pumpkinstrokemarrow

The heroes of the Neibelungenlied were just about Christians, as were the Saxons of the cake story. Thinking of that acid and noisy pair, Hitchens & Dawkins, the story that Hodgkin tells is that, in the middle of the interval, becoming Christians was progress. It made behaving yourself respectable; it might earn you a place in a heaven which sounded much more attractive than that on offer in Wotan land. Warriors suddenly saw that there might be another way of being, other than hacking each other to death in the intervals between drinking bouts. All in all Hitchens & Dawkins are a bit dated; their hate the pope belongs to the time of my parents, a time when the church really did have more power than it should and when hate the pope was a reasonable political position. When one is in the thick of things there is little time for nuances. But now the church does not matter very much (except to some of our leaders), we can be a bit calmer.

On reflection, and to be fair to them, they do do most of their acid and noise in the US where Jesus is still very important to plenty of people. Still do baptism and that sort of thing. So perhaps there is still work to do there. But I now wonder if the audiences pay to go and hear them there, the land of the lecture circuit. Is their crusade (not quite the right word but never mind) a paying proposition?

Moving onto a contemporary best seller, just finished a quick canter through 'Et si c'était vrai...' a book of which and author (Marc Levy) of whom I had had not heard until Sutton Library offered them to me for 30p. Wikipedia tells me that he is an interesting cove, with careers in IT and office furnishings before he started clocking up a best seller a year at the mature age of 39. This one was the first. A silly tale, quite readable, about a girl in a coma in a hospital whose spirit returns to fall in love with the occupant of her old flat, the only chap in the world, it seems, who can interact with her spirit. To everyone else the spirit is intangible (see through, invisible and inaudible). I was amused that the last third of the book introduced a retiring policeman, a device which reminded of that of Houellebecq in his prize book. Quite a lot of medical colour, perhaps derived from his stint with the Red Cross. Oddly for a big cheese, Levy does not seem to have a web site of his own but he does have a fairly elaborate blog. I wonder he has his personal assistants do it for him or whether he does it himself? See http://www.toslog.com/marclevy/accueil.

I await the film of the book, just to entertain the BH you understand, from Amazon at £2.46 plus postage. One of the cheaper films that I have bought.