Reflections on Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

Major Barbara is a play I have enjoyed reading and seeing in performance multiple times.  Having just read it again for my Great Books group, I decided a brief reflection is in order.

This play is the perfect read for thinking Americans today.  If you have ever read works by Shaw, you know that his plays are meant for thinkers; they are not light comedies.  This play includes discussions of morality and its varying definitions, responsibility of the state for its people, morality and religion or perhaps morality versus religion, and finally the crime of poverty.  Poverty is a crime?  Yes, if there is great wealth, there should be no poverty.  It is also about families:  mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, responsibility of fathers to their children.  And it is about love: parental love, couples in love, love for humankind.

If you have never read Shaw, shame on you!  Start with Major Barbara.  Even better...it is in performance at The Shaw Festival this year!

Shaw Festival Link!

More...I will always read more by Christopher Moore.

How does one go about writing a review of any novel by Christopher Moore?  I will begin with a line from The Stupidest Angel:   “The prior Christmas, Mavis’s fruitcake had put two people into detox.  She’d sworn that it would be the last year.  Mavis shrugged. ‘This cake’s nearly a virgin.  There’s only a quart of rum and barely a handful of Vicodin’” (164).  Mavis Sand is the proprietor of the Head of the Slug Saloon, and in Practical Demonkeeping, Christopher Moore’s first novel, I read her background story.  I would love to try her fruitcake.

This novel introduces the setting of Pine Cove, California: a town Moore revisits in other novels including The Stupidest Angel.  The reader meets important citizens such as Augustus Brine, owner of Brine’s Bait Tackle and Fine Wines.  How can you NOT love the world of Christopher Moore?

My first journey into Moore’s hysterically hilarious irreverent world was Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal when it made the Top Ten YA Books List from the American Librarian Association.  Reading his novels, I am guaranteed to be laughing out loud with tears streaming down my face.  After reading The Stupidest Angel for the first time, I knew I must seek out and read everything written by Christopher Moore.

The angel Raziel appears in both Lamb and The Stupidest Angel; Pine Cove is a town the reader will revisit many times.  And demonkeeping is a topic addressed in many of his works.  This novel tells the story of Travis, a man who has spent about 70 years traveling with the demon Catch and is trying to get rid of him – permanently.  I’ll close with a bit of dialogue between these two characters:

            Catch: “You’re trying to be tricky.  What’s morality?” 

Travis: “It’s the difference between what is right and what you can rationalize.” 

Catch: “Must be a human thing.” 

Travis: “Exactly.” (73).

Moore, Christopher. Practical Demonkeeping. New York: Harper, 2004. Print. (Originally published 1992).

---. The Stupidest Angel. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Print.

POST SCRIPT - I also listened to The Photograph by Penelope Lively.  As I do not have a print copy of this book, I am unable to write a review; however, I did enjoy the story.  Decided on this book because I had read The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald several years ago.  Well...when I was at the library looking at the playaways, I thought Lively had written The Bookshop.  LOL  One books leads to another...

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Mishima Yukio

The last of three Japanese novels in my library The Temple of the Golden Pavilion requires giving what some readers may consider a spoiler; however, the storyline should not be the only reason to read a book.  This novel is historical fiction: information included on the cover and discussed in the Introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross:

In 1950, to the distress ad horror of all art-loving and patriotic Japanese, the ancient Zen temple of Kinkakuji in Kyoto was deliberately burned to the ground.  This Golden Pavilion, a rare masterpiece of Buddhist garden architecture, dated back over five hundred years to the days of the great Shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, military leader, aesthete, and powerful patron of the Zen cult. . . So revered was this historic and religious shrine that it enjoyed in Japan the status of a National Treasure.  It was willfully set fire to and destroyed by an unhappy and unbalanced student of Zen Buddhism. (vi)

But this knowledge should not stop anyone from reading The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.  Readers do not refuse to read historical fiction because they know the time period; that is precisely why we read historical fiction.  Readers enjoy reading a story that takes place with familiar markers or markers of interest.  I read this novel knowing it was Mishima’s interpretation of history; he used the incident and built a story around the perpetrator of the crime.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is told from the first person point of view of Mizoguchi, the student.  (This is not the real name of the student who burned down the temple). The novel is a confession and reads with the believability of non-fiction.  Things happen which the reader may or may not be able to connect as important to the story, but that is real life.  Every moment or action in life is not necessarily important, but it is all part of a complete life.  Mizoguchi is faced with situations that are problematic to him; individuals get in the way of his plans, but there is no one clearly taking the role of antagonist.  Mizoguchi is the antagonist in this novel; the temple is the protagonist.  Even as he prepares to set the fire, Mizoguchi contemplates its beauty:

Yet I did not know whether beauty was, on the one hand, identical with the Golden Temple itself or, on the other, consubstantial with the night of nothingness that surrounded the temple.  Perhaps beauty was both these things.  It was both the individual parts and the whole structure, both the Golden Temple and the night that wrapped itself about the Golden Temple.  (254)

A quick Google of the author made more interesting connections.  Mishima Yukio was far right politically.   He was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times, and his political views probably kept this award from him.  He committed ritualistic suicide after his failure to overthrow the Japanese government in 1970. 

My brief foray into Japanese literature has been challenging and rewarding.  Having read a couple of books by Kenzaburo Oe after he was awarded the Nobel in 1994, I will probably return to them for a second reading.  Although I am ready for some lighter reading now, I have greatly enjoyed reading three very different novels, all considered to be classics from the literature of Japan.

Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Translated by Ivan Morris. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1987. Print.