Bluecat

Good grief you hardly need experts. Anyone who has visited Paris (for instance) and used their eyes can tell you his descriptions of key buildings and artefacts are inaccurate. I haven't seen Roslin chapel in Scotland, but I'm told by those who have that he's got that wrong as well. The Da Vinci code has hit a chord in that there is a hidden female history in Christianity. But if it's the one he describes I'll eat a scabby monkey. Without salt.

Good grief you hardly need experts. Anyone who has visited Paris (for instance) and used their eyes can tell you his descriptions of key buildings and artefacts are inaccurate. I haven't seen Roslin chapel in Scotland, but I'm told by those who have that he's got that wrong as well. The Da Vinci code has hit a chord in that there is a hidden female history in Christianity. But if it's the one he describes I'll eat a scabby monkey. Without salt.

stronary stuff

Mr Paradise, by Elmore Leonard. It's not his very best but it's still good. Grand chap, wrote this one at the age of 79. He's 81 now and probably good for a few more.

Not necessarily wrecked. Just umm... Hollywooded. The first paragraph of the short story (elderly man living alone in a trailer on a dusty prairie gets up and re-heats yesterday's coffee) is a bit hard to match with the gleaming-toothed lithe young fellers in spotless ironed jeans that you see on the posters. If it's your kind of thing at all, I expect most people would prefer to see the lithe young fellers in a clinch... but that isn't what the story's really about. Everyone with any interest at all in this - DO read the story. All the stories of hers I've read are great (the novels less so, for me) but that one really is something special. Another good one (specially for all you folks out there in law enforcement) is "The Hellhole".

Bendigo and I saw it. It's very very stagey - making fun of the staginess of the original one minute and being stagey in a modern way the next.The guy who was in "School of Rock" did his Orson Wells impersonation. Lots of characters get set up as story-lines and then we lose sight of them - like the makers lost interest. Some animation scenes look like they have been made for the video game. The ending is almost an exact replay of the original. There wasn't a single memorable line: not like "The wolves! They're gone!" - best line in another daft film we saw. I thought it was stupid but mildly entertaining. B thought it was stupid but enjoyed every minute.

Haven't seen the film yet but we'll probably go next week. The story it's based on (Brokeback Mountain, by Annie Proulx) is the best short story I've read in several years. I'm speaking as someone who reads for their living. Absolutely heartbreaking: about love found and lost, about longing, tenderness and fear. I really hope the film has done it credit. I suspect it may have Hollywooded it up a bit.

It's been said, but I don't think she does. She does not enter Narnia when the others do in the Last Battle, nor is she seen waving on the distant but connected land which turns out to be ours (or rather, the heaven of which our world can be a glimpse, as the Narnia after the Last Battle is the "real" Narnia of which the Narnia they had known till then was but the shadow) where the Pevensies' parents are, but that's because she doesn't die in the train crash which kills them all. I don't have a copy of the Last Battle to check up on, but that's as I recall it. Narnia would no longer be heaven to her anyway. Apparently there is a letter from Lewis to a child fan saying that perhaps Susan would find her way to Narnia eventually.

Aww thank you. It's a pleasure. I hope I haven't stopped you enjoying the books BTW

In the Magician's Nephew a world is created beautiful and good and with all the beings in it having direct knowledge of their creator. This creation is set under the rule of a man and a woman, under the guidance of the creator, who walks and talks with them. But evil enters the world thanks to the wrongdoing of two humans, and causes damage which can only be repaired in time by the death of an innocent and willing victim - the creator himself. In The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, the world is suffering under the rule of the entity which introduced evil into the world, but there is struggle going on between those who obey her rule and those who are still loyal to the creator. An act of betrayal brings a sentence of death upon the sinner, but instead the lion freely offers himself as a sacrifice. He is delivered helpless into the hands of the evil, is mocked, beaten, humilated and finally killed. Two women weep over his body and prepare him hastily for burial. When they return the body is gone, and they believe that it has been taken away by his killers. Then they see him - himself again and alive, but transformed. He tells them that the power of death has been broken. He helps them do battle against evil, and leaves them after a short while. In the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the travellers are greeted on the farthest shore by a lamb, who invites them to eat with them. Only when the meal is about to begin do they recognise that it is their friend the lion. In the Last Battle, the world is corrupted by a ruler who fakes the words of the creator and interprets all signs and omens of his displeasure as agreement. In fact the ruler has handed the world over to the power of evil. A final battle ensues between good and evil, and then the creator winds up his creation, including a last trump, rolling up of the sky and the sea, and so on. The characters who have been loyal to the creator find themselves in a world of which the world they knew was just a faint and imperfect imitation, where they are reunited with their loved ones, and will live forever in the presence of the creator. Throughout, bad characters throw doubt on the existence of the Lion, and especially on his resurrection. This all sounds fairly Christian-influenced to me! Similarly his Science Fiction novels are "what if?" narratives based on Christian beliefs, expecially those of the Creation, the Fall and the Atonement, which Lewis takes to be fairly essential parts of Christian doctrine. For example, if it happened that there were creatures on other planets with souls, would they also have fallen with our Fall (and therefore been saved with Christ's Atonement) or would a seperate Fall and Atonement be necessary for different Creations? What would happen to unfallen creatures if they came into contact with (the certainly Fallen) people from Earth? That gives you the basic plot outlines of his Sci-Fi books. Incidentally, in his academic career Lewis was best known for his work on medieval allegory (his book "The Allegory of Love" is still the definitive work). He was writing allegories of Christianity in his fiction.

Peter is sort of the apostle and Edmund is to some extent a Judas figure at first. But basically they're characters in a story. There has been a certain amount of controversy about the film over here, based on a dislike of Lewis's theology and the fact that he was a bit uncomfortable with the children (particularly female ones) growing up. Still, he was quite open about wanting to write a children's (rather than adults') story because he didn't want to deal with sex. I thought the film was great: wonderful special effects and the White Witch is fabulous. I don't find the books particularly sexist, because IMO Lucy is the hero of the first book, and in the others you get strong females like Polly (Magician's Nephew) Aravis (The Horse and His Boy) and Jill Pole (The Silver Chair), while some of the boys, like Edmund and Eustace Scrubb, are weak and have a struggle to behave well. Also Lewis treats all his characters as moral beings who have to learn how to choose rightly. It is, however, a bit racist: the Calormenes are your basic shifty darkskinned Eastern johnnies, don't you know? though even there Aravis and the chap in The Last Battle who finds out he was a worshipper of Aslan all along get saved. But the less Calormene they are and the more Narnian (Northern) the better... I've also read criticism of Lewis from Evangelical standpoints which knock him for putting in pagan (ie classical) characters like Fauns, Nereids and Dryads. (They haven't noticed that dwarfs and giants come from the equally pagan mythology of the North). Personally I think he just bunged in all the things he liked (Fauns and tinned sardines, marmalade roll, Father Christmas, and tree spirits) and it all goes with his theme of animate, thinking talking dancing nature. His essays are sometimes fairly reactionary, but the one called "Good Works and Good Work" sums up pretty much what I think about consumerism. He seems to be thought of as virtually a Roman Catholic these days, which is odd, as he was an Ulster Protestant given to referring to RCs as "sewer rats"... jokingly no doubt. Incidentally, someone wrote a letter to the paper this week comparing the monkey who brings about the end of the world in "The Last Battle" by faking messages from Aslan, bemusing a Donkey into helping him, and interpreting all signs of Aslan's displeasure as signs of support for his rule - to a certain president of a certain large country west of the Atlantic. Which proves that you can read absolutely anything into them if you're really determined to.

Congo Journey, by Redmond O'Hanlon. I think I'm in love with him.

QUOTE: That sounds like a great book! It really made me nostalgic for my grandmother's scrambled eggs on toast (if there's a heaven I will eat them again) and the biscuits I used to get as a kid. Soulfood for English people... Your recommendations sound great. I haven't seen "The Working Poor" but I read "Nickeled and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich a few months ago: depressing reading. No surprises if the working poor don't vote: they'll be too knackered to get to the polls.

Toast: a story of one boy's hunger, by Nigel Slater. His autobiography written in terms of the food he ate growing up. His mother used to burn the toast every morning, but still he loved the fact she made it for him. She died when he was eight, replaced by a stepmother who used food as a form of agression. It's funny and sad and surprising.

Just reading Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books. Wonderful. And 1421, about the last Chinese fleet to go around the world. Last comic book I read was "Maus" - picked it up in the library the other day and couldn't put it down. Lots more stuff for studies, but these because I want to.