Emperor of Novels – John Williams’ Augustus

John Williams’ (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner) final completed novel, Augustus, is quite simply the best book I have read all year. At school, an English teacher whose opinion I value highly once said that we know the best books because as soon as we finish them we want to start again. We have gained so much from them, yet we know that so much more lies within, deeper down. What separates these books from your standard ever-interpretable and unfathomably-deep Literary Classics is that these books seem to speak to us. They leave us a feeling of company – it is as if your soul is touched by another’s. If I didn’t have other books to read and exams to think about, I would read Augustus again right now. And then again, and again. It is simply that good. What follows is simply an explanation as to why that is.

Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus, was the first Roman Emperor and is a man widely considered one of the greatest leaders of all time. In Williams’ novel we follow Octavius, as he is usually called here, from his days as a youth, to his battles against his fellow Roman, Marcus Antonius, to his years of undivided power, when on all sides he faced political enemies who were determined to succeed him. Williams does not focus on the battles or on the violence – though both are here. Instead, Augustus’s struggle is to lead Rome and fulfil his duty. More than once is Rome named his daughter, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he feels he is failing her. Forced into violence, time and again, by the necessities of fate, Augustus retains control over Rome, but he watches his friends die, and becomes increasingly alone.

“It is too dark” – The Kaleidoscopic Form of Augustus

The first time I opened Augustus I closed it again immediately. The first thing I saw was a letter. What could be more boring than a novel of letters? I imagined ridiculous, unrealistic, epistolary novels from the 18th century and gave a shudder. Yet I had the wrong idea entirely. Augustus is closer to those questions we sometimes find on history exams where we are asked to compare and contrast sources. We see an event through many different angles – that of a historian, an eyewitness memoir, perhaps a newspaper report or even a cartoon – and we must evaluate these sources against each other and try to determine what really happened and why. We must check for biases, for concealed information. In short, we must work for our knowledge.

A sculpture of the head of Augustus
A sculpture of the young Augustus. As with the novel itself it tells us something of the man that once was. But filling in the gaps requires our imagination. Aiwok, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Augustus works by the same principle. Williams weaves together truth and fiction, letters and diaries and proclamations and histories from all sorts of eminent Romans, to tell the story of Augustus’ life. As with Conrad’s Nostromo, we never seem to see Augustus himself, except through the eyes of others. We as readers are always having to think about what we read, to work from glimpses, as if through coloured glass, to guess at what the real man is like. Often, all we get is an image:

“I understand that he wants the letter. I hand it to him, and he turns away from us. The ring of officers breaks for him, and he walks down the hill. For a long time we watch him, a slight boyish figure walking on the deserted field, moving slowly, this way and that, as if trying to discover a way to go.”

The effect of this is incomparable. Augustus appears so vitally human precisely because we know him through confusion and uncertainty, just as we know every human being. No narrator will tell us who he is, just as no human being will tell us who they are either, except through their words and their actions. To create him as I read was one of the most exciting things about reading Augustus.

The Roman Touch – Philosophy, Morals and Nobility

I studied Latin at school. While I can’t pretend to have read Cicero, I did stumble through some Seneca and Livy. But anyone who has studied Latin will have a feel for the way that the Romans wrote. That poise, that composure and nobility of style runs through the entirety of Augustus. Not once did I have the impression it was not a Roman’s writing before my eyes. The Roman way of writing in some sense reflects their philosophical outlook. The Romans had something of a disdain for philosophy, compared to their illustrious Greek forbears. Roman philosophy is focused on the practical, the here-and-now questions of ethics much more than anything else. The most famous Roman thinkers, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, were both Stoics. Nobody in Augustus claims to be a Stoic, but all of the characters, whatever their actions, are motivated by high ideals – honour, duty, and patriotism.

It was perhaps a better time. Even Livia, Augustus’ wife, who is determined to secure the succession of her son Tiberius, is far more an antagonist than a villain. Like Cicero, another of Augustus’ opponents, she is a character whose values and hopes go against his. Both of them find value in the older Roman Republic and its ideas of family honour. In part, the tragedy of Augustus is that good people are politically divided because of incompatible values. It is noble – and reasonable – of Livia to write Tiberius such things as “You have a duty to yourself, to your country, to your name”. And there is a more than a hint of heroism in phrases like “Our futures are more important than our selves.” But what she wants necessitates the limiting of Augustus’ power, just as what he wants demands the limiting of her own.

Williams depicts all of his characters with force. They are real people, with their own motivations. Williams, I believe, is speaking when Maecenas writes to Livy against being a moralist. I shall quote it because it gives an idea of the moral tone of the novel:

“it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.”

Just as we need to piece together Augustus’ character from scraps and choice remarks, so too must we piece together judgements for ourselves, instead of relying on the author to tell us what to think. And as a result, it forces us to be active participants in the novel, making our own meaning out of what’s there.

Power and Necessity

No character here is good or evil, least of all Augustus himself. When you rule an empire you are forced, constantly, to act to secure your power against those who would wrest it from you. When those who went against Julius Caesar are finally punished by Marcus Antonius and Augustus, Cicero’s head is brought and placed at the rostrum in the Forum where once he had spoken so eloquently. The son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra is executed also, though he is only seventeen. Even Augustus’ own daughter, Julia, is forced repeatedly into unhappy marriages by her father to secure his political dominance, as are his own friends. All the time, we are faced with the question that Julia asks Augustus as she enters her final marriage:

“”Has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?”

My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has”.”

One of the novel’s perceptive observers writes that “Octavius Caesar is Rome; and that, perhaps, is the tragedy of his life”. His destiny is Rome, is power, and he does not grow corrupted by that power as so many others do. But in his fulfilment of his destiny, he loses the only things that ever gave him joy – his daughter, and his friends. Forced to choose between his private and his public duties, Augustus always chooses the latter, and eventually he is left all alone. When his old friends have died, he is surrounded by only those who lust after power. That is to say, people he cannot trust. And yet his body will not fail him, and he continues to grow old, all alone.

Julia

The story that, according to my copy’s introduction, was the seed out of which Augustus grew, was not Augustus’ own but that of his daughter, Julia. Augustus had no son, but his daughter was given an education in art and philosophy that at the time was reserved for sons alone. Julia is an extraordinary character, a woman whose existence was scrubbed away by history as best it could. Augustus loved her – and this love is truly touching – but perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel is how Julia, in spite of her knowledge and intelligence, ends up herself becoming a piece on the chessboard of her father’s Empire. And unlike him, who managed to survive to the end, Augustus was forced to let her be captured.

In the end, Augustus leaves us with a sense of limitations. Julia at one point says to her father the wonderful line “The power you have… cannot legislate against the passions of the human heart”. And it is true. Augustus cannot control the hearts of his people, whether friend or foe. In the same way, try as he might to bring peace to the Romans instead he is forced, time and time again, to spill their blood. “There is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness”. People fail repeatedly here. After all, we cannot know another’s heart, and perhaps we cannot even know our own. Augustus is a man determined to do good, and he does, but at great cost – to his health, to his friends and family. It is up to us as readers can say whether it was worth it.

Conclusion

I could write more but I will not. Augustus is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect novel I have ever read. I love it with a passion I struggle to put into words. Its nobility, its formal ingenuity, its gripping plot with tragedy and farce and all the rest together, its characters with their forceful existence, all this I love. John Williams’ absolutely stunning prose I love too. Augustus is a novel for now and forevermore. In its questions of power and necessity, in its praise of the value of friendship and love, in its exploration of the obscurity of knowledge and the unfathomability of the human heart, it is incomparable. If ever a post on this blog has proved for you a reason to go out and buy a book, let it be this one. It will blow you away.

For more on these themes, see my review of William’s earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing, and my comments on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Have you read Augustus, and what did you think of it if you have? What do you make of the final section of the work, where Augustus himself speaks? Does it undermine what comes before, or strengthen it?

The Patrick Melrose Novels – Edward St Aubyn

It was my birthday on Friday, and what better way to celebrate than to think about another book, or rather series of books, that deals with growing up as one of their main themes. The Patrick Melrose Novels were recommended to me by a novelist I know, and it was an excellent choice. The series takes the life of its hero, Patrick, from the age of five right up to middle age. Born in the early 1960s, Patrick’s life runs in many ways parallel to those of my parents and their generation. And not just in terms of age, but also in terms of class and wealth. Patrick is, like my father was, a man living in the shadow of inherited wealth. Yet like the rest of his generation, he witnesses a changing of the times, where what we can get from our parents ends up not being quite enough.

What I liked about the series is the way that it speaks to my own experience of the world. I have no wish to defend the upper classes of England, but what these novels show is a seedier side to their lives that moves beyond the traditional targets of vapid cocktail parties, selfishness, and wasted potential. Patrick Melrose is sexually abused by his father and given precious little kindness by his mother or other people around him. In his twenties he is a drug addict, and as an adult he is constantly at war with alcohol. The failures of these people are not just failures to care about those beneath them, but failures to care even about each other. At the heart of Edward St Aubyn’s novels is an engagement with the upper classes on their own terms, with a kind of cautious sympathy.

In looking at these people’s failures, he’s willing to ask where did we go wrong?

Never Mind – Patrick Melrose #1

At the centre of the Patrick Melrose series lie questions of identity. Who are we, and how did we become them? Never Mind, the first novel in the series, takes us to France, where Patrick Melrose is just a boy of five. With the exception of Mother’s Milk, all of these novels take place over a single day, with memories used to fill in details. On the day of Never Mind there is a dinner party at the Melrose residence, at which two couples will be attending besides the organisers. The novel focuses on Patrick’s father, David Melrose, who is a larger-than-life figure. He wears “an inattentive expression, until he spotted another person’s vulnerability”. Though at one point one of the characters describes him as heroic, the word “villainous” is much more apt. David is a tyrant and a sadist. His enjoyment of the world comes through his controlling it.

We can look for the reasons why he is like this in Never Mind, and there are plenty. He doesn’t work and is bored. He hasn’t earned his money, which he has through marriage to his wife, and perhaps is bitter. His own father was an equal tyrant, crushing David’s dreams of becoming a professional musician. All of these are potential explanations, but in the end, we’re left feeling unsatisfied by them. David subjects Patrick to sexual abuse, and Patrick himself is the product of his mother’s rape – these are not things which even a difficult childhood can excuse. The challenge, reading through the series, for us as for Patrick, is to come to terms with the past, to understand David without forgiving him, or at least to accept him.

The character of David is best described by Nicholas Pratt, one of the other guests of the party: “Such people, though perhaps destructive and cruel towards those who are closest to them, often possess a vitality that makes other people seem dull by comparison.” This too, that David is “good fun”, is no excuse. But within the novel it explains his magnetism. David derides morality, he derides everything, and that grants him a kind of power over the world. Nicholas Pratt is a more traditional representative of his class, a man who does nothing and is at this stage on his fourth of fifth wife. An embodiment of the “boys-will-be-boys” attitude, he sees very little wrong in David. After all, a little cruelty goes a long way in hardening kids up. I remember my own character-building showers at prep school, where there was no hot water.

Alongside Nicholas there is his girlfriend, Bridget, who is there only for his sexual gratification and is herself in her late teens. Though she’s from a good family, she’s a fine gradation of class lower than the other characters, and they spend most of the novel ignoring her or mocking her. Then there is a philosopher, Victor Eisen, who seems to enjoy “ironically” the company, and his own girlfriend, Anne, who had worked for the New York Times.

Of these characters it is Anne who stands out. She alone takes an interest in the young Patrick. In a key image at the end of the novel she comes and sits with him on the stairs while the rest of the adults are having their party. She does not stay for long, and we are left with a sense of what could have been. The Patrick Melrose series is in a way the consequence of missing out on kindness when it is needed. Patrick’s own mother stays inside, continuing to eat. When he needed it, there was nobody there for him.

Anne is also unique because among all of the women of the story, she alone appears to work. Part of the prevailing attitude of the characters in these novels is an unpleasant sexism, which leaves the women trapped at home and unable to develop anything except alcoholism. Anne alone has managed to make something of herself, and it means that she is able to see their world from the outside, and understand just how rotten it is.

Bad News – Patrick Melrose #2

The second novel of the series sees Patrick Melrose aged 22 and addicted to heroin and everything else he can put inside him. He is in New York, collecting his father’s ashes. I did not like Bad News that much. Patrick is a mess and so, in a way, is the novel. I wasn’t a huge fan of the American setting. Though we have a few British characters, including Anne and George Watford (a chum of David’s), in general Patrick’s associates are fellow sufferers of addiction. The whole novel is rather unpleasant to read as a result. Edward St Aubyn himself had a heroin addiction, and I do not doubt the veracity of his descriptions. But still, it brings me no pleasure to read about the intricacies of needlework. Unlike Never Mind, which was funny and sad equally, Bad News is rather too sad to be funny, most of the time.

The addiction is significant, of course. I struggle with addiction myself, though thankfully not to heroin, just as my father and his father struggled with addiction. Addiction is often a way of avoiding something not fully worked out. It is a way of forgetting, even when you don’t want to: “His past seemed to turn to water in his cupped hands and to slip irretrievably through his nervous fingers.” St Aubyn writes well about addiction, it’s just not a subject that he can make particularly funny. And with Patrick’s refusal to think seriously about stopping, and his general early-adult angst and assholery, the novel as a whole was rather frustrating.

Some Hope – Patrick Melrose #3

Some Hope is a much better book, and is perhaps my favourite among the five. Patrick is thirty now, and clean. The central event of the book is a dinner with Princess Margaret at the home of Bridget (now married to George Watford’s son) and subsequent drinks evening. This lets St Aubyn let loose with the full force of his satire, and the novel is really rather funny.

“He moved in a world in which the word ‘charity’, like a beautiful woman shadowed by her jealous husband, was invariably qualified by the words ‘lunch’, ‘committee’, or ‘ball’. ‘Compassion’ nobody had any time for, whereas ‘leniency’ made frequent appearances in the form of complaints about short prison sentences.”

Here the focus is the selfishness, the insularity, the stupidity, of certain members of the British ruling class. Patrick Melrose is now old enough to look with a certain degree of ambivalence on his own people. At the party he meets Anne again, and she apologises for not staying with him on the stairs when he was a child. There is also a moment where Belinda, Bridget’s own daughter, ends up waiting on the stairs and struggling herself, only to have Patrick come and keep her company. Some Hope is a novel where we see development, rather than decline, as we did in Bad News. At one point a girl admits to Patrick that she’s been sleeping with his best friend, hoping to make him jealous. But instead of trying to win her back, Patrick says he’d rather stay friends with his own friend. Suddenly we’re growing up.

Mother’s Milk – Patrick Melrose #4

Mother’s Milk puts us back into decline. Patrick is in his early forties, with two children, Robert and Thomas, an alcohol problem, and a wife, Mary. Patrick has finally got a job as a barrister, though he doesn’t have any money. The novel takes us to Lacoste, where the family home featured in Never Mind is located. Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, is still alive, but she is in a nursing home, having suffered several strokes. Unfortunately for Patrick, Eleanor enjoys trying to make the world a better place, and she has given up the family home for most of the year to be run by a religious foundation seeking out-of-body experiences. Patrick would rather like the house for himself, since it is all that he has to remember his childhood by and is worth not a little money. And so, the novel is in some way a succession crisis between Patrick and the leader of the spiritualists, Seamus.

Patrick’s children and his failed marriage provide some amusement, but I struggled to enjoy the scenes of alcoholism, since I saw a lot of my own father in Patrick at those times. But all of that is to St Aubyn’s credit – he knows his subject matter really well. And unlike in Bad News, he does not present a purely negative, depressing, world. He gives a sense of hope, of progress:

‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Patrick.

‘Oh, no. I don’t drink,’ said Nancy. ‘Didn’t you know? I watched it destroy Daddy’s life. But do help yourself if you want one.’

Patrick imagined one of his children saying, ‘I watched it destroy Daddy’s life.’ He noticed that he was leaning forward in his chair.

‘I might help myself by not having one,’ he said, sinking back and closing his eyes.

At Last – Patrick Melrose #5

At Last is the end – Eleanor has finally kicked the bucket. If in Some Hope Patrick begins to come to terms with his father’s life, in At Last it is his mother whose life he comes to terms with. In spite of her constant charitable endeavours, Eleanor never managed to care for her own son. Not only that, she knew that David was raping him and stood by without intervening, from her own cowardice, or whatever. Early on in Never Mind Nicholas asks: “Is every woman who chooses to live with a difficult man a victim?” And that is the question we have to answer. Patrick is now not drinking, but there is still some final coming-to-terms-with-everything that he has to do. I’m glad that the series ends on a high note, with a novel that is just as funny as its predecessors, while also tying things together.

General Remarks

It is difficult to talk about a series of books in a short blog post, even though the series fits into a single paperback. Some things in The Patrick Melrose Novels are worth emphasising, just in passing. St Aubyn has a fantastic ear for a certain style of speech, one that you occasionally still hear among grandmothers and grandfathers in country houses and castles all over England. Not only that, he knows how to write a great sentence. Most enjoyable of all, he knows how to write a funny sentence. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much while reading a book as I have here. Yet these are also clever books. At their heart is a serious engagement with serious questions about identity, about money and class, and about families .

I do not think that alone these books would be quite so effective as they are bundled together, though. Their focus on a single day makes development difficult unless you read the books one-after-another. And without development, without its possibility, these novels are simply about Patrick Melrose – an asshole who has perhaps deserves our sympathy, but most of the time not necessarily anything more.

Conclusion

I am now twenty-three years old. One foot in the grave, as I have jokingly remarked to a couple of friends. But a good age to read The Patrick Melrose Novels at. The questions which I ask myself, as a member of the British upper (middle) class, as the son and heir to both a glorious tradition and a difficult and sad one, are reflected here with no small urgency. My own generation is the generation of Patrick’s children. We are another step on from his own. The inherited wealth is drying up, the immorality is becoming harder to stomach, and coasting by on connections is a little harder than it once was. But the problems the series identifies, and some of the solutions, remain just as relevant as the monstrous characters who populate its pages, many of whom it seems I know in real life too.

In the end, I can be grateful for what little progress has been made. And I can be grateful that St Aubyn has so wonderfully written of his own slice of the world and its age. One day I hope I will manage to do the same.

The World-Ending Fire – Wendell Berry’s Essays

Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer from Kentucky. He’s in his eighties now, but he still works on his land as he always has done, using horse-drawn tools and old methods. The World-Ending Fire collects his essays, ranging in topic from politics to death, books to the environment. They are all tied together by their focus on localism and attachment to place. Without a real connection to your land you will struggle to live a good life, and you will struggle to live a sustainable life. That is his message, repeated over the course of the book in essay after essay. Slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the simple things. It is a relatively fashionable view now, but Berry has been living it and writing it for over fifty years.

Welcome to Kentucky

Berry has lived in the same place for a long time. When he was young, he did travel about, and even briefly lived in Europe, but all that’s behind him now. He has his home, his community in Kentucky. And for Berry it is the most important place in the world. In The World-Ending Fire he is always praising the ideal of community, where people help each other, tells stories, and share things. And here it is convincing where elsewhere it would surely get on my nerves because Berry actually lives this life. In essays like “The Making of a Marginal Farm” and “Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labour Saving” he really goes into some detail about how it is to live a largely self-sufficient existence. Berry writes with a pencil, only during the daylight hours. One of his most famous essays describes his refusal to buy a computer.

A photo of Wendell Berry standing in front of some solar panels.
The man himself. Solar power is, for Wendell Berry, the ultimate energy source, because it is completely sustainable. And a life is a good life where we leave more than just ashes behind us. Photo by Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This simple life is under threat by the industrialisation of farming, by consumerism, by strip mining and plenty of other things. About half of The World-Ending Fire is diatribes against the unpleasant parts of modernity, and about half a paean to the things modernity seems to be trampling – community, responsibility, and kindness. Many of the essays repeat each other, but I find it hard to ignore the validity of Berry’s message. Below I’ll go over a few of its key points.

Scale and Limits

One of my favourite essays here is “Quantity versus Form”, a short piece originally written for a conference. It tells the story of an old friend of Berry’s who sold her things and went to a nursing home. When they meet there, she is at peace and ready to die. But she then stays alive at the hands of her doctors, and when Berry and she next meet, she is but a shell of her former self. Medicine has kept her alive, but for what? Berry’s target in this piece is not modern medicine, but its application. In the past, he argues, there was an ideal of “a whole or complete life”, whereas now we think only of “a long life”. And these two ideas are incompatible, because they carry with them two different views of the world.

The complete life is one summed up by Lord Nelson’s words at Trafalgar, “Thank God, I have done my duty”. It is a life bounded by duty, by obligations – in other words, connected with others. Nelson perceived his duty, fulfilled it, and was happy to die. He felt no need to experience any more, to see any more. He achieved completeness, and that was enough. Berry points out that though few of us will be admirals, almost all of us will – or should – take part in a community, be part of a family, follow one’s calling, and enjoy things like food and drink and company. If we do all of these things, death need not be something worth fearing, because we can rightly be said to have lived properly and need ask nothing more.

In contrast to this limited life, a life searching after length will always be disappointing. There will always be something to miss out on and therefore a reason to hate death. Berry is not against experiences, but he is against a worldview that does not acknowledge human limitations. When we deprive ourselves of a sense of our limits we encourage a similarly laissez-faire attitude towards the world around us. We start to exploit resources as we try to stave off our inevitable passing. And no amount of resources will be enough, because our deaths will always come. If we choose to limit ourselves, to accept death (I’m pretty sure Berry and Heidegger have a couple of things in common on this point), then life will be much more meaningful. We will be able to give it completion and die satisfied.

Memory

There are different types of knowledge, Berry reminds us in “The Way of Ignorance”, and that which is empirically verifiable is only one of them. Time and again Berry makes us think about memory, and what kind of knowledge that is, and what value it might have. In “Damage”, one of the shorter and better essays, he describes the damage he accidentally causes to his land with a bulldozer. It is a terrible thing, he writes, to directly contribute to the destruction of the natural world. But Berry also finds in the scar left by the bulldozer on the ground a positive element – for it has affected him. So long as he remembers about the damage, he will not repeat it. And as long as he takes part in a community, that knowledge of destruction will be common to all – and destruction will be avoided.  

One of Berry’s keenest laments in The World-Ending Fire is the loss of cultural memory that comes from leaving the communities in which you were born and watching the communities disintegrate. Almost all of us know that strip mining is a dangerous process that destroys the landscape, or that farming by insecticides and computers may not be ultimately the healthiest approach. But without participating in a community where that knowledge is experienced, rather than simply known, we do not feel it in quite the same way. And this lack of feeling, stemming from a kind of ignorance, ultimately leaves a space for tolerance: when we do not witness destruction while getting benefits from it (such as the gold circuitry in our phones), we are liable to forget the destruction or else to accept it. In a community, we have shared knowledge of destruction, and cannot so peacefully accept its results.

Reading and Writing

Berry also laments the loss of reading, which he connects with the rise of television. Again and again in The World-Ending Fire Berry comes back to the classics, because the classics are sustainable – unlike modern technology, they are never superseded. And in the classics Berry finds plenty to support his arguments in these essays. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus illustrates a piece on our fossil fuel consumption, while Milton’s Satan makes us think about human limits. Unlike science, which encourages a belief in limitless progress (because so far it has happened, and all it has cost is the destruction of nature and the climate), literature is by nature bounded. A play is just a play, a poem cannot grow new cantos once its author is dead. But just as Berry thinks a life can be beautiful and valuable while lived within limits through using those limits well, so too can literature.

After all, in hundreds of years we have not run out of sonnets to fit into their assigned fourteen lines. The importance of completion, rather than insatiability, is what Berry takes away from many of the works he quotes. In the past, it seems, writers understood that too much knowledge would lead to our destruction. Berry is not against progress, but he is deeply conservative. He’s concerned about the pace of progress, and I think he’s right when it comes to some of his targets.

A Few Points of Dissent 

The essays of The World-Ending Fire were written over a period of about fifty years, and their order in the book is not chronological (I’m not sure what it is, however). The essays don’t need to be chronological, though, because Berry does not appear to change his mind – but then again, the world he attacks does not change much either. I remember reading his essay “Think Little”, about some faults in the environmental movement in America, and being surprised (and a little depressed) when I finished it to see it was written literally fifty years ago and not more recently. The problem, reading The World-Ending Fire, is more that Berry repeats himself quite a bit. His worldview is wonderful, and he defends it nobly, but in his essays he never seems to develop. It does mean that eventually you get a little tired of him.

I’m also not sure that his solutions are as fully explored as they ought to be, either. I have no problem with Berry using a car while avoiding computers – he knows the limits to his lifestyle. What I do have a problem with is the suggestion that everyone can move into the countryside and start farming. There are too many people in the world now for that to be a sensible or effective solution. I do not know about topsoil or any other specifically ecological problems like strip mining, but I do know that while technology may not be able to save humanity, it’s the only thing that has a chance to save us from ourselves. Just moving to the countryside and adopting an agrarian isn’t a workable solution because nobody, Berry included, can convert enough people to that approach fast enough.

A picture of the Kentucky River, Surrounded by trees.
The Kentucky River. “The Rise” takes us down it, while many other essays in The World-Ending Fire reflect on its decline due to pollution. Photo by Schwaltz, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is a frightening path that we are heading down, and I don’t enjoy being young while going down it. But it’s mildly heartwarming to see (as part of an internship I’m doing) just how the companies of the world are reducing their emissions, and how people really are taking things relatively seriously now. We have destroyed so much, and we will destroy yet more in time, but there is a chance that the likes of carbon capture and storage will give us an opportunity in the future to change for the better. At the moment I don’t think Berry’s “alternative” is a solution that has any chance of solving things. We need time, and technology is the only thing short of a higher power that can buy us it.

Perhaps my greatest disappointment with The World-Ending Fire, though, is just how few essays describing Berry’s own life on his farm are included. To his credit Paul Kingsnorth’s essay choices are mostly well considered, but this omission is in no way minor. It amounts to a grave fault in the book’s structure. We spend three hundred and fifty pages listening to Berry praise his life without really getting a sense of what that life is. How can we trust him without that? The essays that I enjoyed most in The World-Ending Fire were not those that told me how to live, but rather showed me how I could live. “A Few Words for Motherhood” is a beautiful rumination on the beginning of an animal’s life, while the final essay, “The Rise”, uses a narrative of canoeing down the Kentucky River as a way of thinking about pollution and limits.

It is these essays that I will remember and read again, and not those that are purely diatribes.

Conclusion

My criticism of The World-Ending Fire does not mean I did not like it. I would not have read the whole book if I hadn’t found such enjoyment in it. Berry is a wise man, and a kind one. His words and values are things that I hold close to my heart, and I think that others ought to hear what he has to say. I will be picking up this book again, not to find something new, but to find something old. I will flick through it in search of a reminder of who I ought to be and how I ought to live.

“Every man is followed by a shadow which is his death – dark, featureless, and mute. And for every man there is a place where his shadow is clarified and is made his reflection, where his face is mirrored in the ground. He sees his source and his destiny, and they are acceptable to him. He becomes a follower of what pursued him. What hounded his track becomes his companion.”

These are powerful words for an unoriginal idea, but they are words I will carry with me going forward as I try to follow my own calling. Nothing in The World-Ending Fire is original, as Berry freely admits. But original or unoriginal, the knowledge contained in these essays is valuable and not known nearly widely enough. It is a guide to a life that is better, more sustainable, more filled with grace. One day I hope to live it.