Too Close To Home- Linwood Barclay

A thriller which I read in one day- couldn't put it down!  A family of three is murdered while a neighbour friend is hiding in the house, but is it the neighbour's family who were the true targets?  Easy to read, yet not juvenile in the writing, this was a good way to spend a quiet Friday.  I even read it during commercials while watching Tiger at the PGA!

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Zafon is an excellent story-teller whose first novel, The Shadow of the Wind, I thoroughly enjoyed, so when I heard about his second novel, I wasted no time in purchasing it for my birthday.  I found time throughout the rainy days we had to read it, and I found it thoroughly engrossing. He is a wonderful story-teller with a great sense of colour and mood: the novel is set in 1930s Barcelona - the predominant colours here are black, grey and white- there's lots of rain, mist, shadowy homes, eerie public buildings, scenes  in which there is lots of rich detail, only to be re-visited and find them abandoned for years.  The narrator is David Martin ( with a Spanish accent on the "i") , a writer who finds himself contracted to one Andreas Corelli to write a new religion, even as he is ghost-writing a novel for a rich friend, and trying to finish one of his own for some shady lawyers who have him also under contract.  David lives in a huge mansion which has always fascinated him, a place full of old smells and hidden rooms, mysterious visitors, and one which is visited frequently by three police officers, who think David is responsible for some murders they're investigating. The highlight of the book for me is his visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which also appeared in Zafon's first novel, and it is here he finds a book which leads him to discover the truth about the former inhabitants of his home. I can't say whether I completely understood what was happening- there were lots of odd twists and turns, and I ended up wondering how many of these characters, including David, were actually alive, but it didn't matter: I enjoyed the ride!

The Third Man Factor by John Geiger

"The Third Man Factor is an extraordinary account of how people at the very edge of death experience a sense of an incorporeal being beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive" (book jacket)

The book relates the experiences of 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, divers, prisoners of war, sailors, aviators, and astronauts, all of whom have escaped traumatic events to tell similar stories of having sensed the close presence of a helper or guardian. 

The incidents themselves are fascinating, and, if nothing else, reveal the strength of human beings to survive, and their resilience. The most famous, of course, is the Shackleton Experience of hiking across the Antarctic under harrowing circumstances but with the unwavering conviction that there were not two men travelling, but three, one of whom was always at Shackleton's right, not always visible, but an unseen presence.

Geiger discusses how in the early years of Christianity, monks and hermits retreated to the desert to seek spiritual renewal and communion with God through fasting, self-inflicted pain, meditation and prolonged prayer.  He also cites the vision quest of the tribal peoples of Africa, Asia and North America. the phenomenon of angels ("humans can indeed perceive disembodied entities") He also explains how humans seek out company: we are social beings and we need one another.  Monotony and extreme physical exertion are the enemies, and the knowledge of a presence nearby can be a tremendous motivator to survive. It can also be a ghostly apparition, a manifestation of a guardian angel, or hallucinations brought on by medical conditions like low blood glucose, high-altitude cerebral edema, or cold stress.

Geiger sets out to explain what neurological research has found. A scientist named Critchley was the first to seriously study accounts of the Third Man among the normal population and he was certain that its origins lay not outside the body, but within.

In 1976, Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist provided a context in which the Third Man could be viewed as the product of brain processes.  Until 3000 years ago, the human brain was divided into a right-brain "god-side" which appeared like an omnipotent being who dispensed advice and commands, while a left-brain "man-side" listened and obeyed.. "These voices are always and immediately obeyed.  These voices are called gods.  To me this is the origin of gods.  I regard them as auditory hallucinations."

External triggers such as extreme stress, cold, hunger, thirst are factors involved in appearances by the Third Man, but there is also an internal variable: an openness to experience, which Geiger calls the "muse factor": a person's willingness to explore, consider, and tolerate new and unfamiliar experiences, ideas and feelings."

The Third Man could also be a doppelganger: "an extension of one's own corporal awareness into extracorpoeal space". This is probably closest to my own interpretation of the Third Man: a presence that comes when the traveller most desperately needs it.  The mind creates another persona which aids and supports, not necessarily delivers, but reaches those areas of the psyche which facilitate survival and endurance. "The explorers and survivors in this book had pushed them to the bare limits and they reached the point of sufficient extremity to have experienced an additional unaccountable companion on their journeys."

Time and again, these people who experienced the presence of the Third Man, are convinced that the experience was produced by the brain as a coping mechanism.  Its origins were within, not without. "This benevolent being exists not outside of us, but within.  It is a real power for survival, a secret and astonishing capacity of mind, part of our social hardware. I call it the angel switch...It's the ultimate and quite beautiful example of how we are social animals- that in our time of deepest solitude and needs, our brain or mind finds a way to reassure us that we are not alone, and that fellow-humanity feeling is what ultimately makes the difference between life and death"

Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor

I browsed my own shelves for something to read over the days leading up to and after David's wedding: an unusual exercise, because supposedly every book is on my shelf because I want to read it- the only question is "What do I want to read NOW?"  So I decided on Stanley Park.  Caryn, at Smoothwater, was reading this when we first visited there, and I could see as I was reading it, why she enjoyed it- I do recall her telling us that only that morning a new worker had accidentally run over a small animal- I don't remember what- and she had come out to find the animal was still warm, and it was marinating in her kitchen ready for eating that evening.  My stomach twinged a bit when I heard that, and as a group we decided we wouldn't tell the other girls about her comments.

Now I know why, because in this book, Jeremy, a Vancouver chef who's opened a new restauarant, who also has connections to the homeless in Stanley Park, changes the opening night menu.  I quote:  "...a dozen plump Canada geese, a dozen grey rock doves, six canvasbacks, four large rabbits, fifteen grey squirrels, four huge racoons, and a huge swan".  At this point, wasn't I happy this was fiction?  The fish course was to include goldfish, flatfish and periwinkle.  The menus, of course, would not state the true source, so needless to say Jeremy got himself into a pile of trouble.

The novel was also too long - some 475 pages.  There were interesting side-plots, and I had nothing else to read with me, so I trudged through this, and skimmed through the last 50 pages or so. 

Yuck...

The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys

Spring 1941 in England- Gwen Davis is a gardener who volunteers to reclaim the gardens at an estate outside London as a war effort.  She finds a hidden garden, really three gardens, and she realizes the first time she finds them that she is the first person to find them since they were abandoned, and that she was meant to find them.  

she is in charge of a group of Land Girls, while soldiers under the command of Captain Raley reside in the house, awaiting orders to go into combat.  Jane is a frail young woman whose fiance is missing in action.  All three of these characters are dealing with loss, as are all the other characters, who do chalk drawings of their past on the blackout curtains. The lost garden consists of three parts, Longing, Faith, and Loss.  Gwen sets out to find who created this garden, who is the white figure that keeps stealing chickens, and who are the people everyone has left behind. She herself is mourning a mother who never loved her, as well as the author Virginia Woolf ( I really must read To The Lighthouse)!,

This is a beautifully constructed novel, only 182 pages long. Humphreys manages to pack a lot of information and images into such a short novel that you feel it was much longer.  As the book jacket says, it is "word perfect".

I especially enjoyed how she related Virginia Woolf to the story: she is certain she followed her one evening on a busy London street, and nowWoolf has died without Gwen ever speaking to her.  But, upon hearing Jane read To The Lighthouse to her friend David as he knits a sweater for his fiance back home, Gwen realizes that she has shared her life with Woolf: the book is the shared intimacy.(page 156)

"There is VW, dipping her pen in ink, looking up from the page with Lily on the lawn, to the view outside her window.  Here am I, looking across the room to the the summer dark beating against these mullioned panes.  There is Jane reading the words aloud to a young soldier sitting beside her.  It is a place we have arrived at, this book.  The characters fixed on the page.  The author who is only ever writing the book, not gardening or walking or talking, and while the reader is reading, the author is always here, writing.  The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.  And this is what you're doing, being in the book, entering it as one enters a room, and sees there, through the French doors to the garden, Lily Briscoe painting on the lawn."

The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong traces the beginnings of the Bible from the earliest books of the Old Testament, tales of the gods Yaweh and Elohim, describes the many influences that helped form the sacred texts of the Old and New Testaments, and how the 66 books of the Bible were created, interpreted, and developed into the Holy Book. She also describes the multiple ways in which the Bible has been interpreted over the years, from the ancient reformers who didn't use scripture to conserve their traditions, but to evoke radical change, to the fundamentalists of today who see the Bible as heralding the last days of the world.

What did I learn?  Well, to start with, I read the book quickly once, then again more slowly and more intensively.  The subtitle describes Armstrong's book as a "biography", and that it is.  I decided just to take note of certain things which I found most meaningful to my understanding.

1.  The two times the temple of Israel was destroyed was integral to the development of (a) The Torah when Israel was in exile in Babylon in 586 BC, and (b) the advent of Christianity and the gospels when the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 CE.

2. Augustine(c580-662) was the first "born-again" Christian, upon picking up the Bible and reading it.  He, although responsible for much of the dogma of the RC Church, also emphasized the need for charity" the Bible was about love, charity was the central principle of Torah and everything else was commentary.

3. The Puritans' arrival in the New World can be seen as an Exodus, similar to the Israelites leaving Egypt.  They even called the New World "New Canaan".  But the New World also had its slaves:

"although Americans were committed to liberation and freedom, for 200 years there was an enslaved Israel in their midst."

4. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a monk who, after seeing the whole Bible for the first time, became fascinated with the book, saw it as integral to faith,  believed Christ was the central figure of the Bible,became the first "born-again" Christian, challenged the church on the Pope's power to forgive sins, translated the Bible into German, and basically, I think, developed the form of worship used today- scripture, songs, hymns, etc.

5. Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Sephardic Jew who became the pioneer of the historical-critical method :

"the manifest contradictions in the Bible proved that it could not be of divine origin; the idea of revelation was a delusion; and there was no super-natural deity- what we called 'God' who simply nature itself".  He was excommunicated, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion!

6/ The issue of  the Bible vs science in creation, the Scopes trial, the contest deciding on the side of rational thought, only made the fundamentalists more vehemently literal in their interpretation of Scripture, and moved them to the far right of the political spectrum, where they have remained.

The Bible is: a subversive document, a spiritual activity, a commentary on the Golden Rule.

KEY TERMS TO REMEMBER:

Apologia:  a rational explanation

Dogma: term used by Greek-speaking Christians to describe the hidden, ineffable traditions of the Church, which could only be understood mystically and expressed symbolically.

Exegesis: the art of interpreting and explaining the biblical text.

Gnostic: a redeeming "knowledge"

Hermeneutics: the art of interpretation, especially of scripture.

Midrash: exegesis; interpretation, with connotations of investigation, quest.

Shekhinah: the divine presence on earth.

Talmud: "teaching study"

Torah: "law"

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

This is the second novel in the Deptford Trilogy, and David Staunton, Boy Staunton's son, is the leading character.  David has gone to Europe for psycho-analysis from a German psychiatrist: he was the character in the first novel who called out in the presentation by the magician/ illusionist Eisingrim "Who killed Boy Staunton?" and realized that it was his very soul that had called out. The analysis takes up the major part of the novel, and I did find it rather slow-going, despite the fact that events of the first novel were re-told from David's point of view, which certainly was insightful. 

The Manticore is depicted on the cover: it shows a man's face. a lion's body, and a "bite" in the tail, being held by a chain to a woman dressed in white.  Apparently all these images depict the various parts of a person's makeup: the anima, the devil's advocate, the Shadow.  Pretty psychological stuff, and in rather a lot of detail.

Will I go on to read World of Wonders?  Let's see....