How I came to understand religion.

 

My mother sent me to Sunday school when I was four. She told me it would be fun and I would enjoy myself. She said there would be singing, storytelling and playing games.

It was not fun, and I did not enjoy myself.

The stories they told all had weak endings.

These were not stories for a little boy. I wanted bloodthirsty endings that left me thrilled and chilled. Jack and Jill shattered their skulls before careering down a hill. There was no miracle second act where they came back to life healed – they were dead.

The three blind mice weren’t shown sympathy for their disability; they didn’t have their sight restored by the farmer’s wife. Instead, she doubled down and cut off their tails with a carving knife.

Little Red Riding-hood’s grandmother was ripped apart by a wolf. Then a hunter took revenge and carved up the wolf. There was no counselling to understand the mistakes made. By the age of four, children know what to expect when a wolf arrives.

The only story that had any substance seemed to be Noah and his boat full of pets. Noah built his ark in his backyard. His neighbours teased him. Then the flood came, and Noah stood on his boat’s deck and watched all the people who had teased him drown.

“Who’s laughing now?” I imagined him saying.

The lesson was clear, if someone teases you, meticulously plan, then move to a safe place so you and your family can watch that person’s slow and panicked death in comfort.

After Noah had watched all the screaming and wailing from his floating gated community, he went sailing for forty days and forty nights. He sent out a dove that came back with nothing, and that was pretty much it until the dove came back with an olive branch.

The Sunday-school teacher made a big fuss over that branch. She said it was a sign from God to reward his true believers. I thought I must have misheard or she missed a page or something.

“Excuse me,” I said with my hand high. “God killed all Noah’s friends and neighbours, along with all the other animals in the world, and then sent him a twig?”

“As a sign of his love,” she said.

“Did it at least have an olive on it?”

“It was a sign of dry land.”

It turns out, unlike me, Noah was so impressed by that twig that it distracted him enough that he ran his boat aground. My four-year-old self was entirely unimpressed with this story.

The other stories they told us were about Jesus. I kept waiting for him to face danger and change into a superhero suit, but all he did was wander around in a toga with his friends. He did do magic tricks, but none of them were showstoppers. Feeding people bread and fish wouldn’t go over at a four-year-old’s birthday party. Jesus turned water into wine – hardly an age-appropriate story at that stage of my life. 

Walking on the water was cool, but Jesus didn’t seem to do anything with it. He just walked and never put the skill to good use. Then he died and came back to life – but the moment he came back, he left again. Jesus wasted a perfectly good opportunity to haunt people, I thought.

Then the Sunday-School teacher let us sing songs. I liked singing songs when I was four. We sang a lot of them at kindergarten. My favourite was Humpty Dumpty, who fell off a wall to be maimed for life. Good stuff. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again. That’s a story a four year-old-boy can understand.

The Sunday school songs were about Jesus loving me.

I wanted to sing Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty made me laugh because he fell down and broke his crown – how funny. At least the story of Humpty had a comical main character; a big fat round man who did crazy stuff like falling down and breaking apart, never to be put back together again. No resurrection for Humpty. Also, there were King’s horses and King’s men which were cooler than the bunch of hangers-on Jesus seemed to cruise around with.

The people in charge of my Sunday school refused to let me sing Humpty Dumpty.

There was only one thing for it, escape in protest. I took off and ran out of the hall where my Sunday school was being held. I climbed up a tree in the front garden of the small suburban church.

Climbing trees was also something I was very good at when I was four. I was so good they couldn’t get me down. They couldn’t even reach me because I was so small that the branch I was able to climb up into was so thin and fragile if they tried to climb to me the branch would have broken, and they’d risk me falling down and breaking my crown. I was also a very patient child. After an hour up the tree, they decided to call my mother, and she had to come to the church hall to coax me down. This was my first day at Sunday school.

My mother tried sending me to Sunday school one more time because she heard they were having a day to welcome new children. She assured me again there would be games and cake, and she was sure this time I would have fun. I did not have fun.

For some reason the Sunday school decided the way to impress young children and ensure they returned on a regular weekly basis to learn about Jesus was to have a clown.

This was a Church of England Sunday school with progressive leaders who played guitars and were always telling everyone to turn around and shake their neighbour’s hand. I’d been refusing to go back to Sunday school for sometime after the whole tree climbing protest over what songs should be sung, but now there was a clown and I loved clowns, they were funny.

At this point in my life I had been entertained by a number of clowns at my friend’s birthday parties, and they told great jokes, made balloon animals and did silly things like farting out powder through their pants. For a four-year-old, this is seminal comedy. Once we even went to see a circus in a big top and we sat there and smelled the animals and saw the five little clowns driving around in what looked like a Smart Car, but smaller. The doors to this car wouldn’t stay closed and the horn made you laugh because it was so weak, so, I guess, exactly like a smart car.

When I arrived for this Sunday school entertainment extravaganza I was disappointed. The clown was a mime. No one had told me this clown would not be talking. On TV and at my friends’ parties, the clowns talked and told jokes. The better party clowns made balloon animals. This Clown’s big-ticket item was playing the guitar while the Sunday school teacher sang more songs about Jesus loving us. I was having none of it. I was certain this clown could talk, and I set about proving this. I tried to trick him into talking.

“I really need the toilet,” I said. He mimed walking and pointed to the small door at the far end of the hall.

I tried goading him into talking.

“How do we know you’re a real clown because you don’t seem to know any of the routines, at least not the funny ones?”

I tried to guilt him into talking.

“It’s bad to pretend you have a disability when you don’t. My mummy told me that, like pretending you can’t talk.”

He pretended to pull himself away from me on an invisible piece of rope. I chased him and stamped on his toe, which took four attempts because, in his enormous clown shoes, it was hard to tell where his real foot was. When I honed in and found his big toe with my heal, he grabbed me by my ear and pulled me behind a bookshelf.

“You’re ruining this for everyone,” he said with genuine anger in his voice.

“You can talk!” I screamed.

They rang my mother to come and get me.

Years later, when I started primary school, they gave us afternoon milk as a way to keep us all healthy. Some of the kids couldn’t afford fresh milk at home, so this was a way to make sure the poorest kids had milk at least once a day. The milk came in tetra packs, stored in a wire basket in some unused hallway waiting for the recess bell when the little cardboard packs would be handed out to each child.

The moment that bell sounded, the milk monitors would take that wire basket and walk around to every class. Every student would be given a tetra pack of warm claggy milk. I hated this part of the day beyond everything else, even math. I have always hated warm milk because of this ritual to help the poor. To this day, warm milk makes me retch. 

They also had Christian education at my school. Every Christian child at the school was required to go to a weekly class of religious education. It was taught by a woman who, at the age of six, seemed to me, too old to be alive. She was so old her hair had turned mauve. She also talked about how much Jesus loved me.

“Why hasn’t he come and said hello, then,” I asked. My grandparents loved me, and even though they lived in Canada, they still came to see me once every two years, so where was this Jesus guy if he loves me so much?

“Jesus is always with you and watching over you,” she said.

“Like a ghost?” I asked, “Because he died, you know?”

She seemed pleased by my knowledge of Jesus dying, and she started in about how they tried to kill Jesus, but he kept coming back to life, completely ignoring how spooked we all were about being told a dead man would be watching us, always.

I went to my father and told him I couldn’t stand drinking milk. I also told him I couldn’t stand religious education. My father was a practical man.

“You can choose one of the two and I’ll write you a note to get you out of whichever one you choose,” he told me.

That’s how I came to choose Jesus over warm milk. It’s also how I came to understand that religion is more economic than spiritual. If you side with religion, you can bargain your way out of almost anything.

The Cuckoo's Calling - A review

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, AKA J.K. Rowling is a fine detective novel.

It twists and turns and throws up many false possibilities while hiding the real culprit in plain sight. For once, I didn’t get ahead of the story with a solution until it was being rolled out for the slower detectives like myself. While that’s a good thing, I did need the solution of how Cormoran Strike, the enigmatic Detective with five stars worth of personal baggage to unpack, solved the crime. Even then, I found some of the most pivotal clues and found evidence slightly convenient to hand.

This doesn’t address the elephant in the room – that Galbraith is J.K Rowling’s pen name for this detective series. On its own, The Cuckoo’s Calling is a high three out of five stars, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for going that fourth star. The rating shouldn’t change because the writer under another name has written one of the most iconic series in literature and one of my favourites. I keep feeling the nom de plume is a very clever deceit by Rowling to avoid any comparison, every shock at the language and seedier sides of life that come into play within this tale.

I confess I read this because Galbraith was outed as J.K Rowling and not because I am a fan of the detective genre. My eye for what is well done and what contrivances should be expected, rejected or accepted are not as acute as a true detective fan, but I do know a little of world-building and Galbraith/Rowling brings this in spades. It is a real-world with real people who have emotional highs and lows and this includes Cormoran, who seems as flawed as any of us. I enjoyed the stories of its people and while I probably wouldn’t return for more of the same, Cormoran Strike seems to have a lot of potential for more.

How do you keep writing, and tell your good stories without people comparing every word and each twist of the plot to that of Harry Potter? Perhaps Cormoran Strike could set to work to solve that riddle?  

The book has also been made into a series by the BBC - one I plan to try and find.

The Goldfinch - Book Review

☆☆☆☆1/2

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is an exquisite book, rich character dramas brought together with considerable storyteller's coincidence and misdirection that never seem obvious or enough to intrude and ruin the narrative. I would really love to have half stars and would then give a 4.5, with only half a star missing for the length.

This is a story that takes time and is better for the length - but I couldn't help asking myself, at what point does beautiful prose override the need to edit. Even here, I'm torn, as the descriptions from Thomas of imagined happenings that may never eventuate are intricate and well-developed, yet at what point do we want pages of ruminations on what might be, rather than cutting to what actually happens? Would those cuts have been tough to make because of the quality of the writing - no doubt, but they are there to be found.

I loved it. I found a new writer, for me, and will search out her other books and hope they are equally as enjoyable. As a Pulitzer winner, I think This is certainly worthy - I just wish those last, difficult cuts had been made to take away the very few moments when I was questioning why we had so much detail on twists and thoughts that added little.

The Heart Of The Ritz - Book Review

The Heart of the Ritz is an energetic and complex novel with a thoroughly entertaining and captivating story that cloaks an exploration into human morals, personal sacrifice and courage.

I recently read the Paris Seamstress, and while I enjoyed the read, I was a little disappointed when the story moved from Paris under the threat of occupation; the Heart of the Ritz was my remedy.

Polly is a sixteen-year-old orphan, sent to live with her famous Aunt Marjorie, a singer, well known in Europe. When Marjorie dies suddenly, Polly’s guardianship falls to Marjorie’s three best friends, Alexandrine, Zita and Lana Mae. Alexandrine is a minor aristocrat, Zita is a film star and Lana Mae a wealthy heiress, and all three live hedonistic, socialite lives of privilege – their home, the famous Ritz Hotel in Paris.

They’re interesting characters, fun to know in a sort of “The Real Housewives of Paris, in the thirties” kind of way, but as they are, rich, indulgent and somewhat narcissistic, you wouldn’t want to spend too long in their presence. Cue the war as it came creeping to the outskirts of Paris with the fascinating rumours of the approaching German armies, the propaganda and lies of the French government as they keep the truth of the threat hidden until the last moment and then the shock and stunned adjustments needed by the citizens, as one of the world’s most prized cities falls in days and becomes an occupied prize of war.

The German’s take over with ruthless efficiency and Polly, and her three larger-than-life guardians must find a way to survive under the occupation. Each must face harsh truths about themselves, the lives they’ve led and what it will take to be able to live with their choices when witnessing unspeakable crimes. It’s a question we all ask and will hopefully never be called to answer, but who dares to risk their safety for an ideal when forced to choose?

The Heart of the Ritz tackles these issues alongside a good helping of romance without ever being sentimental or relying on easy choices. Some of the affairs with occupying German’s are heartbreaking, and the death of the young, innocent Jürgen rests well alongside other tragic literary deaths such as Pvt. Roth from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

Luke Devenish has written an extraordinarily well researched fiction, based on history, that is so rich in detail and fact that it feels like a window back through time.

Expect to laugh and cry, while being enthralled as these remarkable women change and grow to be so much more than they began. This story will stay with me for a long time, as it dealt with many of life’s big-ticket items in a subtle, thoughtful manner that is so relevant because of the times in which we now live.

My rating: 5 sidecars from the Ritz @ $1500 per drink!

Dan Brown's - Origin

I keep reading Dan Brown because I have enjoyed his books in the past, certainly once before, and almost twice. Inferno had me rolling my eyes, while Origin is back to his religious explorations and is far more what I've come to expect, although there are moments when I found myself more frustrated than thrilled.  To be fair, DB can tell a ripping yarn, but he employs so many delaying tactics, so many moments of narrative exposition that tell us exactly what someone is about to do, or worse, tells us what they're experiencing internally without bothering to paint the picture or show us their emotions through action.  Origin hooks you in with the promises of an answer to life's biggest questions. It's entertaining, although some of the convenient movement forward and out of stalemate within the plot stretch the imagination, but no worse than any other action thriller. I guess that's my biggest complaint here - am I reading this and seeing a movie because of those that have gone before, or is this written more to a screenplay's formula of short sharp scenes, where characters are able to move beyond emotional and physically exhausting moments with ease. It also feels like Origin has taken the DaVinci Code's template and re-created it. Robert Langdon is present when a crime is committed. A hidden revelation may harm religious doctrine, and a mysterious religious sect with assassins try to stop Langdon from solving the riddles and making the revelations public. Change the content, match the template, and another best seller comes off the production line. Enjoyable enough, with some worthy philosophical moments scattered amongst what feels like a guide book to art, history and religion.  This one gets a 3.5 on the ascent of man scale.

Yesterday – Film Review. The danger of a great premise.

Imagine there’s no Beatles, it’s easy if you try…

When I first heard the premise of Yesterday, I was excited. As a life-long Beatles fan, a career-long Richard Curtis fan and someone with at least an affection and appreciation of Danny Boyle’s films, this seemed like a match made in heaven. A mystical genre film in the vane if Freaky Friday or any of a dozen other films where the main character is unhappy with their life and wishes on a star; fountain; talisman; lighting strike etc., for change and lo and behold, change is delivered with all its fantastic complications.

In this case, it’s a mysterious loss of power world-wide that wipes the memories of the world, or resets the world into a parallel universe where many significant elements of our known world are missing – for Jack Malik, the biggest of these is the lack of the Beatles. That’s right; they never existed. Only a few found themselves removed from the effects of the force that erased the elements now missing – like the Beatles, and in Jack’s case, his exemption came by being hit by a bus while riding his bicycle.

Suddenly, with his memory of Beatles’ tunes, he becomes this new world’s greatest singer-songwriter, seemingly able to come up with perfect songs any time he picks up an instrument. Ed Sheeran chances on Jack singing on local Suffolk public access TV, and needing a late replacement to support him on tour; Ed signs Jack to a tour of Russia. When they play in Moscow – Jack wheels out Back in the USSR, and on and on we go.

The problem is, where do you go from there, and it is to the credit and immense talent of Richard Curtis that this film does go somewhere. The cast is excellent, with Ed Sheeran proving his acting chops extend further than sitting around a campfire and pulling focus from an extraordinary cultural phenomenon that was GOT. Himesh Patel as Jack plays confused, guilty and undeserving extraordinarily well, and he can sing, although he’s up against it having to recreate the entire Beatles playlist. Lily James is sweet and adorable as the girl who always should have been the one, and the supporting cast do everything they need to do, with Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal as Jack’s parents standing out as they lovingly patronise and indulge their singing son.

Joel Fry does an admirable job as Rocky, the socially inept, but loveable weird best friend, who helps and hinders, with nothing but the best of intentions and delivers some of the films funniest lines. I couldn’t help feeling the character was a direct lift of Rhys Ifans’ Spike from Notting Hill, but when you write funny characters of quality, as Richard Curtis does, we forgive him for going back to that same well.

So what is the problem with Yesterday? Why did I walk away feeling ho-hum and not thoroughly entertained? It’s because the premise is as good as you can get. In an interview, Ed Sheeran commented that any person he tells the premise to gets it in a single sentence and immediately understands and wants to see the film. There lies the problem – the setup and concept are so good that what happens next, like the reference to fame within the film, becomes a poison chalice.

If Jack becomes the greatest singer/songwriter in the world and lives his life as a superstar, there would come a point where the fantasy delivers nothing more than the premise and no character growth, and that growth is what films in this genre trade on – Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, Freaky Friday or Peggy Sue Got Married. If Jack doesn’t learn and grow as a person, we’re watching Biff’s story from Back to the future, where Biff gets Marty’s sports almanack and leads a charmed life as a rewarded A-hole.

Again, it’s down to Richard Curtis to pull some rabbits out of the hat, and he does so in surprising ways – ways I have already seen derided and dismissed as sentimental whiffs in reviews, but to me, they are the only things that have stayed with me from the film.

Spoiler alert starts here. All the above is a derivation on the premise and apart from the Back in the USSR scene gives nothing new away,  but to talk about the hard turns the film pulls to keep it safe from washing up on the rocks of mediocrity, I have to talk about specific spoilers.

Jack is set up to have a conscience, never being comfortable ‘stealing’ the world’s greatest single band songbook and passing it off as his own – and this is a sound choice because anything else would have many Beatles fans up in arms over this apocalyptic world where their idols never existed, and now have their legacy usurped. Instead, from the very beginning, we’re aware that Jack feels uneasy about passing the Beatles work off as his own. At the concert in Moscow, we see a large middle-aged man amongst the crowd who hears ‘Back in the USSR’ and this fan emotes his confusion on hearing the song. It’s a hint, a flicker of an omen that Jack’s comeuppance is in play – and any film goer will read this trope and predict what is to come.

This thread continues when Jack visits Liverpool to source the places we all know so well from the references in Beatles songs. Here is another subtle, yet loving homage to the greatness of the Beatles, when Jack, as a fan and a musician who sang many of their covers, struggles to remember so many songs. I’m a huge Beatles fan, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember who did what to who in Eleanor Rigby – and Yesterday gets a lot of mileage from this very fact. During Jacks visit to these iconic locales, we see a woman who recognises the now famous Jack, and she stares at him oddly. Again it’s not overplayed, but we all know what’s coming – and this is where Curtis subverts the trope and manages to deliver something memorable and worth more than a Disney-esque mystical genre film – at least to Beatles fans if to no-one else.

At a press conference before the concert to launch Jack’s ‘greatest double album the world has ever seen’, a concert where a desperate version of Help from Jack, highlights the show, we see the fan from Moscow and the woman from Liverpool waving a yellow submarine. Again it’s a warning that jack’s comeuppance is near, as Yellow Submarine is yet to exist in this new world.

After the concert, the two come to see Jack backstage, and the moment he sees their yellow submarine, he knows the jig – or in this case, the gig – is up. Jack tries to explain his plagiarism, only to be stopped and told by these fellow Beatles fans, who also retain a memory of the music, how thankful they are to Jack for saving the songs and letting the world hear them again. The two explain they aren’t musical, so they couldn’t do what Jack’s done, and they only came to say thank you. Jack finally has others who understand his moral dilemma, and the woman from Liverpool thrusts a note into Jack’s hand with only the cryptic clue, that she did a lot of digging to get the information and she feels it will help ease Jack’s guilt.

Sure enough, Jack heads to a picturesque seaside farm, where an old man with a crooked nose and round spectacles lives out the last years of his happy life in peace – it is John Lennon, played believably in old age by Robert Carlyle, and in this new, recalibrated universe, John is alive and well.

Yes, it’s saccharine sweet and throws up all sorts of parallel universe conundrums, but it re-enforces the film as one written with the highest respect for the Beatles and nothing but reverence towards the fab four.

Ed Sheeran is all too willing to indulge in some self-deprecating good humour as he shows a good dose of respect and humility towards any comparison between his talent and that of the Beatles – and the Long and Winding Road/battle of the songwriter’s scene is the best moment of the film. 

The rest is mainly forgettable or even disappointing. That’s an unfair critique because the film is a well written, well directed, well-performed piece of escapism that is enjoyable to sit through and will no doubt play for years on smaller screens. Herein lies the danger of a great premise. The premise of Yesterday is so good that it ranks alongside the now legendary Hollywood pitch – “Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins” – and from there, where do you go? 

The only possibility is to let people’s expectations down. In this case, because of the skill, talent and awareness of the tropes and playing against them, those great creative minds have at least let us down gently.

Yesterday gets a 6.5 out of ten, or in Beatles terminology, it falls somewhere between Abbey Road and the White Album.      

     

Thought for the day

There should be a counsellor, trained for depression, standing in front of every sushi display in Seven Eleven stores. 

There is no greater cry for help than buying Seven Eleven sushi.