The Testament of Gideon Mack, Final

by James Robertson
Penguin Group/March 2007

"What can this work be? Can it be anything other than the ramblings of a mind terminally damaged by a cheerless upbringing, an unfulfilled marriage, unrequited love, religious confusion and the stress and injury or a near-fatal accident? Who would dare, in this day and age, to suggest that Gideon Mack was, as he maintained to the end, telling the truth?"

So wonders the fictional, reluctant publisher of Gideon Mack’s memoir. Can it be the truth? Can a man who claims to have met and befriended the Devil be anything other than insane? The pleasure in reading The Testament of Gideon Mack is that even as you turn the final page, you’re not quite sure. This novel is full of slight tricks of hand. They begin, not with the mysterious appearance of a standing rock, but with Robertson’s introduction of this fictional publisher. This very effective literary device forces us to consider the extraordinary (perhaps supernatural?) circumstances that occur in and around Gideon’s life in the context of the real world. By doing so, he ensures that Gideon Mack’s testament is not easily dismissed. He forces us to share in the publisher’s own confusion: an inclination to disbelieve something so fantastic which battles the desire to entertain, at least, the possibility.

Is it a coincidence that this struggle between belief and disbelief is similar to the one many experience when it comes to the subject of religion? Indeed Gideon, an atheist minister, is the very embodiment of this struggle. But what makes Gideon, this lonely and desperate man, the hero of his own memoir is that, when confronted with the empirical proof of the existence of the supernatural -that is, if we accept Gideon’s own testimony, the veracity of which is highly debatable - he unhesitatingly believes. How many of us would have the courage to do that? How many of us wouldn’t dope ourselves up with the latest anti-depressant and check ourselves into a mental hospital after we recall memories of having spent three days in the company of a man whom we believe to be the Devil? To not only accept that as a reality but to also share that truth with the entire world makes you either very, very brave or very, very crazy. Robertson leaves it up to you to decide which.

But, like any great magician, he doesn’t make it easy. If the standing rock is real why doesn’t it appear on film? If it isn’t real why is Elsie, Gideon’s friend and lover, able to see it? Did she see it? After confessing to having seen the mythical stone, Elsie mentally backtracks:

”I think I saw it..That’s all I have from that night - a maybe. I might have seen it. That’s not enough. It’s not real.”
“So what’s real?” I said.

The “I” in this quote could very easily be Robertson asking us that very same question. What is real? If you’re an agnostic waiting for that empirical proof to make your final decision, how would you define it? The supernatural and the miraculous, by their very definition, don’t follow the laws of nature - at least not as we currently understand them. The supernatural can appear one day and disappear the next; was it real?

But even as we begin to consider such high-minded philosophical concepts such as the definition of reality, we’re never for one moment allowed to forget that it is all grounded on the crumbling pie crust of one man’s testimony. It isn’t even ever clear that the man whom Gideon believes saved his life is really the Devil. The Devil clearly never identifies himself as such. Instead, he’s sardonic and enigmatic, never answering a pointed question, leaving Gideon (and us) to draw our own conclusions. It says something about our main character that, when confronted with a supernatural being, he assumes him to be the Devil based on little or no proof. Perhaps it says too, something about ourselves and about what we choose to believe of this “man” dressed in black, who steals boots and lives a despairing existence in a cave with junkyard furniture.

This reader has her own suspicions about who this Devil actually is but, for now, I’ll keep them to myself since I haven’t quite found a way to make all the pieces fit (two days and counting - I’m still working on it and having a grand ole’ time). The Testament of Gideon Mack is at heart a mystery and it’s likely to leave you with more questions than answers. But that’s not entirely true. The Testament of Gideon Mack, like any great scripture, supplies all the pieces; you just have to decide what picture it makes.

Saturday Morning Cartoons...On Sunday

If you haven't already, please, oh please check out the Weekend Extras over at Book Ninja. Cha-booooon!

So Bad It's Good

Joe Queenan at the NY Times defends the pleasure in reading incredibly bad books:

Bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep the brain active. We spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say a few pages down the road. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad but not exquisitely bad is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight. This is what made the late, great Mickey Spillane so memorable: he never tried to write poor man’s Raymond Chandler books like Robert Parker; he wrote pure trash. I feel the same way about those “Loins of Telemachus” or “Cuirass of the Myrmidons” books that retell famous stories from the point of view of a marginal character. The dumber, the merrier.

Speaking of wonderfully bad movies, anyone remember "Snakes on a Plane?"...

"I Know What You Read Last Summer"

This is two weeks late but I just found this post on summer reading. Very, very funny with a few great reccomendations. I never think of my summer reading in this quite this way, but he makes it sound so fun that perhaps I should...

For me, summer reading is complicated, because I spend the months of June and July on the road. Every traveller knows the importance of packing light, but books tend to be on the heavy side. So leave them at home, you say. Not an option. Erasmus bought essentials like food and clothing with the change left over from acquiring new books, which makes perfect sense to me. I'm a book addict, a chain reader who finishes one novel and immediately starts the next. Sometimes I read two, three or even four books at a time. I can't go to sleep at night without reading.

Nine months out of the year, this isn't a problem. I'm surrounded by unread books. I've lined the walls with them, with stashes tucked away in closets and basements. So far, things haven't reached the point where I'm emptying the coffee jar and hiding a few paperbacks inside, but to be honest, I welcome that day.

Sound familiar?

Eat, Pray, Love, Final

by Elizabeth Gilbert
Penguin Group / 2006

I have another confession to make. I finished Eat, Pray, Love a week ago. This time I have no excuse for not writing this post long ago. I meant to…but yeah. In my defense, what more can I say about a book that has already been reviewed and discussed extensively? The only thing I can say is that the praise heaped upon this book is well-deserved. Sometimes, books are so over-hyped that by the time you get to them, while you may have enjoyed it (if you’re lucky), you come away feeling as if you must have missed something, because you’re saying to yourself as you turn the last page, “What was all the fuss about again?”

I can say with all honesty that is not the case with Eat, Pray, Love. In so many words, it’s moving, inspiring, funny, educational, and altogether enjoyable. Some have called Ms. Gilbert self-indulgent or just plain old self-centered. I, however, think that the act of writing a memoir is inherently self-centered. Who else would write a book under the assumption that their lives and unique experiences are worthy of print and of interest to millions of readers? But what keeps this inherent self-centeredness from being obnoxious and off-putting is an author’s ability to reveal the universal within the particular. All writers aren’t capable of this; Ms. Gilbert is.

One night, alone on the bathroom floor Gilbert realizes that she doesn’t want the life she is living; she doesn’t want to be married, she doesn’t want to have children, she doesn’t want to deny her own unhappiness any longer:

It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and – just as during all those nights before – I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake of Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and grief. I don’t want to be married anymore.

So “seven difficult months later” she leaves her husband and proceeds to not only spend the next year going through a very messy and ugly divorce, but also gets involved in an emotionally unhealthy relationship with another man. Naturally, after the divorce is finalized and after she has extricated herself from her other poisonous relationship (kind of), she finds herself lower physically, mentally, and spiritually than she was when she was sobbing on the bathroom floor. So, Ms. Gilbert does what many of us only wish we could do: she takes a break from her life and packs herself up to spend a year abroad – three months in Italy, India, and Indonesia, consecutively.

What follows is one of the best travelogues I’ve read in a very long time, and not because Italy is my number one choice for Places I Have to Visit Before I Die. Gilbert takes a journey to put the pieces of herself back together again, and oh what a revealing, occasionally heartbreaking, and frequently funny journey it is. Much has been made about the food in Eat, Pray, Love for very good reason. On her pizza experience in Naples, home of the best pizza in the world, Gilbert writes:

The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It’s soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust – thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thick and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise.

Take it from me, you don’t want to read this passage on an empty stomach. In fact, I’d recommend skipping the entire Italian section all-together if you’re hungry. It’s not all about food but there’s enough food mentioned that you might damage its pages with puddles of drool.

But food is primarily the subject of only a third of the book. “India” is dedicated to her quest for spirituality. And while I expected to like this section the least (an entire three months spent in an Indian ashram versus three months exploring Italy?) I actually liked it the most. I found her personal revelations to be honest without being oppressively didactic. And we get to meet Richard from Texas, a man who, if this weren’t a memoir, you’d swear could only exist within the pages of a book.

The final section, Indonesia, is such a romantic fairy-tale – beautiful, caring man and all – that you have to wonder if she really did make all this up. Can one person’s life really change so dramatically and luckily in the space of one year? Gilbert anticipates such criticism by asking and answering it herself:

And, yes, I cannot help but notice that I am sailing to this pretty little tropical island with my Brazilian lover. Which is – I admit it! – an almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story, like the page out of some housewife’s dream…Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years – I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

Indeed, that’s what Eat, Pray, Love is all about: looking for and finding the strength to save ourselves when no one else will or can. Which is why, when Gilbert sails “ludicrously” into the sunset, even as you’re choked up with jealousy, you can’t help but cheer. Gilbert reminds us that happiness is always possible; sometimes we just have to be courageous enough to actively look for it.

Threatening Iago...

This passage from Nigel Cliff's The Shakespeare Riots got a laugh-out-loud response from me:

Shakespeare was revered as a seer and a prophet, the master spirit of the Anglophone civilization, but his plays were also the stuff of log-cabin wisdom, the staple of schoolboy speechifying, and above all the stock-in-trade of popular drama. With one or at most two theaters in all but the biggest cities, men and women of every class went to the same shows and watched the same medley of "legitamate" plays and the skits and songs, farces and acrobatic dsplays that were served up as after-pieces or entr'actes, and no one thought of removing Shakespeare to a separate category called Culture...Some spectators became so wrapped up in the action that they forgot they were watching a play at all. In Albany a canal boatman was enraged by Iago's scheming: "You damned lying scoundrel!" he roared as he rose to his feet, "I would like to get hold of you after the show and wring your infernal neck!"

Ah, the good ole' days when art could move us so...