Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.

Just what is a Christian without love?

What with all the soul-searching about paedophile priests and the role of the Pope, I find myself returning to the question of just what Christianity is about.

People have often told me that what matters in Christianity is its spirit rather than the detail of its doctrine. As St Paul told the Corinthians, ‘if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.’ In other words, it doesn't really matter if you've penetrated the mysteries of the Trinity or they've completely defeated you, what matters is the extent to which love inspires your outlook and guides your actions.

The Archive of Melvyn Bragg’s excellent ‘In Our Time’ series on BBC Radio 4 includes an episode about the Fall of Constantinople which I find particularly instructive from this point of view.

It’s easy to think that Christianity is essentially a European religion with Latin as its traditional language. Plenty of books and films conspire to give that impression. In fact, for most of its early history Christianity was predominantly an Asian religion and its main language was Greek. Of the five great patriarchates in the Roman Empire, four were in the then Greek-speaking East: Constantinople was on the border between Europe and Asia, Antioch was in Asia Minor, Jerusalem in the Middle East, and Alexandria, in Egypt, was in North Africa close to the cusp of Asia. Only one patriarchate, Rome, was in the West.

In the seventh century, an extraordinary new wave of conquerors emerged from the Arabian Peninsula, inspired by the new religion of Islam, and swept into Western Asia and across North Africa. They took Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria in swift succession. Only Constantinople held out in the East. When Spain also fell to the Moslems, Western Christendom in turn suffered a major blow.

Faced with such a powerful threat, you’d think the two remaining Patriarchates would see the sense of hanging together to protect each other.

However, Rome was upset that Constantinople wouldn’t accept its primacy within the Church. It made a great deal of an ideological dispute concerning Constantinople’s refusal to follow Rome in adding the words ‘and from the son’ to the end of the Nicene creed, making it read ‘… the holy spirit that proceeds from the Father and from the son’. In the East, the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father alone; in the West from the Father and the Son. This led to great debates about a triangular view or a linear view of the Trinity.

The Trinity as seen by the Church in the East (left) and West.

A difference worth thousands of lives and the loss of the Christian heartland?

Now I’m convinced that the difference between these two views is absolutely vital in some key way that escapes me. However, it strikes me that it’s less important than hanging onto a toehold at the edge of your Continent against a common enemy.

So how did the protagonists behave? The representatives of Rome travelled to Constantinople in 1054 and, having failed to persuade the Patriarch to change his view, formally excommunicated him from the Church.

A great line in one of my favourite films, A few good men, is ‘my client's a moron, that's not against the law.’ What’s more, and this is one of the great arguments against all racism, being a moron isn’t limited to any one race or group or creed, and it’s just as common at the top of great organisations – for instance, among princes of the Church – as anywhere else. So the Eastern Church reacted with exactly the same level of maturity and Christian love as the delegates from Rome, excommunicating them in return.

The subsequent split in Christendom, which came to be known as the Great Schism, has persisted to this day, in the division between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

For the next act in this pursuit of love above all other considerations, fast forward to the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The Crusades were about seizing the former Christian territories from the Moslems. So it’s interesting that the Fourth Crusade attacked the Christian city of Constantinople and sacked it.

It did so primarily at the urging of the Venetians, a great sea power of the time, second in the Eastern Mediterranean only to Constantinople. In case you’re wondering, this was not a coincidence.

The sacking of the City, by fellow Christians, led to the break up of the remains of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire based on Constantinople. By 1453, all that was left of the Empire’s former possessions were the City itself with some of the hinterland and the Southern Peloponnese, in modern-day Greece.

In that year, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II moved against the City, which had resisted siege after siege in the past, including one by the Ottoman Turks 30 years earlier. This time, though, the Turks had brought great guns, built with skill by their Christian subjects in Hungary. With forces estimated at up to 60,000 against 7500 defenders – 3500 of them from Western Christendom, so some people heeded that stuff about love over doctrine – and the advantage of the siege guns, they finally broke Constantinople and captured it, following up with the sacking (raping, killing and looting) which was traditional amongst all Christian, Moslem and other armies at the time. It's probably still traditional today, though you only find out about it when people are moronic enough to take photos of what they’re doing.

The rule of the Ottomans was strengthened and lasted several more centuries. They might have won anyway, but it’s pretty certain that the sacking of 1204 made it inevitable that they would: it left Constantinople without the strength to defend itself against such a threat.

Now, from the point of view of simple humanity, none of this matters very much. I don't suppose that the vast majority of people under Ottoman Turkish rule then, or under republican Turkish rule now, lived much more or less happily than people under other regimes. Obviously, many thousands died and much was destroyed in the fighting, but who’s to say that the Byzantines would not have caused as much death and destruction had they retained their Empire?

It's just ironic from the point of view of Christianity. Of course, the Western Church emerged in full and sole control of the domain still politically controlled by Christendom, producing the Western-European, Latin-based image of Renaissance Christianity that has come down to us today. Overall, however, that domain was massively reduced. In particular, Christians in the old heartland of the religion were reduced to more or less grudgingly tolerated or openly persecuted minorities.

‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal’ said St Paul. He had a point. It’s curious that the people who proclaimed their role as defenders of his message seemed to have had such trouble hearing it.