English Gothic

After two gloomy, drizzly days of leaden skies and adequate peace and quiet, I have managed to finish Chadwick, Waugh, and McGee.  I will attempt to give a rapid encapsulation of my response to each.

First, Chadwick on the Early Church.  This was at least my third attempt to get all the way through this survey of doctrinal developments in early Christianity, not because I found it tedious, but because the theology does tend to become rather intricate in spots, and the various heresies, synods, ecumenical councils, and contending figures become mixed up in a welter of just so many tempests in Alexandrian, Antiochene, Roman, or Constantinopolitan teapots.  Montanist?  Donatist?  Sabellian?  Arian?  Pelagian?  After a while, it becomes problematic to feel that any of these positions means very much in the struggle to know the ultimate God.

Next, Waugh on the decline of the landed aristocracy.  The first two thirds of this novel are fully as brilliant as anything that crops up in Vile Bodies or Decline and Fall.  The humor is superb, the satire is vicious, the characters are memorable and completely devoid of self-knowledge.  (Is the lack of all self-knowledge an inevitable concommitant of wealth coupled with youth?)  It is only when the scenery cuts to Tony's Brazilian adventure that Waugh seems to lose his way; it reads as a totally alien second novel suddenly welded onto the first, a darkly realistic foray into adventurous exoticism that seems utterly uninvolved with the snarky comedy of manners that has gone before.  Admittedly, Vile Bodies betrays this same strange and totally macabre sort of ending, so perhaps it's a Waugh tic, but I can't say that I'm a fan.

Finally, Selma, an historical novel that is perhaps better described as fictionalized history.  Because I wasn't expecting Dorothy Dunnett, I found Judge McGee's novel to be arresting and well-conceived, particularly in the brilliant formulation of permitting the War Between the States to pass in all its essentials as a vast caesura:  after the description of Sam's trial by fire, the narrative cuts immediately to the closing months of the conflict.  This serves to separate the novel into two unequal halves:  a longer first half which concentrates on describing the nuts and bolts of a slave-holding society, and does so much better than Margaret Mitchell did in her 1936 tome, and the Byzantine political infighting behind the march to secession; and a shorter conclusion which details the aftermath of a conflict which Judge McGee obviously feels might have been avoided had clearer heads been allowed to prevail.  The epilogue is as philosophical as Tolstoy's postscript to War and Peace. The noblest part of the novel, other than the author's usually fine ear for dialect, is the gripping immediacy of his description of First Bull Run, which I think moved me considerably more than the analogous battle scene in The Red Badge of Courage.  Perhaps it's the historian in me, but I am willing to forgive the occasional narrative contrivance in order to communicate essential historical background information to the reader.  And I was vastly relieved that the legal drama that forms the novel's conclusion did not take its expected Faulknerian descent into unrelenting tragedy and vulgar violence, but perhaps Judge Mcgee is more of an optimist than Faulkner was.

329 days, 45 novels, 47 books of non-fiction to go.