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AUSTEN IVEREIGH Desolata, one both intimate and empty; and she is Theotokos, mother of God, the per- sonification of the Scriptures. Lubich on INSPIRATION Mary often hits notes of extravagance: she is “the flower blossoming on the tree of humanity, born of God who created the first seed in Adam. FROM A BOLD She is the daughter of God her Son” – which some may think best confined to a spiritual MYSTIC diary. But she can equally strike on something apparently straightforward – “do to others what would you have them do to you” – and flesh Chiara Lubich, Essential Writings: out a whole practical programme for living. spirituality, dialogue, culture The second part of the book is a series of Compiled and ed. Michel Vandeleene insights for such a programme. In one essay NEW CITY PRESS, £12.40 she suggests asking yourself, when you meet ■ Tablet bookshop price £11.20 Tel 01420 592974 someone, what they are going through, and keep loving them until you find that same suf- fering in yourself. “Love will suggest to me how ith 140,000 members worldwide, I can help them,” she says, “because as Chris- and another 2 million connected tians we know the value of suffering.” Spend in other ways through its prayer Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare one day doing this, Chiara insists, and “a joy W groups, ecumenical and interfaith movement, receiving an honorary we have never felt before will flood over us. meetings – not to mention its 20-odd towns doctorate from the Catholic University A new power will fill us. God will be with us, and 654 businesses run on “communion” of America in Washington DC because he is with those who love.” principles – Focolare is one of the most im- The third part seeks to apply her programme pressively numerous movements in modern Trento; filled with fire and vision, she set about of empathy through kenosis to the worlds of Catholicism. It pops up everywhere: hosting putting into practice the words of John’s Gospel, politics, the media and the arts. She delineates a pan-European ecumenical gathering here, “that all may be one”. Her great contribution the mission of her followers with the boldness an “encounter” of politicians, journalists and to Christian spirituality is to take prayer into and directness of a medieval saint: “Today, pol- artists there, offering an Argentinian safe house human relationships. In a world fractured by itics is a weapon that serves Satan,” she says, to the scandal-dogged Archbishop Milingo, clashing narratives, she offers the possibility “but it could also be put to the service of God.” even inspiring the spirituality of the Catholic of “going to God together”, not by dragging Her political manifesto? “We need to put more drug rehab in Brazil which Pope Benedict vis- others or persuading them or defeating them, religion into politics, more mysticism into prac- ited in May. Those kinds of numbers, and its but by “stripping away those habits that allow tice, more wisdom into government, more unity extraordinary energy and commitment, should me to anchor my security in what sets me apart among all.” If this seems a little, well, simple, make it a major feature on the Catholic map. from others”, as the Archbishop of Canterbury it is followed later by a startling insight – that Yet Focolare flies below the radar, escap- puts it in his introduction. Like the Holy Spirit, modern politics has striven after liberty and ing familiar categories: it is a lay association, equality but neglected fraternity. Like Cather- founded and led by a lay woman, but many ine of Siena, she sternly knocks together these members are priests; it is a Catholic move- In bombed-out Trento, squabbling politicians, offers them a “dynamic ment, but a large number of members are Chiara Lubich, filled with of mutuality” and invites them to love each Anglicans, even Muslims; some of its members other’s parties as their own. are celibate, and live together, while others are fire and vision, set out to For sceptics she offers the example of married, with jobs; it is unmistakably Italian, put into practice the words the Bangwa people in English-speaking yet manages to be quite at home in Africa or of St John’s Gospel, that Cameroon, who sought help from Lubich in Hemel Hempstead; it is deeply Marian, yet the 1960s. “I had a strange impression”, she oddly feminist. ‘all may be one’ recalls of her visit there, “that God, like a sun, Pinning down Focolare is like trying to nail was enveloping all of us, Focolarini and jelly to a wall. But why try? It is hard to say Focolare has a genius for relationship, one Bangwa together; and that the sun, almost like what Franciscans are for (peace and joy?) or forged in a spirituality of kenosis, or self- a divine sign, made me foresee the rising of what makes Jesuits different – until you con- emptying, which is developed in the first third a city that we would build together, there in sider their founders, their character and the of this book. The object is to “lose God with- the midst of the tropical forest.” Hospitals, particular insights which flowed from their in us for God in our brothers and sisters” – schools, houses followed; and the Bangwa prayer. Chiara Lubich, Focolare’s octagenar- to seek the Kingdom of God not just within adopted the spirituality of communion. They ian founder – the online Wikipedia has her us but within people, “to speak in order to be- live now “in absolute peace”, without need even down, oddly, as an “Italian Catholic activist” come one with others”, as she says in her classic of police. – is not a theologian, exactly; but she has a essay, “The Spirituality of Communion”. “If you This is a handsomely put together book in trained mind unafraid of major ideas. Nor, des- cannot always pray, you can always love,” she a hotchpotch of styles – spiritual musings, pite flashes of beauty, is she a writer: the style says. Two people “fused in the name of major addresses, letters to followers – followed is too clunky, sometimes even pedestrian, to Christ” become a “divine power in the world”, by useful sources: chronology, bibliography have won her the readership of an Henri she notes in ‘The Dream of a God”: the soul and index. For anyone wanting to get inside Nouwen or Ronald Rolheiser. But poring over endures pain by thinking of the pain or joy the mind and heart of one of the Church’s most this anthology, it is hard not to grasp her sig- of others; this is “the little secret that builds, significant contemporary figures, it cannot be nificance to contemporary Catholicism. brick by brick, the city of God within us and bettered; it is also just the thing to hand the Lubich is essentially a mystic: she was illu- among us”. Congregation for the Causes of the Saints when minated as a young woman in bombed-out Hence Mary as model: she is at once La – as it surely will – that time comes.

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Respectful adversaries Near East, on to the Crusades and then the rise of the Ottoman empire and, finally (if a little sketchily), into the modern era. He is People of the Book: the forgotten to be applauded for grappling with such an history of Islam and the West unwieldy subject, and it is very satisfying to Zachary Karabell see the role of Judaism being discussed at JOHN MURRAY, £25 considerable length. From time to time, ■ Tablet bookshop price £22.50 Tel 01420 592974 however, Karabell’s delivery lets him down. Writing a history book that tries to teach lessons to the present by recounting episodes n 917, two envoys from the Byzantine from the past is a perilous pursuit. You run Icourt in Constantinople travelled to the God moves a mountain for the the risk of being anachronistic or reductive heart of the Abbasid empire: the fabled city Christians of Baghdad, illustrated (pitfalls that Karabell doesn’t always of Baghdad. Upon reaching the caliph’s manuscript of c. 1412. From The Church sidestep) and the tendency to preach is compound, they were taken on a tour of 23 of the East by Christoph Baumer (IB hard to resist. Historians are fully fledged palaces including the palace of the tree, Tauris, £25) members of society, of course, and they with its astonishing automata; the palace of have their opinions about the full gamut of the 100 lions, where wild beasts began contemporary issues, but too often in these “sniffing them and eating from their antagonism between Islam and the West is, pages one has the sense of being lectured at. hands”; and the palace of paradise, where as Karabell avers, deeply questionable. He If he sometimes misfires, however, eunuchs slaked the ambassadors’ thirst with does not ignore the darker side of this long Karabell writes extremely well and many of iced water and sherbet. Thirty-eight and complex history. Some of his accounts his chapters – notably his even-handed thousand wall hangings, 22,000 elegant are rose-tinted but, for the most part, he discussion of the Crusades – are extremely carpets and countless trays of jewels were does not seek to deny the recurrent carnage rewarding. The relationship between Islam on display to impress the visitors. or cruelty. All he wants us to remember is and the rest of the world will be one of the Relations between Baghdad and that, for every instance of violence or defining issues of the twenty-first century, Constantinople were far from cosy at the prejudice, there was a moment of and revisiting the historical context of time. The envoys had been sent to negotiate enlightened encounter or mutual respect. present-day dilemmas and opportunities is a temporary pause in hostilities between the Do such moments represent a forgotten no bad thing. two empires and to organise a routine history, as Karabell’s punchy title suggests? At the turn of the seventeenth century, exchange of prisoners. But if the rulers of Not really. It is hard to think of venues of Richard Knolles declared the Ottoman Byzantium and the Muslim rulers of rich cultural interplay that have been more Turks to be the “greatest terror of the Baghdad were enemies they still behaved fully examined than Abbasid Baghdad or world”, but he combined his misgivings decorously towards one another. medieval Cordoba: the tales of manuscripts with a keen sense of the Ottoman empire’s I suspect that this story might appeal to being translated, ideas being exchanged, extraordinary achievements. “There is in the American writer and historian Zachary tolerant theological discussions being this world nothing more admirable nor Karabell, who seeks to remind us that, over staged, are familiar enough. That said, strange … nothing more magnificent nor 14 centuries, the relationships between Karabell still has a good point to make glorious … nothing more dreadful or Christianity, Judaism and Islam have often about the complex and sophisticated dangerous.” Such ambivalence towards a been dynamic and fruitful. With history of Islam and the West and one that, rival religion was hardly a high watermark contemporary religious animosities – so in these troubled times, is positively of cultural understanding but, compared to often fuelled by historical myths and therapeutic. He covers a great deal of some of the bitter pronouncements we hear misrepresentations – running rampant, ground, from the birth of Islam in the in today’s world (from both sides of the that is a laudable and pertinent aspiration. seventh century to the establishment of the religious divide) it sounds almost The notion of an ingrained and inevitable great Muslim caliphates in Spain and the adulatory. Jonathan Wright

copy of Great Expectations. Mr Dickens, he concludes with trips to Gravesend and Novel of the week assures his pupils, will give them strength Rochester, with its Charles Dickens Centre. by showing them a new world, Victorian Here she finds her beloved Pip reduced to a Mister Pip England. There they will discover that figure in a commercial theme park. Her Lloyd Jones people in books, like Pip and Joe Gargery, belief in the power of literature is shaken; JOHN MURRAY, £12.99 also confront and overcome difficulties. she becomes aware of its limitations. ■ Tablet bookshop price £11.70 Tel 01420 592974 The children’s encounter with the West The villagers in Mister Pip strike me as through Pip, his bad-tempered sister, the convincingly Melanesian, especially in their convict Magwitch and Miss Havisham is speech patterns and the author’s ister Pip is about doing the right thing, recounted by Matilda, aged 14. Her father, a descriptions of their feelings of mutual Mabout what it means to be a good former mineworker, is in Townsville, obligation towards both individuals and the person and the power of religious faith. Most Australia; she lives in the village with her community. Sparky, clever Matilda’s of the action takes place in Bougainville, in devoutly Christian mother. Great transmutation into a literature PhD student the South Pacific, in 1991 during the island’s Expectations becomes Matilda’s constant is less credible. Her voice becomes too fruitless bid for independence and control reference point, the master text by which wearily English and middle-aged. Grace of its copper mines. In a village near the she understands the outside world. But Watts’ belief that she is the Queen of Sheba coast, the inhabitants are perplexed and there are no easy parallels. The horrible and Mr Watts’ collusion in this, as an terrified by the violence erupting around consequences and moral choices explanation for their presence on the island, them. The coppery-skinned “redskins”, precipitated by Mr Watts’ readings outstrip seem contrived. So do the insights into Mr soldiers from Papua New Guinea, are trying anything described in Dickens’ novel. Watts’ character, as provided by his wife. to take control of the area. The sole Years later, when the adult Matilda seeks These minor flaws, however, cannot detract remaining white man, the reclusive Mr explanations for and reflects upon the from the brilliant originality of the novel’s Watts, decides to reopen the village school, events of her childhood, her self-confidence plot, its exotic setting and gripping teaching with the only book available, a falters. Her research visit to England narrative. Margaret Taylor

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Birds of a feather

Crow Country Mark Cocker JONATHAN CAPE, £16.99 ■ Tablet bookshop price £15.30 Tel 01420 592974

aking them as a whole, I do not like the Tcrow family. My pet hate is the handsome black and white magpie with its saucepan-handle tail. When there are magpies around, no nesting bird’s eggs or young are safe. In tandem comes the cunning crow, striking fear through its sinister call. Then the powerful raven, a huge bird, highly intelligent and scheming, whose guttural croak is so deep that the human voice cannot reproduce it. Then the jay, beautiful in cinnamon, the blue feather in its wing traditionally prized by hunters for their hats. At the end of this line of Rooks in flight: their familiar caw is ‘the quintessence of the countryside’. Photo: gangsters, however, are two birds of better Chris Gomersall character: the lively and mischievous jackdaw, much smaller, with its cascade of the periphery before taking short flights that rooking “is about the whole world”. chacking notes, and the rook, social, inwards. Then at a certain point a silence In the end what drives a naturalist is a waddling in its baggy trousers, its familiar comes over the assembly. Cocker, knowing passion for all life which Cocker does not caw the quintessence of the countryside, what is about to happen, is on edge with hesitate to describe as “a way of loving”. He wise-looking, according to repute a excitement. Suddenly the flock explodes wants to show all this to you through his parliamentarian. It is the rook which is like a huge black flower or mushroom as eyes, so that you will never see it in quite featured in this new book by Mark Cocker. every bird launches itself upwards in a roar the same way again. He does it in this book Cocker has been observing rooks closely of sound towards the trees nearby where about rooks by demonstrating how in the Yare valley of Norfolk for five years. they will roost for the night. extraordinary is this apparently most “Dad’s out rooking,” his daughter would In between his observations about rooks ordinary of birds. John Wilkins say. Cocker admits it has become an in this book, Cocker freely wanders off obsession. He recalls telephoning his fellow down other paths. It is like an after-dinner naturalist Richard Mabey and getting the conversation. His family’s move from answering machine. Behind Mabey’s Norwich makes him reflect on bird recorded message could be heard the calls migration. He relates dramatic episodes in of a rook or crow. When he remarked on his cross-country expeditions in England this to his friend, Mabey told him to watch and Scotland. He recalls past history when out. “You’re becoming a nerd,” he warned Norfolk was mainly water, and roach and him. bream were so plentiful that fishermen The centre of Cocker’s attention has been thought nothing of catching a ton in a day. rookeries, rooks’ roosts, and the He quotes the poetry of Robert Burns and relationship between them. He likes to go Virgil and John Clare. He tells of British out at dusk to watch the incoming lines, POWs patiently counting rooks and with jackdaws in attendance, making their jackdaws flying above their German camps. way to their chosen field, where they fling He marvels at nature, fascinated, themselves down through the air. constantly tempted to overwrite. Thus the Thousands of birds gather noisily in the hoots of the tawny owl “cut their sinuous flock on the ground. Fresh arrivals way through the air with stiletto-like continually swell the numbers, landing on precision”. He watches a dragonfly on a wall: “Here it is, a scarlet cruciform filling itself with autumn sunlight, savouring the immensity of its existence.” On a winter’s OUR REVIEWERS day the cold acquires “a rat’s relentless Austen Ivereigh is a writer and campaigner. incisors”.The same expert knowledge and Jonathan Wright’s most recent book is The acute observation which made Birds Jesuits. Britannica, the book he wrote in association with Mabey, such a triumph, THE TABLET BOOKSHOP Margaret Taylor is a writer and are evident here, but in that book the Postage and Packing anthropologist who specialises in Melanesia concentrated emotion was contained UK & Europe: £1.50 per book (4 books or more: add £5) and the South Pacific. through the discipline of the Rest of the world: £2.00 per book We accept Visa, MasterCard and Switch. John Wilkins was editor of The Tablet from encyclopedic form.But he writes like that to Cheques payable to Redemptorist Publications. 1982 to 2003. draw the reader into a mystery “threaded Call: 01420 592 974 Fax: 01420 888 05 into the very fabric of my everyday world”, is a publisher and writer. Email: [email protected] Brendan Walsh as he puts it – a mystery of which human Post: The Tablet Bookshop, Alphonsus House Lucy Lethbridge is the literary editor of The beings are a part. The observer and the Chawton, Hampshire GU34 3HQ Redemptorist Publications will endeavour to sell you the book at the price Tablet. observed are related. “Everything is advertised. However, occasionally on publication the published price is connected to everything else,” he says, so altered,in which case we will notify you prior to debiting your card.

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bronzed, be-furred and impeccably varnished. John was “parked” with EVERYDAY LIFE IN BRIEF relatives in Scotland and Essex, the costs of his maintenance and private education Queuing for Beginners by Joe Moran taken care of by the resourceful Liz. (Profile, £14.99). Taking daily routines, While he wrote immensely long letters from rising to bed, cultural historian Joe to her every week, she replied “seldom, Moran has pieced together an eclectic his- cursorily and always fondly”. John felt a tory of everyday life in Britain. Our “half-orphan”, an inconvenience, “baggage habits are subject, more than we think we to be stowed, kindly but firmly”. On her know, to outside manipulation. Toys in return to Colchester, Liz secured a job with breakfast cereals were the first example the council. Using her “connections” (her of marketing aimed at children; the bedroom door is often locked in the open-plan workplace was pioneered in the afternoons) she rose up the management Fifties by German “office landscapists”. ladder, eventually winding up as a JP, and Moran charts the development of office- taking early retirement in the south of chair design: throne-like for management, France with a second husband. As she nimbly-wheeled and armless for their lady cheerfully told him, she had gone from secretaries. The water cooler featured in being whispered about as a trollop to Sinclair Lewis’ 1917 novel The Job ; in the John Sutherland: ‘a self-effacing being nicknamed “rich bitch”. 1990s, London Underground staff went insistence on the mediocrity of his Over 50 years later, and now a on strike when their cappuccino privileges youthful career’ distinguished critic and retired university were withdrawn. Irritated by text mes- professor, Sutherland doesn’t disguise a saging shorthand? Victorians saved space lingering sulk over his mother’s failure to on postcards by dashing off “Hvng wn- have had ginger nuts and milk on the drful time”. Tablet price £13.50. Middling through kitchen table when he came home from school. She was never, he recalls Household Gods: the British and their The Boy Who Loved Books resentfully, “deeply involved in lives other possessions by Deborah Cohen (Yale, John Sutherland than her own”. £25). A look at the evolution of British JOHN MURRAY, £16.99 It’s hard to gauge how fond Liz really taste from the nineteenth century to the Tablet bookshop price £15.30 Tel 01420 592974 was of her son, but she certainly wasn’t the age of Ikea. Cohen covers fast-moving fur- smothering sort. In place of the ginger niture fashions; but stuff is about status, nuts there’d usually be a ten-bob note for “the competing claims of God and Mam- here are no end of memoirs that the schoolboy to buy himself a few pints. mon”. Eras of opulence (the Edwardian Tcelebrate a joyous and coddled Liz sounds terrific. There’s no mystery why furniture store Waring & Gillow’s rotun- childhood. The current taste, of course, is John should have been besotted by her. da was half the size of St Paul’s Cathedral’s) for lashings of violent abuse and He’s less successful at demonstrating why are followed by opulent minimalism. confinement in the unlit cupboard under she ought to have been as besotted by him. There are tremendous details: gutta- the stairs. The Boy Who Loved Books is the But naturally enough it still grates that she percha – the dental putty – was used in best book I’ve ever read about an wasn’t. the nineteenth century for everything from altogether more common sort of John found solace from the mediocrity faux inlay to Jacobean-style panelling. childhood, one of benign neglect and low- and loneliness in books and booze. By the Readable and excellently illustrated – level damage, of dispiriting rather than time he was 18 he was gulping down huge though Cohen’s prose is, like a Victorian grinding poverty, of scraping into Victorian novels by day and 10 pints of parlour, serious but highly fringed. Tablet provincial grammar schools and redbrick Bass by night. Alcohol, of course, is the price £22.50. universities, of middling marks and the traditional consolation for men resentful Third XV. “It was”, John Sutherland recalls of the world’s stubborn way of refusing to Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Ky- in his characteristically languid way, “all revolve around their requirements. But the naston (Bloomsbury, £25). In 1946, rather limboish.” adolescent boozing that gave the young Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote: “No one Sutherland’s father was killed in 1942 Sutherland status (he might just as well in wartime can quite escape the illusion when his Wellington crashed into a have called his book The Boy Who Could that when the war ends things will snap mountain during a training exercise. John Hold His Drink) grew into a catastrophic back to where they were …” Things did was four. His mother, christened Maud but dependency that he was not to shrug off not snap back: post-war rationing was even soon switching to the smarter Liz, moved for another 30 years. stricter; the British, says Kynaston, were on briskly, taking up with a series of Sutherland is the virtuoso of the second- apathetic and unsure of themselves. This American officers stationed in Colchester rate. Colchester Grammar is haunted by a brilliant and comprehensive book brings during the war, and later following the “searing sense of inferiority”. At Leicester these uncertain years to life. Citizens were wealthiest prospect back to his home in University “the campus air is porridge- worn down by queuing and form-filling; Argentina, returning three years later thick with inferiority complex”. And his planners among the bomb craters looked eventual alcoholism is second division. “I to “clean proud towns of living and light”, never starred at AA meetings.” Even his not anticipating the bleak isolation of tower resentment has a wry half-heartedness; it blocks. In 1947, drought, freeze and lacks the Osbornian fury of so many others floods decimated crops. The first wave of who became adult in the 1950s. immigrant workers arrived in a country But in the constant self-effacing where only 37 per cent could name a prod- insistence on the mediocrity of his uct imported from the colonies – and only youthful career is the plaintive voice of a 49 per cent could name a single colony. half-loved small boy imploring us to give Tablet price £22.50. Lucy Lethbridge him a cuddle and tell him that he’s not middling at all, that he’s really a very clever To order any of these books, call The Tablet boy indeed. And he is, too. bookshop on 01420 592974 Brendan Walsh

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