Could it be that the stridency with which some American Christians today call for a return to “family values” is yet another expression of buried unease, an attempt to evoke an enthusiasm for family life by over-compensation?Shakerism also represented a rejection of conventional gender roles. The mobs that attacked Shakers were often incensed that this increasingly powerful movement was led by a woman. The early Shakers believed that history was approaching its consummation. Jesus had made heaven available and had incarnated the Word of God in male form; Ann was the new Word, the female Christ, whose appearance heralded the End of Days. She was the woman foretold in the Book of Revelation, clothed with the sun, moon and stars, who would take refuge in the wilderness before the apocalypse. Now that Ann had established herself in the American wilderness, the human race could unite with the divine.After Ann’s death, the Shakers remained true to the ideal of female leadership.
Ann’s cult shows a rejection of the masculine tenor of conventional Christian imagery. She was always called “Mother” by her followers, who seem to have found her presence consoling and maternal. This would have been particularly appealing to New Englanders repelled by the harsh rigour of Puritan society, which was notoriously suspicious of inspired women.During the 18th and 19th centuries, America experienced an extraordinary upsurge of religious creativity. Like the Shakers, many sects espoused novel visions of Christianity; some, like the Mormons, made new scriptures. Their popularity shows that many found them a helpful way of making the painful rite of passage to the exciting but disturbing modernity coming to birth in the new United States.The rowdy stamping, quaking and frenetic dancing of Shaker worship also gave people a way of expressing inchoate anxieties about the new era. Ann can be seen as a folk genius, able to assuage tensions and fears in a way that the more aristocratic and rational Founding Fathers could not.
Americans have continued to use religion as a means of protecting against the secularist establishment, and of exploring a populist alternative to the prevailing ethos of the US elite.* Karen Armstrong’s new book, ‘The Battle for God’, is published by HarperCollins. Kill Your Darlings by Terence Blacker (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99, 292pp)
Kill Your Darlings by Terence Blacker (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99, 292pp)
Literary Romans à clef are of interest to everyone – except, possibly, people outside the tawdry world of publishing, promotion and launches where misanthropic hacks get drunk on cheap white wine at miserable Soho bars. But one can safely say that Terence Blacker’s novel – the story of a once-feted author who steals the brilliant manuscript of a star pupil – will probably not be of much interest to anyone inside this cloistered world of scribblers and parasites. PRs will look in vain for reconstructions of their grubby sex acts on the pool table of the Groucho Club. Blacker is a man plugged in to this world and, frankly, he isn’t going to dish the dirt.A mid-life crisis in a middle-class London male never fails to be dull and pathetic; the least one can hope for is a bit of decent spleen and caustic bile.
Initially, in Kill Your Darlings, there is the hope that the narrator will turn out to be genuinely nasty and repulsive. Gregory Keays is a bitter man who has endured years of failure and writer’s block after his initial promise in the vanguard of the Rushdie/McEwan generation. He has drifted into teaching a creative-writing course, and there he meets a troubling and troubled young man, Peter Gibson – in a class apart from the other mules and wannabes.Naturally, Keays has a marriage in crisis, and naturally his wife is a dried-out feng shui expert who arranges their house in a deracinated imitation of Zen practice for magazine shoots. Naturally, there is also a teenager in situ, a teenaged son who Blacker characterises as a Kevin & Perry stereotype. Naturally, the whole family despise one another.From this richly composted situation comes that toxic British flower: scepticism embracing universal contempt. When Keays ends up having an unexpected sexual relationship with the young author (who is besotted with the middle-aged loser: yeah, right), we have the sole expression of non-contempt. But then Keays dumps the kid; the boy commits suicide, Keays finds his body, fellates the corpse, then steals the boy’s manuscript and manages to pass it off as his own.All sorts of sub-plots now jostle uncomfortably – involvement with a gangster type and ghost-writing a novel for him, a falling-out with the son who bails out to live in a crack house and then effectively tries to blackmail Keays.
A lot of rather silly goings-on, in fact, just when it seemed that the novel would benefit from a certain hardening of purpose. After all, the central drama is so dastardly, the sheer villainy so splendid, that the plot is only weakened by cartoonish swipes at the literary diaspora.Kill Your Darlings is bitter, but not bitter enough, with satirical pretensions that seem less than barbed and more like a pool of unset jelly (enough Martin Amis swipes, already). Misanthropy can be terrifically entertaining – Larkin and Evelyn Waugh spring to mind – but, in the wrong hands, it just sounds like whining Cheap white wining in miserable Soho bars, in fact.. Something New Under the Sun by John McNeill (Allen Lane, £20, 448pp)
Something New Under the Sun by John McNeill (Allen Lane, £20, 448pp)
Ecological anxiety is a form of human self-flattery. We have convinced ourselves that, in the war of our species against the rest of nature, we have bludgeoned the enemy into retreat We can colonise spaces that seem rationally uninhabitable We can destroy or domesticate almost at will.
