Critic Cal

"I promise that I will do my best To do my duty to God; To serve the Queen, To help other people, And to keep the Brownie Guide Law." We'd chant this soporific, semi-circular in front of a melamine toadstool and a formidable middle-aged woman known only by the misleadingly congenial title of 'Brown Owl'. And then we'd dance around the toadstool, singing a song about the propitious time of day to the tune of Big Ben. And then we'd ceremoniously dismantle the toadstool and return its various parts and accoutrement to the cupboard. And then we'd break out into our sixes: Elves, Sprites, Pixies, Fairies, Imps and -- by far the least attractive or agreeable of the legendary supernatural namesakes, and therefore necessarily the one to which I was assigned -- Gnomes. And then we'd get to work devising desperately futile money-making schemes, all with the stated aim of finally, one day, restoring to its former glory our dear Brownie hut, burnt entire

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." ( The Good Soldier ,  Ford Madox Ford ) There's an opening line to draw instinctive protestation, if I ever read one. The world is over-flowing with sadness; we blind ourselves in order to survive. One's own feels no less unbearable for the realisation that it's only the tip of an unthinkable iceberg. For a story to self-advertise as "the saddest" takes some cheek. And yet, having now read to the end of Ford Madox Ford's mini masterpiece, I'm half inclined to say the same myself. The novel charts the miserable disintegration of two couples' marriages and lives. It is written in the most remarkably effective nonlinear, ' unreliable ' narrative, so that the true characters of the people involved, and the actual events, are revealed gradually -- piecemeal and out-of-order and repeatedly revised. The narrator's own understanding and perspective -- and his honesty with himself and with

I struck the board and cried, "no more; I will abroad..." (George Herbert, The Collar   [1]) Or, in my case, I will not  abroad. Like Herbert, desiring to defy his priestly calling, to escape, to flee the life that God has given him which seems to him too burdensome, too wearisome, I don't want to do it anymore. I don't even know what "it" is -- I'm not a priest, I'm not a missionary, I'm not an anything-in-particular; the Bible tells me I'm "his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" ( Ephesians 2 :10). "Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if you do not give up" ( Galatians 6 :9). Well, I'm weary. I'm not even sure I know what giving up looks like, but I know I want to do it. Part of me resents the strength to carry on, because without it I wouldn't have a choice, and without a choice I wouldn't h