What I've been reading this week
21/02/25
Good evening!
I’m quite ill with a cold at the minute and I wasn’t going to send a newsletter this week, but I am suffering for you all.
On 26th February, I’ll be at Blackwells Manchester interviewing Vincenzo Latronico about his novel Perfection. Tickets are £4, or free with a purchase of the book.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Once again I have had two very different experiences in my reading this week. Firstly, I read an advanced copy of Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, which is out in May from Bloomsbury. This was an absolutely incredible read, and I really recommend pre-ordering it, especially if you are a spiritual or religious person. It is a deep dive into the current landscape of Christianity among people in their 20s and 30s in Britain, with Ash beginning her research as a reluctant atheist and ending it as a regular Anglican church-goer and believer in Christ. I say she began as a ‘reluctant’ atheist because she would like to believe in a Cristian God, but she finds it difficult getting past many of the institutional issues that many Christian denominations have. She begins going to Bible reading lessons, and finds that the church who run the course are very conservative, and very much at odds with things like Ash’s sexuality and beliefs. She goes to Quaker meetings, but finds that people very rarely give ministries and they are mostly silent, which help her in her journey to a degree, but they don’t foster a reliable community or spiritual guidance. She goes on Christian retreats, she attends Catholic Mass, she watches baptisms, she speaks to Orthodox Christians who don’t speak Russian or Greek. She interviews adult converts, people raised in the church, people who have deconstructed from their particular congregations but who still believe in God, she speaks to atheists who attend Quaker meetings. It would be difficult to find a clearer or more varied portrait of modern-day faith in Jesus in Britain today.
All of the above is interspersed with readings of the Bible as both a historical and literary text -- a text that has been corrupted, edited and written under circumstances that are now mysterious to us, but also something that holds great metaphorical and literal value. Ash, like myself, prefers a metaphorical reading of both the Old and New Testaments, taking specific images (one she returns to is Jacob wrestling with the angel, as well as the burning bush) and combing out their many meanings. In her research she finds that literal interpretations of the Bible can make for very conservative churches, something she finds fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching and the nature of faith. What I particularly liked about her reading of the Bible is her capacity for contextualising and humanising characters and situations that can (and often are) removed from their original occurrences. For example, it would have been common for Moses to have seen desert fires because of the extreme heat -- but he was drawn to the burning bush because its leaves would have been intact, the texture of the fire would have been different. When God left the bush as a vessel to speak with Moses, Ash wonders if it remained intact, or did those previously unharmed leaves begin to shrivel? If they didn't, would that have strengthened Moses’ faith in what he had just experienced? In such a humanised reading, she (quite ironically) shows us the capacity for metaphor and multiple meaning in these kinds of images. The Bible is far from stale and fixed with this kind of faith.
It’s through her reading and interpretation of the Bible that she finds a greater connection with God. It is also in her encounters with the people that she meets in her research, even if she doesn’t agree with their standpoint. Ash experiences great kindness and empathy in her meetings, which are incredibly varied. This is as much a portrait of Britain today as it is a portrait of a particular religion, with quite a strong focus on working-class people and those who have experienced trauma or mental health issues. She makes room for criticism, but she also makes plenty of room for empathy, noting in her writing where she could have been more open-minded with people, especially at the beginning of her journey. The personal elements of this book are deeply, deeply moving, with some beautiful writing on faith, as well as Jesus as both the Son of God and a man who lived at a particular time in order to fulfil a particular purpose.
My next book was also rooted in religion, but it just didn’t quite work for me. I read Pew by Catherine Lacey (2020), which focuses on a person arriving in a small conservative American town, presumably in the South, who is found sleeping in a church pew by members of one of the town’s congregations. They name them Pew after an anecdote the pastor shares about his cat, who is named Gutter because he was found in a gutter. They have to give Pew a name because they do not speak to anyone, aside from a handful of words to certain outliers of the community when they are alone. Pew is not of any immediately-obvious gender, age or ethnicity, and as they continue on in their silence, Pew becomes a sounding board and site of experimentation for their prejudices and their histories.
I quite liked the concept of this, but something I feared was that it would not go past a certain point -- and it didn’t. This was really uninspiring work overall. The idea of it sort of hung there and wasn’t developed in a way that was interesting. I started to suspect that I wasn’t enjoying Pew early on when I wondered why Pew’s lack of definition wasn’t being set against anything -- the town and people they encountered didn’t leave any significant impression. Perhaps this was Lacey attempting to say that these kinds of towns are also built on unsteady ground, and that someone like Pew can easily disrupt it and show it its own condition. But the issue with that was that it wasn’t set up in this way -- we just met a cast of pretty boring, ill-defined characters in a place that barely felt like it was formulated. It’s difficult to showcase the hypocrisies of a particular location if that location isn’t really present in the text. Lacey seemed to be drawing on particular mentalities in contemporary America, but I did think a bit of an obvious flaw was how the kinds of communities she was writing about heavily celebrate the police and institutional justice, but, even though Pew is often believed to be around 15 or even younger, the authorities were not called at any point. I kept thinking, why hasn’t anybody told the police? Why aren’t they present in the community, even though the justice system and the law is referred to? It was an odd reading experience that wasn’t really saying anything beyond some very basic ideas (small towns are often racist and transphobic, and they prescribe to a particular kind of Christianity). Ok, what else would you like to say about that? Not much it seems!
More next week!