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alobearA couple of friends of mine are running a reading challenge this year, whereby you read a book from a particular category each month. January's category was "a book you haven't read before, which has been on your shelf for over a year". Serendipitously, when I found out about the challenge, I was already partway through a book that fit this description, so I forged onwwards and finished it on Sunday.
The book was The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, which had been on my shelf so long I'd completely forgotten where I got it from, or why. They say you should write what you know. So, what kind of book would you expect from a recently qualified pediatrician who then decided to go to divinity school? Why, a story about a children's hospital surviving a biblical flood to be the only bastion of humanity left upon globe-spanning seven-mile deep seas, of course!
It's an impressive and ambitious novel - over 600 densely written pages - and it's very compelling. It's an amazing combination of wild fantasy and blunt mundanity, so sharp in contrast as to make every switch quite shocking. The practical difficulties of 1000 people surviving in a single building with no outside contact are dispensed with promptly by an angel taking up residence in the hospital's computer (quite literally deus ex machina) and providing the residents with power via a perpetual motion machine, and anything at all they want from Star Trek style replicators. This is very much fantasy, and not science-fiction.
What the story is really about is the relationships between the people, and how they react to extreme circumstances. The protagonist, Jemma, is a medical student who discovers she has developed the ability to heal people, which obviously helps with the 700 sick children. She is a deeply flawed character, as are all of them, which makes for a rich tapestry of human personalities and a huge range of attitudes and beliefs among the survivors.
A lot of the book is quite unpleasant, and there was certainly a lot more medical detail than I would usually prefer, but at no point did I want to stop reading. In fact, the medical stuff actually made the magical healing much more interesting and more credible, since it described exactly what Jemma was doing to fix the problems in each child, rather than just having her wave her hands around and everyone suddenly be better.
The conflict between science and faith is very strong, which is understandable from an author who has worked as a doctor but is also religious. I would imagine such a position would result in a great many questions, a lot of despair over the suffering of children, and a strong desire to be able to fix everything magically. There's also a lot of political themes, as the adults in the hospital try to figure out a governing system, and go through various elections and changes in attitude towards those they choose as their leaders.
Overall, it's a sprawling tale of the minutiae of people's lives under bizarre circumstances and, as such, is a fascinating exploration of how a society might be built, with a lot of very weird religious philosophy thrown in.
The other book I finished over the weekend was Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson, which talks about strategies for changing your ingrained reactions to and beliefs about certain aspects of your life and personality. It contained a lot of information I've come across before, particularly in books and workshops on mindfulness, but wrapped up in an imaginative way that really appealed to me (my gremlin is called Winston, by the way, and he would very much benefit from chilling). It's always useful to be reminded of this kind of stuff, and fun to find it presented in a new and unusual way. I was particularly amused by a section near the beginning, which acknowledged that the reader might well be dismissing the whole thing as ridiculous by that point - but that those thoughts stemmed from their gremlin, who was against them accepting the tenets that would result in his taming. A clever way to wrong-foot the naysayers! It's definitely one of those books that won't appeal to everyone, but I think anyone who wants to challenge self-destructive thoughts and impulses would get something useful from it. At root, it's about noticing the problematic behaviour, realising you have choices about how to change it, and acknowledging that the journey of self-improvement is a constant process and you might as well get some enjoyment from it.
On Saturday, I went to see Loving, which tells the story of a inter-racial couple who were arrested for being married in Virginia in the late 1950s. It turned out to be less a story of courtroom battles, and more an intensely personal portrayal of two very ordinary people who achieved something extraordinary through just wanting to live their lives. It was a very measured film - some might say slow - but I thought the pacing worked well to draw the viewer in and immerse them in the lives of the protagonists. The relationship between Richard and Mildred Loving was often one of silences, and the film let those spaces speak without crowding them with action or drama. There were small moments of humour, small moments of tension, and small moments of despair. Even the eventual outcome of the court case was dealt with in a very understated way. But all the pieces built up in a very moving and interesting whole, which I thought was very effective and I am glad to have seen.
