What a great, lovely question. Whoever left it wanted to do something kind for me on Christmas and I really appreciate it. All I want is to talk about books. And I’ll do it now by offering the penultimate book review of this year.
The novel I finished today is the most recent installment in Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series titled A Slowly Dying Cause. I’ve been disappointed with some of the books in the series but this one was very enjoyable. George finally decided to move away from trying to depict “diverse communities” that FGM and rape each other all over the place (but only for extremely good reasons, of course). This novel is very non-diverse and much the better for it.
I’m sure this wasn’t by design but the many stories which converge in the novel all depict the ugliness of people who destroy family life because of their incapacity to school their egos into any sort of order. This is a crucial question of modernity. Why should a person not follow every passing whim and stomp over people’s heads in the process? One example in the novel is policewoman Bea Hanaford. She abandons a good, loving, faithful husband and a teenage son because… being by herself “makes her feel more like herself”, whatever that means. Bea is not religious. The only philosophy of life she ever learned is that human whims are more important than anything. She abandons husband and child not to do anything special but to sit at home alone over a styrofoam box of takeout curry.
Bea’s case is not the most egregious one in the novel. Other characters destroy relationships and throw away friendships over a passing caprice, too. We keep hearing that one doesn’t need religion to be moral because one can develop an inner code of ethical behavior. But that’s all empty blabber. What George depicts is real. Inner ethics always accommodates the selfish, covetous bastard one tends to be without external limits.
Let’s all think this over as we prepare to celebrate Christmas.
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