2022 in review - part 1

This last year has been, at least on the global and national scale, something of a shitshow. An omnishambles. A permacrisis. It would be easy to dwell on the political incompetence, corruption, and out-and-out evil that has permeated the year. But I am instead going to cast my eye over the books, TV and films that have caught my mind, heart and imagination over the last twelve months.

Books

Several books caught my mind this year. First, let me start with a couple novel series that have occupied a lot of my time - one contemporary, one dating back to the eighties.

The Expanse

The nine novels of the Expanse came to their conclusion in November 2021 with Leviathan Falls. Filmed as a first-rate TV series, the novels naturally follow a somewhat different trajectory. After finishing the last four novels over the course of the year, I could appreciate the value of the original material afresh. The characters have more room to breathe. The realities of the differing cultures of Mars, the Belt and Earth in the twenty-third century have more room to be explored. The realpolitik of a solar system on the brink of war has a subsequent heft and logic. 

The nine books fall into three trilogies (roughly), but only the first two have been turned into TV. The last trilogy, which dwarfs in scale and consequences the previous two, now looks unlikely to get the adaptation it deserves.

While it is far from original - the Expanse borrows heavily from nearly a century of American and British space opera, from the Golden Age to the New Wave and the modern reinvention of the genre - it uses the tropes and cliches of the genre to great effect. It also has structural similarities to George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels. Both use multiple narrative third-person viewpoints. Both tell a tale of complex politics with multiple powers and personalities striving to control a chaotic, factionalised world. They introduce an initially low-key outside threat that soon grows into something that becomes the centre of the narrative while never fully explained. Above all else, both do some impressive world-building that immerses you in a believable world with diverse cultures and languages.

But it is still an artisan's work compared to the other sequence I stumbled upon this year.

Hyperion Cantos

Taking its titles from two of Joh Keat's poems, Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion, are something remarkable. The first novel is structured like the Canterbury Tales but also draws on the poetry of Keats, Christian and Jewish theology and Scripture, the works of Shusako Endo (especially Silence), hard-boiled detective fiction, and the wildest edges of modern space opera, to create something unique. It is a narrative about the emergence of sentient AI (and what comes beyond that), deity, and the purpose of humanity, suffering, life, and death. At times, I found the individual stories of the core protagonists profoundly moving and almost too painful to finish. 

All this and a cracking good yarn to boot!

I felt the second novel finished perfectly. The two sequels (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion - also from Keats) seemed unnecessary and are, by all accounts, inferior works. So I have not (yet) ventured to read them. 

While The Expanse sequence is a great, rip-roaring adventure, Hyperion Cantos are something more complex and need a slower read and re-read.

Faith, Hope and Carnage

I knew I had finally given in to my inner grumpy old white man when I began to immerse myself in the music of Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and, most recently, Nick Cave. They all have something that speaks to my lived experience as a white man entering his seventh decade and a spirituality born of hard lives, love, losses, hope, and pain.

However, Nick Cave, the human being rather than the artist and performance persona, was a revelation to me. In a series of recorded, transcribed interviews, he and journalist Seán O'Hagan, explore his songwriting process, his relationship to fame, and the highs and lows of being in a band (including stories of drinking and drug excesses and run-ins with the police). All somewhat familiar, standard rock journalism and storytelling.

But the book veers off quite early in unexpected directions. Not least, into Cave's growing Christian faith and how he and his wife have come to terms with the loss of his fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, in a tragic accident in 2015. His reflections on faith and grief are profound, raw, hopeful, and eloquent. 

This was probably the most moving book I have 'read' in years. Actually, I listened - the audiobook is Cave and O'Hagan reading, and their voices give the whole weight of Cave's self-disclosure some extra heft. His eloquence in writing and speaking the unwritable and unspeakable are pretty remarkable. And to see a man in his mid-sixties still growing, learning, creating, and working like a trojan to produce work of remarkable quality, is heartening and inspiring to me as I look at turning sixty in the next two or three years. His output is both prodigious and diverse, from his rock albums to film soundtracks, to novels, to films.

As Cave says at one point, 'life is too damned short not to be awed'. This is from a man at an age that, in the recent past, would have seen him retiring and stepping back from all this creative energy to look back on his long life. Here instead, is someone whose pain and loss have reshaped him into a more richly human, spiritually questing individual. Maybe that is a source of hope for anyone as they enter this third act of life.

How to Inhabit Time

This brings me to my favourite book of the year! In many ways, this book gives the theological and philosophical underpinnings of what Nick Cave was writing about in the previous book. James K A Smith has written several books in recent years that seem to have resonated in Christian and possibly secular circles. From exploring the liturgies of culture and how they shape our beliefs and lives. to unpacking the dense philosophy of Charles Taylor into an engaging book about faith in the secular world, Smith has tackled complex ideas with passion and insight.

I first got turned on to his writing by his previous book, On the Road with St Augustine, turning the great early medieval theologian and philosopher into a travelling companion on a Kerouacian pilgrimage across Europe and modern-day life. Along the way, they pick up other hitchhikers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Satre, seeing the journey from their perspectives but finding a more satisfying point of view in Augustine. It is a book I keep re-reading for its depth of insight.

How to Inhabit time may be his most intimate book yet, exploring the travails of family life and loss to illustrate how faith engages with our temporal and fleeting existence as human beings. You can already see how it links back to Faith, Hope and Carnage! 

How do we understand our past and anticipate our future while living firmly grounded in the present? How do we live in the moment while recognising the past as the 'compost' out of which we are growing? How do we remain grounded in the here and now while anticipating a future steeped in biblical eschatology? Well, he does not have all the answers, but Smith's engaging, passionate, culturally rich writing will take you on a journey to discover the answers for yourself. A journey that is probably worth taking with Augustine as a travelling companion.

It's another book to read and re-read.

In my next blogs, I'll look at some of the films and TV that have shaped my year.