"The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan

 

This quiet spot off the River Ouse in Bedford was where John Bunyan baptised people.

This classic allegory is one of the best-selling books ever. It was written in 1678 by John Bunyan, a tinker who had been a soldier with the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War,  while he was in Bedford prison for being an unlicensed preacher during the religious repressions following the restoration of the English monarchy. 

It is presented as a series of dreams. The characters are, as was the fashion of the time, named for the characteristics: thus Christian, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, Mr Standfast, Mercy and so on. In the first part Christian travels through hardships such as the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death and encounters temptations such as Vanity Fair and monsters such as Apollyon before fording the River of Death. In the second part, Christian's wife Christiana and his four sons form the nucleus of a party making a second pilgrimage in his by-now-famous footsteps. 

The prose is inevitably old-fashioned. There are no chapters but there are marginal annotations which describe which part of the story you are in. Poems, presumably hymns, are interspersed through the narrative.

Some of it is rather tedious theologising - it is, after all, a sermon - but the picaresque story, despite the inevitability of the happy ending, still has its charm.

The book has been hugely  influential, not least to other writers such as George Eliot (for example in Silas Marner). Some of the quotations below have reached the status of proverbs. And, of course, it contains 'Bunyan's hymn': 

"Who would true valour see,Let him come hither;One here will constant be,Come wind, come weather;There's no discouragementShall make him once relentHis first avowed intentTo be a pilgrim.

"Who so beset him roundWith dismal stories,Do but themselves confound—His strength the more is.No lion can him fright;He'll with a giant fight;But he will have a rightTo be a pilgrim.

"Hobgoblin nor foul fiendCan daunt his spirit;He knows he at the endShall life inherit.Then fancies fly away,He'll fear not what men say;He'll labour night and dayTo be a pilgrim."
It has been rated best in the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time.

Selected quotations:

Part One

• "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream." (First line)
• "there is a company of these crazy-headed coxcombs, that, when they take a fancy by the end, are wiser in their own eyes than seven men that can render a reason."
• "He is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them."
• "What you will. I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things worldly; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial, provided that all be done to our profit."
• "at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not."
• "to tell you the truth, I am become a gentleman of good quality, yet my great-grandfather was but a waterman, looking one way and rowing another, and I got most of my estate by the same occupation."
• "we are always most zealous when religion goes in his silver slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him."
• "Sin was very sweet to my flesh, and I was loath to leave it."

Part Two

• "Now the seal was the contents and sum of the passover which the children of Israel did eat when they came out from the land of Egypt, and the mark was set between their eyes." 
• "Why doth the pelican pierce her own breast with her bill? ... To nourish her young ones with her blood, and thereby to show that Christ the blessed so loveth his young, his people, as to save them from death by his blood." 
• "the way is the way, and there's an end."
• "I know thou art a cock of the right kind, for thou hast said the truth."
• "Mr. Fearing was one that played upon this bass; he and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are; though, indeed, some say the bass is the ground of music. ... The first string that the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune."
• "When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went he said, 'Death, where is thy sting?' And as he went down deeper, he said, 'Grave, where is thy victory?' So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

April 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Year of the Stranger" by Allan Campbell McLean

When I was a little lad, Allan Campbell McLean's young adult stories set in Skye were among my favourite novels: these were The Hill of the Red Fox and The Master of Morgana. These had contemporary settings. The Year of the Stranger is set in 1877.

Callum Og is, like so many of ACM's young heroes, fatherless. He is being brought up by his strict Kirk Elder uncle and his strict, humourless mother, his elder sister is a maid in the Factor's Lodge. The folk of this Skye village live on the seashore after being evicted from their glen which the Factor turned over to sheep. So their life is poor and hard. This is the context for a story of magic and transformation.

Half-way through the book a poor tinker is strapped to heavy yoke in the crucifix position and sent out of the village. Callum finds him dead in the quarry. But when he takes the adults to the scene, the tinker has disappeared, leaving his cross. Shortly after this, ACM gives us the image of a boat beached on the sand: "It always came fresh to me the sight of the old schooner lying beached on her side, her black, dripping flanks exposed, helpless as a stranded whale. And I always got the foolish notion that she was slowly dying as the sea left her. Not that it was all that foolish a notion, because you could see her coming back to life as the sea returned, her timbers groaning loud as she shifted with the incoming tide; and it was as if she breathed again as she finally came clear of the shore and floated free." (C 11) This is a beautiful metaphor for death and rebirth, tangled with the sea and the ebb and flow of life, and promising freedom at the end.

Immediately after crucifixion, death and resurrection, a stranger comes to the village with a musical pipe (is he the pied piper?) and a monkey. He charms the children of the town and uses them to build a fish trap on the shore. A heavy harvest of fish are taken. Very biblical. But when the stranger invites the local tinkers to share the feast, the townsfolk refuse and throw stones at the tinkers.

This is a story of a call, a refusal of the call, and the bitter retribution that it brings.

It is wonderful.

I adore the way that ACM makes you hear the Gaelic speech patterns:

• "I am telling you, boy, you should be down on your knees quaking and trembling at the thought of the everlasting fire that awaits the the wicked. What a bed is theirs to lie on; no straw to ease their bones, but fire; no friends, but furies; no sun to mark the passage o' time, but darkness - fire eternal, always burning, never dying away. Who can endure everlasting flame, boy?" (C 3)
• "You would need to chain him to a wall - and a strong wall at that - to keep him away from the kirk on the Sabbath." (C 3)
• "Mr Ferguson's heavy studded shoes and Mata's bare feet, unprotected among the clattering tackets of the well shod, padding silent as the tread of a cat." (C 3)
• "She was sleeping, the same one, sleeping like a dead thing." (C 5)
• "There were more than Mata with ears fit to hear the grass growing." (C 5)
• "He had questions ... that would have drawn sweat through the thick hide of a donkey." (C 6)
• "That was the way it was with us after the night of the storm ... I mind well when we first saw the sun again." (C 10)
• "He would say that there is always a place for the right shaped stone, and that you had to build that way, not taking the first stone that came to hand, and trying to make it fit - that would put the wall out of true, and it would not endure." (C 13)
• "It seemed to me that we were not just building a fish trap. With every stone that went into the wall of the cairidh, we seemed to be weaving a web that bound us ever closer to the living world" (C 14)
• "We will have a great fishing, I know it." (C 14) This echoes the great catch that the disciples had when fishing on the Sea of Galilee
• "The turf dyke at the bottom of the crofts was the boundary between the believers and the unbelievers, although, in truth, my own belief was ebbing as fast as the tide." (C 14)
• "It is great how old men do not like to be beat, always making out that nothing can compare to the great days of their youth." (C 14)
• "But the moment I was into the water, the flood was greedy for my legs." (C 16)

Beautifully written. June 2020; 192 pages

"Perelandra" by C S Lewis

Before the Narnia books, Lewis wrote the "Cosmic Trilogy", a set of three sci-fi books in which the hero, Ransom fights for God against the Devil. Perelandra, which is set on Venus,  follows on from Out of the Silent Planet which is set on Mars. The third book in the trilogy, more dystopian than scifi and set on Earth, is That Hideous Strength.

Ransom is recruited by the Eleldil, the 'angels' who look after the solar system, to travel to Venus which is in a Garden of Eden situation. His mission is to persuade the Queen not to listen to the blandishments of his old adversary, Professor Weston, and therefore to avoid the Fall. This book is heavily allegorical and involves a great deal of theological argument, However, Lewis is a great writer and the passages of description (the surface of Venus is mostly Ocean covered with floating islands in which the mountains and valleys swap according to how they are positioned on the giant waves; this makes walking harder than gaining your sea legs on a boat but “like learning to walk on water itself” (p 44) are memorable. He can even make theology interesting and there are a lot of fascinating theological points which he makes.

In the first chapter 'Lewis' walks to Ransom's cottage to send Ransom off on his journey. This makes the main drama a story within a story (a frame narrative) and pays an obvious homage to The Time Machine by H G Wells. It is a great start as it describes Lewis as walking through darkness, assailed by fears and doubts, repeatedly wanting to turn back, and is itself a delightful allegory.

• "I was afraid ... I might get 'drawn in' ... I suppose that everyone knows this fear ... the sense that a door has just slammed and left him on the inside." (p 3)
• "This is a long, dreary road." (p 4)
• "My opinion about sanity changed. Had it ever been more than a convention - a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?" (p 9)

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book. It was written in 1943 and is therefore imbued with the life and death struggle against Nazism in which so many young men sacrificed their lives. The only part of the book in which I lost interest was the last two chapters which follow the main drama and act as a sort of long-winded ceremony.

He is particularly good at spotting the paradoxes in our everyday lives:

• "I felt sure that the creature was what we call 'good', but I wasn't sure whether I liked 'goodness' as much as I had supposed." (p 15)
• "One can believe in anaesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life feels when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it's good practice." (p 25)
• “He stood ... wondering how often in his life on Earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire, but in the teeth of desire and in obedience to a spurious rationalism.” (p 47)
• “He saw reality, and thought it was a dream.” (p 49)

There is a great description of men from the feminists point of view:

• “One felt them [men] there as a huge, dim multitude of creatures pitifully childish and complacently arrogant; timid, meticulous, unoriginating; sluggish and ox-like, rooted to the earth almost in their indolence, prepared to try nothing, to risk nothing, to make no exertion, and capable of being raised into full life only by the unthanked and rebellious virtue of their females.” (p 154) 

There is some useful advice for living:

• “Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it?” (p 175)
• “The words ‘would have happened’ were meaningless - mere invitations to wander in what the Lady would have called an ‘alongside world’ which had no reality.” (p 180)
• “He was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which Justice demanded. ... There had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge ... The thing was neither more nor less dreadful than it had been before. The only difference was that he knew ... ... there was going to arrive a moment at which he would have done it.” (p 184)

There are some great descriptions:

• "Blood and lungs and the warm, moist cavity of the mouth are somehow indicated in every voice." (p 12)
• “A tall, white, shivering, scarecrow of a man.” (p 28)
• “He saw the golden roof of that world quivering with a rapid variation of paler lights as a ceiling quivers at the reflected sunlight from the bath-water when you step into your bath on a summer morning.” (p 37) 
• “Why ... are you making little hills and valleys in your forehead?” (p 82)
• “The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop.” (p 150)
• “All beautiful on the surface, but down inside - darkness, heat, horror, and stink.” (p 224)
• “Beyond that were great halls still dimly illuminated and full of unknown mineral wealth that sparkled and danced in the light and mocked his eyes as if he were exploring a hall of mirrors by the help of a pocket torch.” (p 231)
• “A sailor’s look ... eyes that are impregnated with distance.” (p 254)

Other great lines:

• “Words are slow.” (p 39)
• “This was a calm which no storm had ever preceded.” (p 64)
• “A night is always a night whatever you do in it, as from this tree to that is always so many paces whether you take them quickly or slowly. and I suppose that is true in a way. But the waves do not always come at equal distances.” (p 69)
• “He was a man obsessed with the idea ... that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome.” (p 97)
• “The face which he raised ... had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.” (p 134)
• “We have all spoken of a devilish smile ... the smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world.” (p 134)
• “Among times there is a time that turns a corner and everything this side of it is new. Times do not go backward.” (p 72)
• “It [the devil] regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in it off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave.” (p 158)
• “Could it be possible, in the long run, to wear clothes without learning modesty, and through modesty lasciviousness?” (p 167)
• “Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.” (p 173)
• “That's why it's so important to live as long as you can ... Every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say ‘what difference does a short reprieve make?’ What difference!” (p 210)
• “Our mythology is based on a solider reality then we dream ... gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.” (p 255) 

OK, so the story is massively allegorical and really only buyable by those ascribing to a quite narrow interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden. On the other hand Lewis is able to make some interesting theological points. And the whole thing becomes readable (except for the last two chapters, in my opinion) because he is a great writer who can both spin a yarn and develop it with powerful description. 

The Narnia books are lovable because of the simple adventure narratives and the cute and cuddly talking animals. They are appropriately written for children. These science fiction books are not bad for adult allegories.

August 2018; 282 pages

"Out of the Silent Planet" by C S Lewis

C S Lewis is famous for his Narnia books though his Space Trilogy starting with this book predated Narnia. These are also allegories in which a character, in this case an eminent philologist, travels to another world and, after a series of adventures with talking nonhumans, meets the planet's 'god'. All the elements are there.

But it is adults. Ransom, a philology don on a walking holiday, is kidnapped by mad professor Weston and treasure hunting Devine and taken on a space ship to Malacandria, a planet where there are three species of rational beings. Quite a lot of the book is taken up with realistic descriptions of the planet and its flora and fauna. Almost exactly half way through comes the crime, or tragedy, that marks the turning point and sends Ransom on a journey to the god of the planet.

There are several moments of homage to H G Wells. At the start of the book Ransom is described as "The Pedestrian" as Wells only ever calls the protagonist of The Time Machine as “The Time Traveller"; both books end with the narrator talking direct to the reader. There is a reference to Ransom having read Wells.

There is a delightful part at the end when one of the other humans, a bad man who arrived with the narrator, is given a speech in which he justifies his desire to colonise the new planet in terms of the march of life, of civilization, and of his own species. This would be heavy going if he just droned on for two or three pages! So his speech must be translated and this opens up first the opportunity for the translator to interrupt so that the speech is broken up by 'business' and second (and most wonderfully) the opportunity for the weasel words in the speech to be explored. Thus "To you I may seem a vulgar robber" becomes "there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnau's food and - and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind." This is a very clever piece of technique.


Roger Lancelyn Green described the experience of reading Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis: "remembers vividly the thrill of excitement - the sudden moment of joy - when ... he realized in a blinding flash to what Oyarsa was referring ... it was like stepping into a new dimension." (Lancelyn Green and Hooper, 1974, 165)

Great lines:
“The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuff his map into his pocket.” (p 1; first line)
“Dressed with that particular kind of shabbiness which marks a member of the intelligentsia on a holiday.” (p 2)
“One of those irritating people who forgets to use their hands when they begin talking.” (p 13) This allows CSL to punctuate the speech with (a) longings of Ransom to see the bottle uncorked and (b) Devine stopping talking to do another bit of the uncorking ceremony.
“It, too, was in the grip of curiosity. Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly felt the impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening, ecstatic and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. it was like a courtship - like the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world; it was like something beyond that; so natural is the contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence, so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling intercourse of two different, but rational, species.” (pp 65 - 66)
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.” (p 89)
“Would he want his dinner all day or want his sleep after he had slept?” (p 89)
“How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life filled the whole life with expectation and memory?” (pp 91 - 92)
“I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, no love so sweet, if there were no danger.” (p 92)
“A world is not meant to last for ever, much less a race.” (p 126)
“They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair - or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it - like a female trying to beget young on herself.” (p 129)
“What it might mean to grow up seeing always so few miles away a land of colour that could never be reached and had once been inhabited.” (p 130)

This is a fun book. Although there is too much 'world-building' for me I understand that there are a lot of science fiction aficionados who adore that aspect of sci-fi. It is a little dated: it was written in 1938 when Dons did take walking holidays and the working class really did tug their forelocks. I suppose it is a grown-up version of Narnia.

Perhaps another source is Paradise Lost: the mythology of Malacandria does seem to involve the fall of Lucifer and his banishment to the earth.

This author also write two sequels to this book, the Screwtape Letters, and the seven book Narnia series as well as 'The Discarded Image', a fascinating study of mediaeval literature. He was also the subject of a biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper.

October 2017; 206 pages