Halfway through Lent, we heard the Gospel reading where Jesus tells his disciples twice, in fairly stark and violent terms: If you do not repent, you will perish.
Then he tells them a story: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For three years now, I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’
He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not, you can cut it down.’”
If the fig tree (you and me) isn’t just failing to bear fruit; it’s exhausting the soil around it. It’s hurting the other trees and crops nearby by taking without giving back. It should be destroyed, says the owner of the garden.
The gardener (Jesus) agrees that the fig tree shouldn’t be allowed to go on this way. It must bear fruit—repent—or it should perish. But note something extremely important: he doesn’t just insist that it should repent. He doesn’t even just give it extra time to repent. He comes and helps it. He gives it what it needs so it can, if it will, turn things around before it’s too late.
This reading dovetails so nicely with a short book I recently re-read: The Lost Princess by George MacDonald. It’s not as well-known as his excellent longer “princess” books, the two Curdie books or The Light Princess, but I think it deserves more attention than it gets.
To summarize without spoilers: Two young girls are raised by disastrously indulgent parents. One girl, Rosamond, is a princess, who has become monstrously selfish and capricious, terrorising the whole household. The king and queen are at their wits’ end with their daughter’s violent temper, so they summon a wise woman to help them. She abducts Rosamond and takes her on a brutal journey of self-knowledge and self-control, with many trials and many failures.
Then we are introduced to the second girl, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife, who isn’t openly monstrous, but she is so profoundly self-satisfied, she doesn’t really believe anyone else is real. She, too, is taken in by the wise woman for cultivation, and at some point, the shepherd girl and the princess switch roles, with varying consequences. At the end, both girls are returned to their homes to live the lives they have chosen.
The story, being Victorian, is pretty openly preachy. The narrator frequently delivers little lessons about life directly to the reader, which was the style at the time. But if you think of it as a sermon with a compelling and entertaining story, rather than a story that preaches at you, it’s wonderful, and harrowing in the best way—and don’t get me wrong; the fiction stands up on its own and isn’t solely a vehicle for a message. It has some scenes and some imagery that have stayed with me for 40 years or longer, and that have not lost any of their power when I read again it last week.
Speaking of books, let’s do this thing about what we’re reading! (I can’t remember why I wrote “speaking of books,” but apparently I was when I started writing this. Well, there are worse things to speak of.)
1. What book are you reading right now?
Meh. I’m in the middle of a bunch of books and not happy about any of them.
is a sequel to a book I loved, The Dogs of March. The series takes place in Darby, a fictional version of the exact spot in NH where I live, and boy does he understand what it’s like here. Dogs of Winter was like Faulkner meets Hemingway. Whisper My Name is veering a little bit into Walker Percy-style “man meets troubled girl, and va va voom” territory and it’s making me itchy, but I guess I’ll keep going.
which is making me laugh out loud but feel bad about it. I just finished scene where he makes several choices about how to deal with the fact that he set his boss’ wife’s guest bed on fire and it just about murdered me. The protagonist has a habit of swiftly and privately making grotesque faces that express how he feels about people he encounters, and that reminds me, it may be okay that we’re supposed to start wearing masks again.
If you haven’t read an Anne Tyler novel (and there are about 700 of them), I would recommend Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant, where I think she was at her full powers — the least prone to precious quirky self-indulgence, and the most fearless and tender toward people doing dreadful things for understandable reasons. (Homesick Restaurant has scenes of child abuse.) Morgan’s Passing is pretty good, but I think she’s a little too patient with Morgan and his midlife problems. I just want to kick his ass.
The kids had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it, as is appropriate for George MacDonald. I know I’ve complained before about the profoundly Victorian unreadability of some of his sentences, and I’ll do it again. Just say it, man!
But the Curdie books are probably the most accessible of his, except for The Light Princess, which is the easiest to read and also the most coherent and straightforward story. The Princess and Curdie is a sequel that’s better than the first book (The Princess and the Goblin), which we also read aloud. It has such good images in it: Young Curdie and his aged father meeting each other halfway up a hill, and if you saw them from a distance, you wouldn’t immediately know who was climbing and who was descending. This idea is carried forward when Curdie is given the power to identify what it is that people are becoming by touching their hands. Some hands feel human, but others feel like the paws or hooves or tentacles of animals. And the reverse is also true: There are fabulous avenging monsters in the story, who are apparently working out their salvation and becoming human again.
You can see how MacDonald’s great admirer C.S. Lewis was influenced by (or at least agreed with) this idea that, by the way we live, we carry heaven or hell within us even before we die. This idea is in The Great Divorce and The Last Battle and probably several others.
Anyway, between that and the imagery of the great princess purifying her beloved children by heaping burning roses on them, and weeping as she does it, I’m glad we read it. BUT THE ENDING. If I had remembered it ended that way, I would simply have skipped the final page. I was reading the book to the six-year-old and the ten-year-old, and some of the teens were listening in. The ending is basically: The young princess grows up and marries the hero and the kingdom is wonderful. But they don’t have children and then die, and then there’s a bad king, and things get worse and worse until he literally undermines the kingdom and it all crashes down and everyone dies, and then no one even remembers it existed. Well, goodbye! Generally, I respect authors to do what they want with their stories but there was no preparation for this happening, other than a general feeling that the story was a broad analogy for humanity in general. Truly unnecessary and the kids were rightly horrified. Boo.
The Green Knight movie comes out soon and it looks absolutely swell.
I read the Sir Gawain by Marie Borroff to the kids many years ago (that’s the one we read in college), in our last year of homeschooling, and they were spellbound. I remember skipping all the other lessons for the day because they wanted me to keep reading to the end. But [sighs until dead] it was a lot easier to spellbind them in those days.
Here’s how the Tolkein begins:
When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, and the most true upon earth–
it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred
who then laid under them lands, and lords became
of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.
More fun to read aloud than ol’ George MacD, anyway! Heck, maybe I’ll pay the kids to give the first few chapters a fair shot. And then buy them movie tickets. Those poor children, how they suffer.
At first this struck me as a rather heavy handed “Have you ever seen such cruelty” kind of book, ala Isabelle Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea or Tracy Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, but it grew on me, and I was impressed at how the author brought two stories together. It follows the lives of two girls in Afghanistan, one born in the late sixties and one in the late seventies. The prose is a bit movie storyboard-y at times, but it’s very sincere and creates a strong mental image of the setting. A painful and beautiful read. As far as I know, it’s a faithful rendition of the history, and fleshed out my skimpy understanding of the era before 9/11 (but it definitely reads like a novel, not a sneaky history lesson). The reading level seems aimed at smart middle school or high school age, but it includes fairly graphic scenes of rape and violence, so reader beware.
This one is a YA book, but Joan Aiken always uses her whole butt and doesn’t talk down to younger readers. Really never read a dud by her. The Shadow Guests is a weird, compelling story about Cosmo, a teenage boy who’s sent to live in the countryside with his great aunt after his mother and older brother apparently killed themselves to avoid succumbing to a family curse. But the past isn’t done with his family, and Cosmo becomes entangled with previous generations. It sounds dark and awful, but it’s very entertaining and funny in parts, and the dialogue and characters are so skillfully and realistically done even as the plot itself is outrageous. We recently read Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase out loud, and it was just as good as I remember. Aiken’s male teenage characters are the most appealing people you’ll ever meet.
3. What do you plan to read next?
Watership Down by Richard Adams
I started it several years ago and didn’t get very far, but I hope to keep going this time. Damien’s been recommending it for years.
4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?
ANY BOOK. I have almost completely ruined my brain with social media, so if I could finish anything at all, I’ll be pleased.
5. What book do you keep meaning to start?
With God In Russia by Walter Ciszek
I’m a bad Catholic reader and I should feel bad. I have now officially lost this book under the bed twice, once under the old bed and now once under the new bed. With God under the bed, I guess.
