kitchen. America can’t do it alone anymore.

Gilles Kepel on the Future of the Middle East.

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How the mighty are fallen . . .

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Literary Kicks has a nice post about Francoise Sagan, her life, loves, her first novel and the movie of her life.

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“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Times Online reports from a paper published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal.

Over the weekend we were lucky enough to catch the touring version at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre. The play opened at the National Theatre in 1973 and was subsequently performed all over the world. There was a film version by Sidney Lumet with Richard Burton and Colin Peter Firth, for which the two leads and Shaffer were nominated for Oscars.

The touring company is led by Simon Callow as the psychiatrist, and by Alfie Allen (brother of Lily, recently seen in the feature film Atonement) as Alan Strang, the boy with a pathological religious/sexual fascination with horses. The horses are played superbly by six actors wearing heavy metal masks and shoes. The magic of theatre done well leaves you in no doubt of their authenticity from start to finish.

Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Callow) is presented with a challenging case by magistrate Hesther Salsman (Linda Thorson). Alan Strang (Allen) presents like a normal seventeen year old. At first sight his life is routine and he lives in the bosom of a loving family. Through a series of events in his childhood he has developed a passion for horses and recently he has been involved in an initial sexual experience with Jill (Laura O’Toole) a stable-hand. The results have been devastating. He is an unresponsive patient who is woken each night by nightmares. And it is now up to Dysart to resolve this psychological puzzle.

A child is born into a world of phenomena,
all equal in their power to enslave.
It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes
over the whole, uncountable range.

Suddenly, one strikes.
Then another. Then another.

Why?

Moments snap together,
like magnets forging a chain of shackes.

Why?

And there certainly is something of a detective story in the formal structure of the play. We know almost from the beginning what has happened. But our imagination cannot deduce the sequence or the reasoning behind the events we know have taken place. Dysart (Simon Callow), the psychiatrist is deep in the midst of his own mid-life crisis, and Shaffer loses no opportunity to compare and contrast the worlds of doctor and patient. Strang’s (Allen) parents, his Christian mother and Atheist father have their own guilt to deal with, their own fears and insecurities to work through, and their own justifications to make. Though the play, although it does use Freudian theory, never strays into the hackneyed territory of the psychological thriller.

Instead, Shaffer has thrown into the pot of Freudian theory and Christian imagery the whole contemporary issue of meaning and identity. The question underlying the play is: What makes life worth living? Is it what we, in the west, have been very busy carving out for ourselves.? Is it safety and security? Or is it passion?

On an intellectual level the play never flags. It contains argument and reference enough to keep you thinking from scene to scene and act to act, and when the final curtain comes down you continue to think and talk about the experience. The group I was with talked together well into the wee hours, and I could imagine other groups of theatre-goers who had seen the play were similarly reluctant to go to bed.

But perhaps even more than the obvious intellectual stimulation, what I took from Equus was the genius of the writing. Broad brush-strokes, like the coup of setting the main action of the play in a stable, the hallowed ground of Christian tradition.

And fine detail in the language of the play, the metaphors and single-word allusions to, for example, the ‘reining’ in of the boy’s excesses; quite apart from the obvious sexual references to the sweat and tackle associated with the magnificent animals who come to represent deity in the mind of the boy who is the centre of all our concerns and the ‘only son’ of his benighted mother.

The tour has moved on from Sheffield now, so you’ll have to catch it at one of the following venues. Let me know what you think:

Monday 21 – Saturday 26 April
Theatre Royal
New Road BRIGHTON
Box Office 09800 606650

Monday 28 April – Saturday 3 May
Alhambra Theatre
Morley Street BRADFORD
Box Office 01274 432000

Monday 5 – Saturday 10 May
Theatre Royal
Sawclose BATH
Box Office 01225 448844

Monday 12 – Saturday 17 May
Festival Theatre
Grange Road MALVERN
Box Office 01684 892277

Monday 19 – Saturday 24 May
Richmond Theatre
The Green RICHMOND
Box Office 0870 060 6651

Sienkiewicz was born in Poland in 1846 and raised during the country’s partitions. He was a constant fighter for his nation’s independence but died a couple of years before that event took place.

In his presentation speech, Carl David af Wirsén commented:

If one surveys Sienkiewicz’ achievement it appears gigantic and vast, and at every point noble and controlled. As for his epic style, it is of absolute artistic perfection. That epic style with its powerful over-all effect and the relative independence of episodes is distinguished by naive and striking metaphors. In this respect, as Geijer has remarked, Homer is the master because he perceives grandeur in simplicity as, for example, when he compares the warriors to flies that swarm around a pail of milk, or when Patroklos, who all in tears asks Achilles to let him fight against the enemies, is compared to a little girl who weeping clings to the dress of her mother and wants to be taken in her arms. A Swedish critic has noticed in Sienkiewicz some similes that have the clarity of Homeric images. Thus the retreat of an army is compared to a retreating wave that leaves mussels and shells on the beach, or the beginning of gunfire is compared to the barking of a village dog who is soon joined in chorus by all the other dogs. The examples could be multiplied. The attack on the front and rear of an army surrounded and subject to fire from both sides is compared to a field that is reaped by two groups of mowers who begin their work at opposite sides of the field with the purpose of meeting in the middle. In Krzyzacy the Samogites rising from furrows attack the German knights like a swarm of wasps whose nest has been damaged by a careless wanderer. In Pan Wolodyjowski we also find admirable images; in order to judge them we should remember that, as often in Homer, the two terms of the comparison converge only in one point, while the rest remains vague. Wolodyjowski with his unique sword kills human lives around him as rapidly as a choir boy after the mass snuffs the candles on the altar one after the other with his long extinguisher.