Muriel Spark’s 1988 novel — a drama, a mystery and a comedy in approximately equal measure — is in some ways a nostalgic, yet unsanitised reflection on the London publishing industry of the fifties. We travel back to postwar London, still pockmarked by the Second World War. Our guide on this journey is Mrs. Hawkins — an ageing insomniac in…
Author: Christopher Adam
What happens when something that you don’t understand and want to escape ends up pulling you in and throws your whole world off balance? That’s the question at the heart of Flannery O’Connor’s darkly comic novel Wise Blood. We meet Hazel Motes, a World War II veteran. He’s pursued by Christ, and he is desperate to evade him. Then there’s…
My chapter on Canada’s response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent refugee crisis of 1956-57 has appeared in Hungarian, in a new print handbook on the history of 1956 published by the Institute of History at Hungary’s Research Centre for the Humanities. The Hungarian-language version of the handbook is being launched tomorrow in Budapest. In English, the project…
The dynamics of daily life, the intricacies of human relationships, and people with prestige or power in our communities can appear to be of unfaltering importance. Yet human existence is fundamentally evanescent and that’s what Evelyn Waugh explores in his 1934 novel A Handful of Dust. We meet a group of English socialites and at the heart of this group…
Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies is about departures — and about the liturgies that precede them. In the first half, set in 1986, a music festival in Manchester is the last hurrah of boyhood before a close-knit group of young men head off on the divergent paths of adult life. In the second half, thirty years later, they gather again at…
Robert served 12 years of a 20-year prison sentence for his involvement in the Irish Republic Army (IRA), and in the bombing of Belfast City Centre. Mark served as a British military officer during the Troubles. Today Robert is a prominent community leader in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast, as well as a Sinn Féin party activist. Mark…
It’s a unique event in the life of a Roman Catholic parish when a Canadian university press publishes a monograph on one of its ministries. In fulfilling its mission over the past 30 years, the St. Joe’s Refugee Outreach Committee (ROC) has, of course, extended far beyond the boundaries of its home parish — helping to settle more than 200…
Death is humanity’s common denominator and also the great equalizer. In her 1959 novel Memento Mori, Dame Muriel Spark uses sharp language and imagery to make her many characters face the fear of the one inevitable event in life that they would most desire to avoid. Spark dissects with the keenest scalpel her characters. She pulls away the thin veneer…
In this coming-of-age story, Adib Khorram provides the sort of dimension to Persian culture and to Iran as a country that one is unlikely to find in much of the media. And while offering vignettes on Persian customs, cuisine, the Farsi language, landmarks and the demography of Iran, the novel’s overarching theme is that of mental illness. The protagonist, sixteen…
How do we find solace amidst grief and turmoil, especially when we struggle to believe in a God who lends order to existence? That question forms the basis of Michael Ignatieff’s newest book. He begins his journey by exploring the Psalms, the Old Testament story of Job and the life of the Apostle Paul. In this survey-style presentation of western…