Book Review: Sea Of Glass

Barry Longyear’s Sea of Glass is one of those rare gems that you tear through, then habitually re-read, until the spine is more creases than cover and you know it inside out. Despite this, you are still unable to quantify precisely why you love it so much.

Published in 1987, and set in a dystopian future that is now the present day, the subjects of overpopulation and the consumption of natural resources are now old and familiar. Despite the age of the book and its themes, the narrative is as fresh today as it was in its infancy. Told from the perspective of Thomas Windom, first as a seven year old, then as an extremely troubled teen, the novel offers a peculiar perspective on the inner workings of a body and mind subjected to far too much, for too young.

On his seventh birthday, Thomas opens the window in his stuffy attic room and, for the first time in his life, sees Sky – a concept he had previously struggled to grasp, yet knew existed. Spotted by a neighbour, and reported to the dreaded ‘men in black’, Thomas is taken to an orphanage for illegal children while his parents are executed. As a ‘redbird’ at the orphanage, Thomas is immediately flung into a world of violence, oddly mixed with the sexual tensions surrounding any group of pre-teens and adolescents living in very close quarters. In his struggles against the ‘blackshit’, Thomas comes to learn more about the world and understand that, due to massive overpopulation, the planet’s inhabitants have essentially split into two, one half dedicated to preventing the destruction of mankind, by strictly limiting population growth, the other allowing nature to take its course. Running in the background is the ominous presence of MAC III, a supercomputer which, by a series of complicated projections and predictions regarding future events, influences the course of developments in an attempt to postpone the inevitable War between the two factions, which MAC III is certain will occur, when the opposing side run out of resources.

Longyear, however, has taken what could have been a simple, albeit engaging plot, and given it endless depth through considerations of psychology, morality, religion, determinism, and fate. Add to this truncated prose that mirror very well the workings of a fractured mind and he has created a narrative that is as timeless as the question at the heart of the novel itself: why?

The Inmate of Rome

But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

— Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)

It’s a relief to be able to call him Joseph.  And it will be a relief once he’s treated just like any other Joseph.  It’s been said before and it will be said again: there’s a Ratzinger-sized space in Rome’s nearest prison cell just waiting to be filled.  The former Bishop of Rome should soon become the Inmate of Rome.

It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise when I discovered recently that the Vatican doesn’t actually have a prison system.  Earthly justice doesn’t seem to apply to the elect, after all.  Not to a man who personally granted the abuser of 200 deaf and dumb children in a Wisconsin school his wish to die without the oh-so-unconscionable spectre of a canonical trial hanging over him.  Not to a man who delayed the defrocking of a convicted child molester for four years, before writing and personally signing a letter asserting that the “good of the Universal Church” and that of the offender had to be considered for longer still – without even a hint of a mention for the trauma of his 11- and 13-year-old victims.  Not even to a man who disseminated the disgusting memo to every single Catholic bishop in 2001 that encouraged – nay, demanded – secrecy and silence with regard to every last case of child molestation and rape under pain of excommunication.  ‘Tackling’ the issue head on was something of a speciality of his, it seems.

In any other walk of life, that man would already be locked up.  And that’s just what he is: a man.  No more, no less.  Vaticanites may reason that elevating him from mere primate to venerable and venerated Primate lifts him above the law, as if a capital letter and a Latin intonation automatically give you special privileges; but strip him of his robes and his cronies, and you’ll soon find out that he’s no different from you or I.

Is this how brittle our values really are?  So brittle that we’re willing to excuse from justice anyone who can persuade us that they’re running a rather important errand for God?  ‘My apologies,’ he says, ‘but I happen to be infallible too.  Fancy that?’  Maybe what we should actually be questioning is the kind of God that would endorse such arrogance, such malevolence, such a sickening brand of despotism.  This is not morality; this is delusion and depravity.

And I, for one, am having none of it.  Think of every single one of the many thousands of victims of child abuse by priests; think of all those cases that Ratzinger could have stopped – and chose not to – as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  Just think.  And then imagine looking into a young child’s eyes and telling them that the man who put the welfare of a 2,000-year-old Church over that of 12 year-old children is likely to go unpunished.

Any decent human being simply couldn’t.

When Ratzinger announced his resignation, he talked about having “repeatedly examined my conscience before God”.  He can say that again, and again – in the jail cell where he belongs.  Apologies and excuses and stage-managed contrition won’t cut it anymore.  The most courageous thing he could do now is to hand himself in.  If the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church can’t subject himself to civil law and emerge unscathed, his 1.2 billion followers have got to question whether his ‘divine’ mission is one they want to be part of.

The Vatican is shaken, no doubt.  An institution that has insisted on being its own judge and jury for so long suddenly finds its carefully sealed totalitarian tinderbox at risk of being prised open.  Reuters recently quoted a Vatican official who commented revealingly that it was “absolutely necessary” for Ratzinger’s future place of residence to be within their jurisdiction.  Otherwise, he might end up as defenceless as the children abused at the hands of Father Keisle or Cardinal Law or Father Hullerman or Father Murphy: “He wouldn’t have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else”.  What more needs to be said of the constipated morality that underpins the Roman Catholic Church?

After Ratzinger’s final disrobing, we mustn’t let ourselves be persuaded that he’s to be handled with care.  There’s no reason for us to respect his rights in a court of law any more or less than the next man.  There never has been.  But now, we can either make it our duty to challenge him and the institution he represents – on behalf of the children whose lives have been blotted by his signature, and on behalf of an entire civilisation whose progress surely relies on unflinching inquiry and scrutiny – or else face being complicit.

For if you look on impassively as Ratzinger slinks off to his very own 4,300-square-foot convent for the rest of his days, you’re like the kid in the playground who’s too timid to stand up for the victims of the mother of all bullies.  Only the stakes are higher this time.  Much higher.

An Interview with Peter Hitchens – Shouting into the Wind

“I didn’t arrange that,” Peter Hitchens blushes.  A stranger has just told him of her appreciation for everything he stands for and, for once, he’s been caught off guard, disarmed by praise.  The stone wall of rhetoric, dogmatic conviction and obduracy against which I’ve been fighting an attritional struggle for the past hour is felled in an instant.  And I can’t help feeling relieved.

We’re in Starbucks showing our solidarity with their tax avoidance – well, Hitchens is.  “I’m a very bad interviewer,” he opens, slipping into the rich baritone of the ‘Hitchens’ voice that so melodiously beguiles and bewitches, “partly because I’m usually more interested in myself than the other person.”  And he has reason to be.  After all, Peter Hitchens is a hell of a lot more interesting than most other people; I’ll give him that.  Columnist and blogger for The Mail on Sunday, author of five books on drugs and God, crime and politics, reporter from more countries than you can count on two hands – it’s a CV that would dwarf most.

But, if you’ll believe him, no one’s taking him seriously.  Never mind, though: the fact that they aren’t will hardly matter soon enough.  Indeed, the world as we know it is preparing for its final curtain call.  This is the end of civilisation according to Peter Hitchens.

Characteristically, Hitchens has been one of the more outspoken commentators on the recent Sandy Hook massacre that has reignited the debate on gun laws in the US.  “People don’t think about anything most of the time,” he notes about the arguments against gun ownership in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “It’s just intellectually moronic to close your mind to the possibility that something other than guns are at issue.”  He’s thought, he’s decided, and I’m not about to change his mind: “I’m bored by this subject.  If someone produced a gun in here I’d be as scared as the next man – probably more so because I’ve seen what happens when a bullet passes through a human body.  It’s not nice, I’m not in favour of it.”

Hitchens rests his arm over the railing next to our table, as he attempts to deconstruct the myths of gun control.  To him, the reasoning is unsound.  Indeed, until 1920, he maintains, the UK’s very own gun laws “were so lax they made Texas look effeminate.”  And what about the rarely reported knife massacres in China?  Guns aren’t the only things capable of causing havoc, he argues.  “This problem of increasingly frequent gun massacres is new,” Hitchens goes on, “It’s not something that’s been going on during the entire period that the United States has had relaxed gun laws.  In fact, its gun laws have become increasingly restrictive over the past 30 or 40 years.”  His tone is such that it almost caresses me into submission.  Almost.  But I’m not convinced.  Fifteen of the 25 biggest mass shootings worldwide in the last half-century have taken place in the US, a country with double the number of guns per person compared with somewhere like Yemen.  Hardly coincidental, I might suggest.

“It’s theoretically arguable that the existence of law-abiding gun owners in places where people start shooting provides some protection,” Hitchens digresses as I inwardly cringe, noticing the tell-tale signs of the strand of thought with which he’s aligning himself – the NRA honchos and their ‘more guns, fewer shootings’ claptrap.  For someone who prides himself on logic being his weapon of choice, this doesn’t seem awfully logical to me.  “Take the Anders Breivik incident,” he explains, “Had there been anybody on that island in possession of a legally owned gun, a law-abiding sane person, they could have dropped him from 300 paces, and that would have been the end of that.  Good thing, no?”  Well, yes… provided that you haven’t taken into account how many more Anders Breiviks might crop up if guns were readily available.

Yet still his claim is that the problem lies elsewhere: “It’s a case of the old saying,” he recalls, “‘When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.’”  Focusing on guns is a lame distraction.  In the world according to Hitchens, we’d bite the bullet and scrutinise “a scandal as big as thalidomide” much more closely.  Most of these shootings, he’s convinced, have involved anti-depressants or illegal drugs (and sometimes both).  However, “the reason we don’t look there is because it’s fashionable to be against guns and it’s fashionable to be in favour of anti-depressants and marijuana.”  Hitchens takes a gulp of his coffee and shakes his head irately: “Fashion shouldn’t govern thought.”  I couldn’t agree more – but contrariness is fashionable too, I think to myself.

“The anti-depressant scandal is so huge,” and he’s cross with the failure of his trade to report it.  Hitchens carefully explains to me that it’s a “known fact” that the pills induce “suicidality, a tendency to feel suicidal,” but that nobody seems to care: “If people were constantly dying of a physical disease after having taken a pill that was supposed to cure them, the suspicion would be thrown on the efficacy of that pill.” But self-interest shuts the door to examination – on the part of “an awful lot of people in the media” who are taking these drugs, the “huge number of doctors” who prescribe them “out of laziness and a desire to get rid of patients,” and the pharmaceutical companies whose profits keep on soaring.

Hitchens fidgets in his chair slightly, before candidly admitting: “My engagement with the argument about drugs is purely to point out that everybody is talking balls.  I don’t have the slightest illusion that anything I say is going to make a difference.”  It’s the first sign of Hitchens’ distaste for the modern world – and its distaste for him.  “It’s coming, it will come,” he prophesies, “If you’ve read Brave New World, soma [the hallucinogenic consumed ubiquitously in Huxley’s novel] is on its way.”  Illegal drugs, according to Hitchens, have been systematically decriminalised in recent decades by the UK.  He rubbishes my suggestion that Portugal has seen notable successes since decriminalising possession of all drugs in 2001, regarding the Cato Institute’s conclusions as self-serving: “The evidence is that they had an agenda.  Besides, Portugal hasn’t decriminalised to anything like the extent that Britain has,” he explains, swooping up his coffee mug and leaning back once more.

Regulation of the drug market is a cowardly kowtow to the “stupid people that take them,” Hitchens believes.  But what about the tens of thousands of preventable deaths in Mexico, or the Taliban-swelling destruction of Afghanistan’s poppy fields (the only crop that yields its farmers any sort of livelihood)?  “Well, they’re caused by the selfish cretins who encourage the trade.  They’re on their conscience.”  He disputes the idea that decriminalisation would, in one fell swoop, eradicate (or at the very least, significantly reduce) the nefarious effects of just these two examples.  The way I see it, prohibition has been ineffective – it’s changed nothing but the girth of the criminal underbelly.  Peter Hitchens has no time for such arguments, though – indeed, his writings deny the very existence of a policy of ‘prohibition’ in the UK – and he’s not afraid to show his impatience with them: “Oh it’s pathetic, sub-intellectual drivel!  Any thinking person would easily see through it if they were given half a chance, but it’s fed to them as truth,” he complains.

Lazy thinking is a bugbear of Hitchens’, not least when it comes to God.  Which is why I’m a touch surprised that he appears jaded by the conversation when I bring it up: “I’m reduced to repeating things I’ve said over and over again,” he sighs, “It’s a matter of saying that either this is a created universe, and it is therefore the product of a mind in which we live and move and have a purpose that is discoverable, or it’s a meaningless chaos in which nothing we do has any significance.”  Life without faith, for him, is necessarily devoid of meaning and happiness: “You live, you die, it’s over.  There’s no justice, there’s no hope, those who are dead are gone and we have no souls.  Why would you want that?”  The trouble is that Hitchens’ argument smacks of teleology, even though it’s dressed up as rationalism – he wants there to be a meaning, a narrative he can follow with his finger down a page, a universal and unalterable understanding that is discoverable.  Therefore God exists.  Persuaded?

Above all, what religion gives Peter Hitchens is justice and morality.  “I don’t care whether you need him or not,” he expounds in pugnacious style, “Human justice, as we know, is a completely fallible thing.  Yet we all desire justice – I bet you do.  If it isn’t happening in the temporal sphere, there’s only one sphere in which it can take place: the eternal.”  Hitchens believes that a world without religion would substitute morals for ethics.  And we’d be poorer for it: “Ethical codes change all the time.  What’s more, they usually change to suit powerful people who need them to.  But God does not change; justice does not alter.”  My mind wanders momentarily, and I wonder whether he would agree that Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings – on which Hitchens’ Anglicanism was founded – constituted precisely the kind of change to the Church’s morality (at the behest of a very powerful person indeed) that he’s disparaging in the secular world.

There’s no doubt in his mind, though, that the Church of England is in decline.  According to census figures, the percentage of UK citizens classifying themselves as Christian nosedived by 12.4 per cent between 2001 and 2011.  “Christianity has more or less talked itself out of existence,” Hitchens acknowledges, “It lacks confidence and in many cases is espoused and headed by people who don’t really believe in it anyway.” It’s a depressing indictment of his own dearly held faith.  “This will be an Islamic country in 60 or 70 years’ time, I think,” he continues, resting his hands lightly on the table, “When the fundamental religions of modern life – namely, uninterrupted economic growth and an endlessly expanding welfare state – have proved to be false, which they are doing as we speak, there will be a religious revival in the Western countries and Islam is very well placed to take advantage of it.”

A distinct sense of resignation penetrates nearly everything Hitchens says.  He appears to see himself as a modern-day Cassandra, shouting truth into the wind whilst everybody else’s back is turned.  There’s a certain earnestness in his voice when he laments that he has “absolutely no influence over the politics of this country.  Maybe you do,” he offers.  “The existing political system is incredibly intolerant of dissent.  And it keeps me out,” he notes as though he’s living in 1984, but still he keeps fighting his corner, “I’m treated as a sort of licensed lunatic.  Nobody reads my books; nobody listens to anything I say.  All I can say is that I’ve tried.”

And just when I think we’ve reached the nadir of this conversation, he hits back with a sucker punch: “The jig is up, the country’s finished, Western civilisation’s over.  It’ll be the Chinese writing the history of this place.”  His advice?  Emigrate: “If I were you, I’d leave tomorrow.  But I’m too old, I couldn’t make a living abroad now.  I’m stuck.”  He tells me how he’d board the first plane to Canada, because “it’s a sensible, well-governed place and its people have a good sense of humour.”  But that does nothing to take away the sour taste of his doom and gloom end of days story.  “We’re watching the end of an ancient and once rather wonderful civilisation,” he meditates wistfully, “You’re watching the end of it.  It’s how these things go – neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with the country sinking giggling into the sea.”

At length, we get up to leave.  Maybe it was something in the coffee, but I felt sure I’d walked into Starbucks feeling about five feet taller than I did now.  We shake hands, and I watch as he flings a scarf over his shoulder and strolls back to another day at the office, another day in the world of Peter Hitchens.  It’s all well and good, but the trouble is that I’m not quite sure the world that Hitchens thinks he lives in really exists.  At least, I hope it doesn’t.