Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The story of a murderer
Patrick Süskind, Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders. Diogenes, 1985 Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The story of a murderer. Translator: John E. Woods. Vintage International, 1986. Again a long break since I last wrote, caused by the need to edit the final volume of a research project three of us had been working on since the early 1990s,1 […]
On Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948)
I suppose it’s inevitable that my search for novels of Christian experience should bring me back to Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter is a novel of Christian experience with a difference. It is set in Freetown, capital of the then British colony of Sierra Leone, during the Second World War. Greene never refers […]
A novel of Christian experience: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
Robinson’s _Gilead_ is the thoughts of an old man who has long related to God. For Robinson religious experience is an intrinsic part of human existence that cannot be ignored.
About George MacDonald’s novel Thomas Wingfold, Curate
A couple of months ago, I wrote about novels of Christian experience, and more recently I asked whether The Brothers Karamazov was an example of this genre. Thomas Wingfold, curate is a novel that epitomises what I mean by the term. Thomas Wingfold, curate, published in 1876, is the first novel in George MacDonald’s Wingfold […]
Is The brothers Karamazov a novel of Christian experience?
A few weeks ago I wrote about my search for “novels of Christian experience”, novels written by Christians who choose to convey something of Christian experience to a mainstream audience. At the time I was reading Dostoyevsky’s novel The brothers Karamazov, and recently I finished it. Is it a novel of Christian experience? It comes from a cultural setting different from my own, but […]
Novels of Christian experience
At my English high school I came to love classical music and throughout my high-school years I sang in the school choir. I clearly remember something that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen. I think I would have called myself an agnostic at the time. We had been practising Handel’s Messiah for a performance in Wimbledon Town Hall, and the great night arrived. We sang […]
William Young’s The Shack
When I read William Young’s novel The Shack shortly after it was published in 2007, I was so struck by its theology that I wrote a summary — not of the story but of its theology, much of which is fairly explicit in the dialogue and the narrative. Having seen the movie a few days […]