Wayne Williams and Darren Allan: I Know What You Did Last Supper (2013)

Edition: Piatkus, 2013

Review number: 1477

I initially hesitated about reviewing this novel when I was asked to do so, because of the subject matter, but decided that it is wrong to effectively condemn anything without experiencing at least part of it. I probably would not have picked it up, though, unless I'd been asked to review it (hence the introduction of a new tag for books submitted for review).


The basic premise of I Know What You Did Last Supper is that Judas Iscariot receives a threatening message after his betrayal of Jesus Christ, before his friends and family start being gruesomely murdered one by one. The title suggests an outrageously silly take on this, but that is not what the novel is: instead, it is a fairly standard thriller in terms of plot.(Others may find the way it is written funny, but I felt that the killings were really too gruesome for this.) To my mind, it has to succeed as a thriller before getting to the question of the content, which may well be offensive to some.

As a historical novel, it does rather come up short. There is little real atmosphere of first century Palestine, and many of the actions which happen are more or less transpositions of modern day actions to the period - when Judas goes out and buys a flashy black stallion with the money paid to him as the price of his betrayal, the transaction hardly differs from a purchase of a shiny black convertible in Los Angeles. There are events which don't really ring true, particularly in the portrayal of religion. For example, it seems unlikely that so many people would ignore the Sabbath at this time in Jerusalem. So, not convinced by the setting. I had the impression from somewhere that "Iscariot" is thought to be a nickname, from the Sicarii, a group of Jewish nationalists, not a surname in the sense that we use them, so that Judas' father is unlikely also to be known as Iscariot.

And as a thriller? I'm not entirely convinced here either.  The thriller plot, with Judas basically flailing around trying to work out who is killing people, is basic and unoriginal, though it does have a couple of interesting twists, which I will discuss as part of the religious content. The final revelation was, to me, long anticipated and unconvincing.

The Christian content seems, to at least a certain extent, designed to shock. Some of this is done at the expense of verisimilitude, as when, for example, Judas suspects that it is the resurrected Jesus who is using supernatural powers to kill those close to him as a punishment for his act of betrayal - not really likely in the sort of person that Jesus is otherwise portrayed to be in this novel as well as in the gospel narrative. Not validated by the quality of the treatment, the use of Christianity is just offensive for its own sake, which is the least excusable form of offensiveness. There are a couple of redeeming features. One - the one which is most important to me - is that the novel reminds its readers that the disciples portrayed in the Bible were people, even Judas. The other  is that the most interesting thing about Judas' character as depicted here is the motivation for his original betrayal, which is not considered important by the gospel writers, but which is something very important to modern readers of crime fiction. So Judas is given one, and it is because he wants to save his uncle from a vicious criminal boss who wants his gambling debts paid off.

In the end, the redeeming features were not enough for me to truly enjoy reading the novel. My rating - 3/10.

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress (1678/1684)

Edition: Penguin, 1965 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1221

The recent BBC poll to find the best loved English novel, the Big Read, chose The Lord of the Rings, a winner which is almost inevitable in this kind of listing nowadays. But if the poll could have been run a hundred and fifty years ago or more, then The Pilgrim's Progress would have been the runaway winner (so long as we ignore the fact that it is not really a novel). If a family owned one book, it was the Bible; if two, the second would almost certainly be Bunyan, far more likely than Shakespeare. Its popularity was only challenged when the Victorian mass market in novels began to open up, with the success of Dickens particularly. Today, it didn't even feature in the top 100 list. This suggests two questions: why did this book in particular become so popular? and why has its popularity diminished?

Everyone still knows what The Pilgrim's Progress is about, at least its first part: it has become an almost proverbial title. It is an allegory of the Christian life, as seen from John Bunyan's Puritan evangelical viewpoint, and takes the form of the description of a journey made by Christian from the city of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part (published six years later) describes the subsequent journey made by his wife Christiana, following in his footsteps. Like most allegories, the point is not the story, but lies in the images used to make the point; some of Bunyan's have entered the language, such as the "Slough of Despond".

The reason for the popularity of Bunyan's work cannot really lie in the allegory itself, for his images in general are not particularly imaginative (some are copied directly from ideas which occur in the Bible). Some, like the images shown the pilgrims in the House of the Interpreter, are hardly made part of the story at all. The story itself is unevenly constructed, with at least one character met on the way disappearing from the text without his departure being recorded (this is the Atheist, though it is at least made clear that he is travelling in the opposite direction to Christian). The second part is even more problematic, as it consists of little more than a description of a tour of the places which have already been mentioned when Christian visited them. Both parts include a lot of direct preaching and theological discussion as well as the allegory, but there is also far more of this the second time around.

The popularity of The Pilgrim's Progress must have come more from the timing of its publication, and from its content rather than its quality. The evangelical revival which gave rise to Methodism was just around the corner, and many non-conformists (people who would not accept the doctrine and hierarchy of the Anglican church) emigrated to America in the next few decades. These were the groups who took up Bunyan's book, and they spread it worldwide. It even proved to have cross-cultural appeal, being widely translated and even published in Catholic countries. (For a Puritan work, it is very restrained about Rome, and its references to Catholicism are veiled, but this is still surprising.)

The value of The Pilgrim's Progress to the Puritans was that it is an extremely effective aid to applying an evangelical view of Protestant Biblical theology to the trials faced in life. Through its images and allegorical characters, it was inspirational. The Bible is a confusing document, even for those who profess to believe it literally, and the sort of theology followed by the Puritans was much easier to pick up and understand from a systematic outline; The Pilgrim's Progress is not totally systematic, but it is certainly easier to apply to real life situations than either an abstract summary (like a catechism) or the Bible itself. It picks up one of the big reasons why the parables have always been more popular reading matter than the Pauline epistles - stories are much more entertaining than the direct exposition of theology. Aids to understanding the Bible have always been popular - such aids have been produced to push just about every possible theological position - and The Pilgrim's Progress is one of the most entertaining and is certainly the best known.

So the reason for the initial success of The Pilgrim's Progress was the right content at the right time; if it hadn't been published, I suspect that a Puritan allegory would have come along sooner rather than later (after all, it had been one of the most characteristic forms of medieval literature), and that this might have become as popular. It massively overshadowed all Bunyan's other writing, only Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, his autobiography, coming anywhere near it in popularity even in his lifetime.

The drop in the popularity of The Pilgrim's Progress seems, as far as I know, to have been well under way before the decline in churchgoing which marked the twentieth century West. It may have kept its pre-eminent place in rural areas, but novels like The Pickwick Papers, or alternatively the works of Shakespeare, took over in the urban middle class home.

It seems to me that the change is likely to be connected to the big publishing explosion at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (This is really just a guess; I don't have any facts and figures to back it up.) Apparently, up until then it was just about possible, given a fair amount of luxurious free time, to read every book published in English. Then, when the novel took off, this changed. Even if this isn't actually true, there was suddenly a lot more available to read, and it was also more entertaining. (As journeys go, the Pickwick Club's progress around England may be less edifying, but it's definitely more fun.) Instead of being one of two books in the average literate home, The Pilgrim's Progress became one of dozens.

There are cleverer, subtler and more completely worked out allegories, but none which have had as big a cultural impact as this one. I wonder if today's equivalents in popularity - The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter novels - will prove as long lasting. It is of course noticeable that the criticism that there are cleverer novels of their type around applies just as much to these current contenders; and just as behind The Pilgrim's Progress lies one of the most popular medieval genres, they both build on many precedents.

George MacDonald: Lilith (1895)

Edition: ClassicReader (http://www.classicreader.com/booktoc.php/sid.1/bookid.1048/)
Review number: 1086

George MacDonald may have written pure fantasy, both for adults (Phantastes) and for children (The Princess and the Goblin), but he has been most admired for the allegory of Lilith. This picture of Christian salvation is the reason for his influence on C.S. Lewis in particular; as well as being part of the inspiration for the Narnia stories and the Ransome trilogy, it is why Lewis makes MacDonald his guide to heaven in The Great Divorce.

Lewis, of course, was also steeped in medieval allegorical writing, the most characteristic literature of that period. Though there is much in common between them and later allegories such as The Pilgrim's Progress, there are also differences, at least in English. The great popularity of this work - second only to the Bible - seems to have quenched the desire to write acknowledged allegory for many years. The main way that it differes from the medieval genre is that it is Protestant in outlook; it is all about personal faith. (It is also the direct model for Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress.)

All these are different from Lilith. Most allegories are open, with the meaning of the characters and places revealed at least in part by their names (Christian and the Slough of Despond in Bunyan, for example). Lilith, on the other hand, is a closed allegory, and MacDonald explains very little of the inner meaning of his writing. In the end, this makes it more powerful, as the allegory doesn't distract from the story (it would be almost possible to ignore it entirely), while the interested reader can try to work it out like a riddle. Many writers since MacDonald have incorporated allegorical elements into their work in this way (prominent examples including Salman Rushdie and Iris Murdoch), and in the fantasy genre it has become the norm to analyse the more literary writers in these terms. (Tolkien is an obvious example, and he tired of facile interpretations of The Lord of the Rings to the extent of adding a preface denying that the trilogy was an allegory of the Second World War.) Allegory is frequently used today, both within and without the fantasy genre, to encode the ideas of Freud and Jung rather than to send a religious message.

Like The Pilgrim's Progress, Lilith is about the salvation of the individual, here presented as a first person narrative while Bunyan is a third person one. Bunyan writes mainly about the temptations which attack someone who is already a Christian, as seen from a Puritan point of view, while MacDonald's theme is a man's progress to conversion. His narrator's story begins in the library of an English country manor, where his studies are interrupted when he sees an elderly stranger dressed in black - a man who appears to be (the ghost of) his father's old librarian, Mr Raven. It may be the raven imagery, but this opening seemed to me to be reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. He is eventually transported to another world, the allegorical domain, where he learns about what humanity means (in the company of a group of innocent children) and meets Lilith, the original bride of Adam according to rabbinical literature, a princess both desireable and wicked. MacDonald was fascinated by this character, to the extent that in the end the novel is as much about her relationship with the Christian faith as it is about the narrator's. She is, I think, the allegorical symbol for lust and impure decadence and is the world, to use the term in the sense of (say) St Paul. It is generally easier for a writer to make evil interesting as opposed to purity (even Milton's Paradise Lost is really a tragedy centred around Lucifer); this is because goodness is usually perceived as being about refraining from particular actions rather than about positive virtues.

MacDonald's weighting of his novel towards Lilith makes it more interesting to read, but it does muddy the waters of the allegory. The novel's major flaw is a certain sentimentality, particularly in the depiction of the children, but it will remain enjoyable to most readers and fascinating to anyone interested in the history of the fantasy genre and its relationship to earlier literary forms.

C.S. Lewis: The Great Divorce (1945)

Edition: Fontana, 1977
Review number: 1017

One of the fruits of Blake's unorthodox theology was the series of engravings entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which (according to the arguments accompanying the plates) depict Swedenborgian universalist ideas - the salvation of every human being. Lewis, on the other hand, wrote The Great Divorce to illustrate how different heaven and hell are in his more orthodox Protestant theology, and to say something about the ways in which he believed a soul would end up in one or the other.

Although The Great Divorce is not a pure allegory (as is the much less successful The Pilgrim's Regress), it contains allegorical elements. The basic idea is that the inhabitants of hell - depicted as an endless, dreary town - are able to make a day trip to heaven. There, they seem so insubstantial that to walk on the solid grass is extremely painful; and there, those they knew when alive try to persuade them to remain, which they can do if they turn to God rather than concentrating on themselves.

Self-centredness is viewed here as the common factor in turning away from God, and the encounters in The Great Divorce are basically a series of elaborations of the forms that this vice could take. Lewis doesn't take the space to be particularly subtle or to do more than sketch in situation and personality in each case, but many of the discussions are quite memorable. Less interesting is the explanation of what is happening by the soul of George MacDonald, chosen by Lewis to be his guide to the spiritual realm as Dante did Virgil.

Though the ideas here are good, the limited range of examples chosen by Lewis - mainly to point readers away from the common idea that the worst crimes are the public ones like murder - means that The Great Divorce cannot be the best of Lewis' fiction.

C.S Lewis: Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1965)

Edition: Fontana, 1965 (Order from Amazon)
Review number: 999

This collection of generally hard to obtain but previously published pieces by Lewis was the last book he worked on before his death. There is no unifying theme; most of it consists of sermons and talks delivered over a period of around fifteen years.

The title piece is rather different, being - as its name indicates - a follow-up to The Screwtape Letters in which the demon Screwtape is addressing the graduation dinner of the Tempter's College. Screwtape being Lewis' most famous creation, with the possible exception of Aslan, people continually pressured him to write a sequel to the Letters, which he resisted doing for several reasons. The obvious one is that he felt that the idea of diabolical letters was exhausted, but more interestingly he had been alarmed to find how easily he was able to assume the demonic point of view. The idea that he did think of producing as a sequel was to write an equivalent from a guardian angel's point of view, but he felt he couldn't do justice to this (and I suspect that it would have been less interesting in the same way that Paradise Lost is more striking than Paradise Regained).

None of the pieces match up in terms of quality of writing to the rest of Lewis' theological output, but the collection manages to be thought provoking in places, particularly when it challenges the underlying assumptions which came to be commonplace during the twentieth century.

C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Edition: Fount, 1982 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 987

After the Narnia series and possibly his science fiction trilogy, The Screwtape Letters is Lewis' best known work. It isn't intended, like most of his fiction, as an apologetic for Christianity, but as an aid to a Christian - it is designed to help someone overcome temptation. This purpose is carried out in such a way that it is entertaining even to a non-Christian.

The reason for this is partly the method used, the conceit that the contents are letters addressed by a senior devil to a more junior, inexperienced tempter, and partly that the whole book is very well written and clearly thought out. If the theological background is accepted, even for a moment, then the letters are convincing; if not, then they are certainly entertaining and occasionally thought provoking.

C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Edition: Fount, 1977
Review number: 963

Lewis' earliest novel gives fullest reign to the allegorical impulse which was to form an important part of all his fictional writing. Intended to be a Pilgrim's Progress for the twentieth century, the story of his central character John mimics Lewis' own spiritual journey from the dry church of his childhood to a personal Christian faith. (Even without confirmation from the later foreword, the autobiographical element should be clear to anyone who has read Surprised by Joy, his memoir of this process, or knows that he was called "Jack" by his friends.)

In Bunyan's work, the major difference is in intent; The Pilgrim's Progress is designed to show the tribulations of the Christian after conversion while Lewis is more interested in the journey to conversion. This difference may partly be connected with a change in emphasis in the Protestant church in Western Europe towards evangelism rather than the development of the individual - and Christian is very much an individual rather than part of a church congregation. Lewis was almost certainly not going to want to update Bunyan's famous story, the most read book in English after the King James Bible.

There is also a difference in method. Bunyan externalises Christian's psychological states and spiritual experiences at least as much in geography as in the people that he meets - the Slough of Despond being the most famous example. Lewis has John meet personifications of major twentieth century mindsets; the landscape is far less important, even though it is the fulfilment of a vision of an island that John is seeking.

Lewis' novel is far less successful than Bunyan's story, as might be expected of a work so thoroughly in its shadow, and indeed is less convincing as fiction than anything else he wrote. The reason for this, as the foreword indicates, is that the journey he describes is not typical. Though it maps Lewis' own philosophical wanderings before he embraced Christianity, most people don't even generally introspect about what they believe and don't change so comprehensively. Most people today also don't come from a church background, though this change has occurred since the thirties. (This return to something like the start is needed for the title to make sense, of course.)

However, it would be possible to enjoy the novel not as an allegory on each person's spiritual life but as a satire on thirties ideas, except that Lewis makes another mistake which is common for a convert. He shows little sympathy for the philosophical ideas he is mocking, but portrays each as something so insubstantial and ludicrous it is impossible to see how anyone can be taken in. This gives The Pilgrim's Regress the feeling of a novel which contains only one dimensional, repetitive characters, and makes it a dull read. Perhaps Lewis needed to get this out of his system, but it is his poorest published writing, fiction or non-fiction.

Richard P. Feynman: The Meaning of It All (1998)

Edition: Viking, 1998 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 884

These three lectures, about science, society, philosophy, religion and so on, were delivered in the early sixties but not published until after Feynman's death. They read as though they are basically transcriptions of more or less off the cuff speaking rather than as composed in written form for the book.

Basically the theme of the talks is how science relates to society's other concerns, with interesting digressions on subjects like why politicians' promises can't be trusted (because real life situations are often too complex for sound bit answers). The sections where Feynman defines science and where he talks about religion are particularly interesting, but there are thought provoking ideas throughout.

There are two - at least - disappointing aspects to the lectures. One is the occasional piece of naive American patriotism, endorsing the space race, for example, because it wouldn't do to let the Russians get too far ahead. This is more a product of the time and place than anything else, but it certainly dates what is said and reduces the impact of the more interesting bits.

The other problem is more serious, and pervades the whole book. The general tone of the lectures is over-simplified, and has a tendency when written down rather than spoken to come over as patronising. Feynman was a great communicator, and I suspect this problem is a result of the lectures being transcribed from the oral to written medium without editing. The Meaning of It All is interesting, but could have been fascinating if intended to be a book from the start.

Leo Tolstoy: A Confession (1865)

Edition: Everyman
Review number: 536

In contrast to Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, with which it is packaged in this Everyman edition, A Confession is a work of non-fictional autobiography. It followed Tolstoy's greatest work, rather than preceding it as Notes From Underground did that of the older writer. There are similarities, in that both authors use these short pieces of writing to set out something of their views on life, and as these philosophical ideas are vitally part of their great novels, the works bear similar roles in the authors' output as a whole.

The subject of A Confession - not a title Tolstoy liked, but imposed by publishers because of similarities to Rousseau's Confessions - is the move of the writer away from the religious certainties of his Orthodox childhood. This started with an excited discussion between Lev and his brothers after one of them had been told that there was no God. The line of thought taken by Tolstoy from that date parallels that of the writer of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which is quoted at length. Basically, Ecclesiastes looks at the world from a purely materialistic point of view, and comes to the conclusion that it is meaningless; only God, the writer feels, can make sense of life. Tolstoy does not take the same final step, being put off by the vast differences between the professed values and the actions of those who called themselves believers in the nineteenth century Russia upper classes. He tried to copy the simple faith of the peasantry, by just glossing over the parts of Orthodox ritual he didn't 'understand' - the word he uses, though he really means 'identify with' in today's terms. When he realised that this amounted to most of the ritual, he left the church and effectively formulated his own personal religion, trying to follow the moral teachings of the New Testament while jettisoning every other part of Christianity.

Tolstoy's religious writings, of which this is the best known and (I think) the first, were fairly influential in the last years of the nineteenth century. He considered these works his most important and retired from novel writing to concentrate on them, before returning to fiction with Resurrection years later - and even then, the novel was written as a way to publicise his ideas.

Today, the religious work of Tolstoy is relatively obscure, and there are both historical and literary reasons for this. The Russian Revolution brought suspicion in the West on ideas from that country, even if they were not Communist in origin. Thus, Tolstoy ceased to be cited as an influence on atheistic humanism, even as this became one of the dominant philosophies of the twentieth century. From a literary point of view, Tolstoy tends to play to the gallery; in A Confession, the autobiography is smoothed out for public consumption, every action rationalised and justified (in a rhetorical way, the philosophical argument being of a poor standard). In the end, the reader is left wondering whether Tolstoy really believes what he says, and certainly is in doubt as to the way he actually reached these beliefs.

Thomas Browne: Religio Medici (1643)

Edition: Renascence Editions, 1998
Review number: 170

Ever since reading Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night for the first time, and seeing how much pleasure the metaphysical poets and Thomas Browne gave her (through the enjoyment she assigned to her characters), I have wanted to read these works for myself. This year I have finally got round to doing so, and was not disappointed. They provide much the same kind of pleasure, in the images used and the linguistic invention in which the writers take such joy. This is perhaps to be expected in poetry, but much less so in prose (even seventeenth century prose), particularly when the subject under discussion is philosophy and theology.

There are many parallels with Gide's Fruits of the Earth, which I read only a short time before Religio Medici: both are written mainly in prose, a prose which reads like poetry; both have similar subject matter; both were written by comparatively young men. Browne's work is, naturally (given its date) more orthodox and (given Browne's nationality) more Protestant in outlook. However, Browne was not completely orthodox; he thought for himself and was not afraid to come to different conclusions from mainstream seventeenth century Anglican theology. (He is much more tolerant of Catholicism and other religions, for example.)

The joys of Religio Medici are in its beautiful language and Browne's humanity, his understanding and his insight. It is not surprising that it was loved by Lord Peter, and by many others.

William Langland: Piers Plowman (c. 1370-1395)

Edition: Penguin, 1958
Translation: J.F. Goodridge

Although I was able to read Chaucer in the original Middle English with only the help of a (fairly comprehensive) glossary, I'm glad I got hold of Piers Plowman in modern English. Judging by the excerpts given in this book, it is considerably more difficult to read, mainly because it is written in a Midlands dialect which didn't provide the basis for later literary English as Chaucer's language did.

The text of Piers Plowman is considerably more complicated than that of, say, the Canterbury Tales; there are three major manuscripts, known as A, B, and C. This translation is based on the B-text, though appendices give some parts of the C-text (which contains more information interpreted as autobiographical than the other manuscripts).

Piers Plowman is the story of a series of dreams, told in the first person by William (Langland). These dreams show in allegorical form what is wrong with the society he sees around him, and by contrast the perfect society which is to come under the rule of Piers Plowman, who stands for Jesus Christ.

One very sophisticated aspect of the allegory is that the dreams are spaced throughout the life of the narrator, and the nature and meaning of the visions changes as his spiritual understanding matures. Other than that, the book is also notable for the strong criticism of the abuses of the church current in the later middle ages. You need some understanding of medieval theology to get the most from the book, but anyone interested in the medieval world-view should find it fascinating.

Peter Cotterell: Is God Helpless? - Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (1996)

Edition: SPCK, 1996
Review number: 10



The author, formerly head of London Bible College is well qualified to write a book on a Christian view of suffering, having been a missionary in Ethiopia at the time of the famine there. He comes over as a lot more sensitive than a lot of authors on this subject, and I found the book a helpful read.

I didn't agree with all he had to say, particularly not his ideas on hell and judgment. This doesn't mean that he was un-Biblical, more that I find the traditional idea of judgment difficult to accept emotionally. It was interesting to see his own emotions disagreeing with his intellectual conclusion; although he ended up supporting a fairly traditional viewpoint, most of his arguments were in favour of
destruction rather than everlasting punishment.

Cotterell is particularly keen to refute any view of suffering which denies its reality or which assigns its cause to a righteous God of anger. This is one of the reasons why this book is valuable, as the first of often put forward in a disguised fashion to explain the second, and neither is terribly helpful.