Fifteen - o - eight, at a stadium in North London

I went to see U2 with family. It was a lifetime ambition, and the reaction from many of the fans on the U2 website (many of whom travel to several of the concerts) was that this was a good place to fulfil it.

I wanted to write a song-by-song reaction, but I also wanted to say something, before the immediacy of the concert had faded, so this is a shorter post than I originally intended.

On the back of books like "Get Up Off Your Knees", I have to say that I was expecting an experience that was more ... well, almost sacramental. It wasn't, though it was thoroughly amazing.

U2's concerts have always trod a subtle path, as illustrated in an interview Bono did with a Chicago newspaper in 2001. They make the case for the new album, as is proper - there were seven tracks from "No Line on the Horizon" on Saturday. But also, they have a selection of songs that become the heart of the concert - that pretty much define U2 not just musically but in terms of their political voice. This selection gradually shifts over time - "Bullet the Blue Sky" didn't feature on Saturday. And on top of that, they have a huge repertoire of amazing songs to draw on to fill out the programme.

In the case for the new album, we had "Breathe", "No line", "Boots" and "Magnificent" as the first four songs. "Unknown caller", a psalm with chorus responses from a divine voice, projected the divine words so that the congregation - I mean audience - was singing them back to the band. The remixed version of "Go Crazy" is, in my opinion, unusually better than the album version - it is loud and ... well, crazy. And the band signed off the last encore with "Moment of Surrender".

The tracks that every audience expects to hear are, I think, "Beautiful Day", probably "Until the End of the World" and "City of Blinding Lights", "Vertigo", "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", "Pride", "Where the Streets have no name" and "One". "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" picked up as a reference point the post-election riots in Iran - how long must we sing this song indeed! And they miscued at the end! Afterwards, the band grinned sheepishly at one another. "Walk on" was a fairly inevitable addition, given the presence of Aun Sang Suu Kyi in the news at the moment.

And then the choice of extras. "New Years Day", "Still haven't found" - with first verse sung by the audience - "Far away, so close", "Bad", "With or without you" are all popular live. We also had "Unforgettable Fire", "Sleep Tonight" as an intro to "Walk On" and "Ultraviolet". There was almost nothing I would have swapped away from the programme, although personally I feel "Pride" is a little worn out. In terms of additions? I was surprised that "Stand Up Comedy" from the new album didn't feature - it made the tour tee-shirts. "Stuck in a moment" is a song that happens to mean a lot to the family, but hey, there were quite a lot of other people who would have had opinions too!

This was an amazing evening out, and I'm looking forward to doing it again!

"God's Philosophers" - more personal reaction

Aside from writing a formal review, I had some more of my own thoughts on James Hannam's book.

From my point of view, one of the specious arguments levelled against Christianity is that it is anti-science, and only under the influence of naturalism - at least methodological - can science make progress. Of course, this is nonsense - not only have materialistic presuppositions consistently failed to prove true or useful (life at its lowest level turned out not to be simple, the earth turned out to be finely tuned for life, the universe turned out not to be infinitely old ... I could go on) but a significant proportion of science has been, and continues to be, done by people within a theistic framework. Arguably, even when the individual scientists deny this, they unwittingly borrow assumptions about the nature of truth from a non-naturalistic epistemology - science simply can't operate with the postmodern assertions about the nature of truth which dominate other disciplines.

The Dark Ages represent a challenge to this, though. It was an era when progress was limited, we were told, as a result of the unopposed authority of the church. Only with the dawn of the Renaissance, with its more humanistic focus, did we even come close to the heights of classical civilisation once again. Hannam's book tells a different story of the Middle Ages, with accessible and enjoyable style, and shows that the world is actually more subtle than received wisdom would have us think.

Also, even more personally, his book ticked boxes relating to my expectations of a good book. I have long had a gripe about people who write books and don't edit them properly. You really ought to be able to get your ideas across in around 350 pages, in my opinion: more than this in a lot of cases is indulging the author at the expense of the reader. Hannam's text comes in at just under this length. In addition, it has an index, a list of names (important when there are so many bit parts in 1000+ years of history), suggestions for further reading, and a huge source list.

One more thing is the interdisciplinary aspect. Hannam's background is science, and he writes understanding the science side of things. But what he has written is historically lively and, as far as I can tell, accurate. Knowledge is too often fragmented, and a more realistic and coherent picture can be obtained when study joins up different areas.

"God's Philosophers", James Hannam

For years, the teaching of history has been criticised in some quarters for being insufficiently broad. It focuses on the cause and effect of specific events - often those of significance to the political inclination of those writing the curriculum, or those where the student can be expected to empathise with the subjects studied. Thus in England, for example, children can expect to learn about the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution and the Cold War, but will often learn little about how the United Kingdom or Europe arrived at their current political shape. But even given a general knowledge of history, some areas are more opaque than others. History, it seems, barely existed in pre-Roman times in the British Isles. For a similar reason perhaps - a relative dearth of written sources - our knowledge of the time from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance tends to be pretty sketchy.

It is easy to conclude that our ignorance of what happened means that nothing of any significance actually did happen. So the "Dark Ages" have come to signify an era of intellectual and cultural stagnation between the Classical era and the Renaissance. This has been fed by writers from later eras - both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment - seeking to portray their own time as the new golden age, in contrast to what went before.

Modern scholarship has detected this bias and ignorance, and has started to evaluate the Middle Ages in a more objective light. James Hannam's book, "God's Philosophers", gathers together stories of the people, ideas and innovations from the time. He shows that, far from being an era in which the culture stood still, key developments took place without which the development of modern science and technology couldn't have been possible. In fact, even the humanistic ideas which shaped the Renaissance have their roots in philosophical/religious work from the Middle Ages.

Hannam highlights developments in many areas - mathematics, timekeeping, optics - as well as more obvious ones, such as the printing press. He shows that earlier progress was acknowledged - or at least apparent - in the work of early modern scientists - Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Brahe, and subsequently Newton.

Indeed, Hannam points out, one of the effects of the Renaissance obsession with Classical culture was to come close to discarding all the progress that had been made in the Mediaeval era, in areas such as maths, science and philosophy. Much writing was virtually lost, only to be rediscovered in some cases centuries later.

The traditional demarcation between the premodern and modern eras - a fairly moveable line, though one which probably hovers around the time of Galileo - is actually too arbitrary. Substantially after the start of the Renaissance, Newton continued to believe in Alchemy; astronomy continued to be driven by astrology; medicine arguably continued to operate using a pretty premodern methodology well into the 18th Century.

Also, the supposed clash of cultures between the church and the forces of rationalism was not nearly as apparent as it is suggested now. Galileo's conflict with the Inquisition, as portrayed by Brecht and regularly replayed, has already been shown elsewhere to not have taken place as a struggle between faith and science. Hannam argues further, highlighting the role of the church in establishing universities as centres of independent thought, granting them a substantial degree of intellectual autonomy. The Inquisition itself, he suggests, was not the ruthless and intolerant secret police organisation we have come to know and love. Instead, it was patient and careful, loath to impose heavy sanctions, and operating using a higher standard of judicial procedure than could be expected in contemporary civil courts.

Hannam's theses aren't new; these ideas of the Middle Ages are increasingly acknowledged by scholars, and Hannam helpfully offers a list of books for further reading, along with a very comprehensive list of source material. His book highlights the difference between careful scholarship and the lazy rehash of received wisdom all too common amongst writers who simply present ideas that fit their presuppositions, with little attention to how substantive they are.

The book is fast paced and well-written. It is very hard to dispute his assertion that the cultural and scientific achievements of the era were significant and far-reaching. Perhaps it would be possible to argue that with the withdrawal of intellectual life to the monasteries and subsequently the universities, life was culturally narrower for the general population than it had been under the Romans. However, with the spread of architecture and the growth of cities, even this seems unlikely. This is a very helpful introduction to the Middle Ages in Europe.

"God's Philosophers" (Icon Books), James Hannam

A new religion

In what we call the developed Western world, we seek redemption and purification from the more extreme forms of our material indulgence: we fill our faces with drugs, drink, bad food and other indulgences, we know it's wrong, and we crave ritualistic protection from the consequences, a public 'transitional ritual' commemorating our return to healthier behavioural norms.

The presentation of these purification diets and rituals has always been a product of their time and place, and now that science is our dominant explanatory framework for the natural and moral world, for right or wrong, it's natural that we should bolt a bastardised pseudoscientific justification onto our redemption. Like so much of the nonsense in bad science, 'detox' pseudoscience isn't something done to us, by venal and exploitative outsiders: it is a cultural product, a recurring theme, and we do it to ourselves.

"Bad Science", p.12, Ben Goldacre

A very interesting book - an important antidote to much of the nonsense that is presented through the media. If your child's school runs "Brain Gym", protest - it is nonsense!! I thought the comments about the "religious" observance of rituals that have no real scientific justification was perceptive.

How Music Works with Howard Goodall

This was an amazing series. It was not made available on DVD or Channel 4 On Demand. However, it is possible to watch the series on YouTube at the moment. Start here.

Ward on "The Last Battle"

That this journey passes through and beyond Saturn means that the new Joviality is even more joyful than before, more meaningful and poignant, more completely diffused with 'tragic splendour'.

A sceptical account of this imaginative journey would configure it quite differently. Lewis's recidivist Joviality would be taken rather as evidence of a refusal to learn from experience, an inability to grow up and to accept thre incorrigible harshness of the world. ... Humphrey Carpenter, in The Inklings, suggests that the boyishness evident in the Chronicles [of Narnia] was only the superficially attractive flip-side of prejudices against modernism, liberalism, and anything that stood opposed to the old-fashioned, conservative world in which Lewis was brought up. Philip Pullman goes further and contends that there is a 'life-hating ideology' at work in Lewis's willingness to massacre his cast at the end of the Narniad. Pullman thinks Lewis should have allowed Peter to 'go on and be a father'. He thinks Lewis was afraid of maturation. ...

... the premises upon which Lewis is arraigned ... are themselves open to challenge, for their allegations about 'immaturity' assume that the more bleak an outlook, the more adult (that is, wise) it must necessarily be.... in an attempt to find a balance, it will be worth recording the subtleties of Lewis's attitude to youth and age, the arguments ge mounted against those who accused him of 'Peter Pantheism,' his asperity toward poets who never got 'beyond the pageant of [their] bleeding heart,' the seriousness with which he regarded mortality and loss, and the donegalitarian requirements of writing a Saturnine story in which death could no more be omitted than war could have been left out of Prince Caspian.

... Too easily, in his view, the writers of his generation assumed that brains splattered upon a wall represented what life was 'really like' and that the consolations of religion were 'really' only a trick of the nerves.

"Planet Narnia", p.209-210, Michael Ward

This is an excellent book. Ward makes a powerful case for an overarching metanarrative for the seven Chronicles of Narnia, and ties them into a Christianity which doesn't isolate itself from culture but absorbs it and shows how humanity can't help but reflect its shaping divinity.

"Is it reasonable to believe in evolution and God?"

To my mind, there is more to this question than the one which framed the previous post - "Can evolutionists believe in God?" In thinking about this question, I am assuming by "God" that we are talking about the God of the Bible, who (if you accept what the Bible says about itself) makes himself known as creator, sovereign and redeemer of this universe.

In a sense, it is reasonable to say that "only a fool doesn't believe in evolution". Evolution happens all around us - organisms adapting to their environment through darwinian processes.

However, the fact that evolution takes place doesn't mean that it is reasonable to claim that darwinian evolution (random mutation, natural selection) has achieved what its proponents claim it achieved. Humans have known about selection, and "directed" evolution for millenia - we call it breeding. The finches on the Galapagos Islands that Darwin studied do develop over time, as changes in climate cause changes in the abundance of different foods for them. In actual fact, if they weren't able to adapt to a changing environment, they would not be well designed - they would likely not have survived as long as they have! But this doesn't prove that finches share a common ancestor with turtles. This observation may simply demonstrate that they were designed to adapt to changing environments. After all, a good human designer will allow their designs to adapt to such changes.

What has happened when evolution is considered is that a presupposition has come into play - the presupposition that there is no designer. The logic is something like this:

Premise: Variation takes place through darwinian processes (observation)
Premise: There is no designer (presupposition)
Conclusion: All life developed through darwinian processes

Note again that the second premise is not a matter of observation. Before the conclusion can be assumed to be true, the second premise has to be justified. Let us say that at least it continues to be a matter for debate.

And in that context, the evidence has fairly consistently proved to fail to support the presupposition. For example, it was assumed by materialists that the universe had always existed - and then it was discovered that the universe did have a "start point". (The name "Big Bang" was given derisively by Hoyle, who disliked the idea intensely from a philosophical point of view). It was assumed that life in its simplest forms would be ... well, simple. And then it was discovered that in actual fact, the simplest forms of life are still incredibly complex. It was assumed that the earth was a fairly insignificant, typical planet. And then it was discovered that the earth is incredibly finely adapted to the presence of complex, intelligent life ("Rare Earth", Ward/Brownlee). I could go on....

None of these facts invalidate a materialist perspective on the evolution of life. However, they do demonstrate that there is no good track record of collecting evidence to support the presumption that there is no designer.

Let's assume, for the moment, that the history of the universe is pretty much as the scientists have concluded - it is around 13.5 thousand million years old; the solar system is around 4.5 thousand million years old; life first appeared around 3.2 thousand million years ago; complex body plans appeared around 530 million years ago. In the context of the appearance of life, there are certain facts about the process which at least at the moment remain unexplained.

- biogenesis - the initial appearance of life - materialists often specifically exclude this issue from consideration when they talk about evolution. Ward and Brownlee ("Rare Earth") argue that it may be common - but the truth is nobody really knows how it happened, or how feasible it is;

- the organisation of eukaryotic cells - animal and plant cells are much larger, more complex and more diverse than bacterial cells, and again, there are only suggestions as to how this crucial evolutionary step took place;

- the organisation of cells into multicellular organisms - this requires differentiation, structure and genetic switching, none of which has the same level of significance in single-celled organisms;

- the Cambrian explosion - the sudden (in geological terms) appearance of almost all modern phyla about 530 million years ago, with little in the way of apparent antecedents;

- the development of complex biochemical systems - whilst the concept of "irreducible complexity" may be disputed, it is certainly the case that systems like flagella, blood clotting, vision and so on are highly intricate, and would tax the ingenuity of human designers. I am sceptical that a "blind watchmaker" would be capable of producing such systems;

- evolutionary transitions between phyla - bear in mind that for the most part even changing the number of chromosomes in an animal can have a drastic effect on its ability to survive: this has to happen over and over again as biodiversity increases;

- the radically different nature of humans, and the consequent achievements of their sapience.

It would be a logical mistake to argue from this that there must be a designer, I think. That would kind of represent a "God of the Gaps" type argument - as the gaps are whittled away by naturalistic explanations regardless of how improbable they are, the materialist would then argue that he or she has done away with the need for God. It would also be a mistake to assume that we might be able to identify a kind of "miracle" taking place at each of these stages - or, for that matter, that if we can identify a possible naturalistic explanation, that "proves" that there is no God.

Instead, think of what we now know about the development of life. Is it unreasonable to believe that there is no sovereign intelligence that has directed this process? Isn't it more unreasonable to believe that all of this should have happened by chance, in a universe that is in fact completely indifferent to human existence?

So I am strongly convinced that, even if a person believes in evolution, this does not mean that they have grounds for discarding belief in God - that belief is neither foolish nor misguided.

"Can evolutionists believe in God?"

The short answer to this question is yes.

There is a spectrum of beliefs about the origins of life and the universe. The belief that everything was created by God in six 24 hour periods in the last 10000 years (Young Earth Creationism) is possibly the most well-known in our churches, but doesn't necessarily date back terribly far in its current incarnation.

Scientists understand the age of the universe is about 13500 million years (MY) old. The age of the solar system (including Earth) is considered to be about 4500 MY. If you accept these as accurate, you may still have a variety of beliefs about the issue of origins. If you exclude the possibility of the divine (which is a presupposition, not something derived from evidence), then you will believe that the presence of the universe is no more than a quantum phenomenon, and life just happens to be present - after all, if it wasn't present, we wouldn't be discussing it, would we? On the other hand, you may believe that the presence of the universe is a consequence of divine action - this implies some level of theism (belief in God). You may believe that God acted in a kind of "miraculous" way on one or more occasions to bring about what we see today - this would, I suppose, be an "Old Earth Creationist" position. Or you may believe that God used "regular" laws of science and physics to bring about what we see today - perhaps that apparently "random" events were controlled by him in some way. This is something like what could be called "theistic evolution" - and is the most obvious way in which you might say an "evolutionist" (defined as somebody who believes that life came about no more than imperceptibly guided by a divine hand) believes in "God" (defined as the God of the Bible). As with many such questions, definition of terms is very important.

Even if you believe that the universe appeared on its own, and life appeared without the involvement of God, you might still believe in God. However, the god that you believe in, not being involved in the creation, would have little resemblance to the God who reveals himself in the Bible.

Perhaps there is another interesting question, which is also relevant - namely, if I believe in the Christian God, what should I make of evolution? But that is for another post ....

"Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

'A New Theory of Biology' was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page. 'The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.' He underlined the words. 'The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St Helena may become necessary.' A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose - well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstances, admissible. He picked up his pen, and under the words 'Not to be published' drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed. 'What fun it would be,' he thought,' if one didn't have to think about happiness!'

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

I hadn't read this book until now. We read "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in school in 1983 - but not this one. I wonder if the reason that it didn't make reading lists was because it was just too subversive - too undermining of the prevailing culture....

"The Independent" rattles a cage

Now don't get me wrong. I like "The Independent" If I had my choice of daily newspapers in the UK, that would be the one. Yes, it is radically philosophically different from me - it is pretty humanist, and I am a Christian. But for the most part, I value its approach.

Not universally, though. This commentary was, in my opinion, a misguided and misinformed contribution to the new-religious/new-atheist "culture wars". There were some things that I agreed with - yes, faith schools do tend to pick up highly motivated children from wealthy families. Yes, I would agree with Hari and Dawkins that there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children" (though I think that approvingly citing Dawkins in any context in a debate about the rightness or wrongness of religion shows the writer's presuppositions). But deep down, I think Mr Hari needs a hug - he evidently hasn't been able to deal with some things that scarred his childhood.

Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray - or pretend to.

Well, I have two children at a state comprehensive school in Surrey, one of the most conservative parts of the country. They simply don't have an act of collective worship every day. Where they do have assemblies, they don't generally have a religious dimension. But forget the fact that this doesn't reflect what is happening today - except in the paranoid fantasies of the new atheists who imagine the arrival of a theocracy next week. I finished O-levels in 1984. By the time I left (again, a state comprehensive), we had stopped singing hymns in assemblies, and any prayers were pretty perfunctory. Again, this was not in a radically left-wing part of Inner London, but in a middle class commuter town in Sussex. A fair number of assemblies had no religious content whatsoever, and they certainly didn't take place daily. I find it hard to believe that Christendom has managed to extend its grasp on the education system at all in the intervening years.

scientist Gregory S Paul

Who is Gregory S Paul, and why haven't I heard of him? I did a little googling. Here's some background on him. And here's some more. Here's the executive summary: Paul's research on religion and society has been debunked. Hari should not be quoting it, let alone leaning on it.

Very few people are, as adults, persuaded of the idea that (say) a Messiah was born to a virgin... You can usually only persuade people of this when they are very young.... if you watch children being taught about religion, you will see most of them instinctively laugh and ask perfectly sensible sceptical questions that are swatted away

So, Mr Hari - are children instinctively sceptical, unlike adults? Or are they easy to persuade, unlike adults? How about you make a decision about which way you want to play this before you write the article?

There is a real debate to be had about the role of religion in public life. But poorly informed, badly researched and unbalanced articles like this one don't contribute to it.

"I caught swine flu on an aeroplane!!!"

No you didn't. Probably.

People's perception, when they sit in aeroplanes, is that it must be unhealthy from an air point of view. But once the engines are running, and particularly once the aeroplane is in the air, you are probably breathing the cleanest air you've breathed outside a clean room. Firstly, all the air in the cabin is replaced every 2-3 minutes. Secondly, the air that is used inflight comes from outside, well above all human pollution. Thirdly, yes, air is recirculated. But the recirculated air is put through a hospital-standard filter, which is effective at removing contaminants even down to the size of viruses. Fourthly, there is little lateral airflow in the cabin - the air normally flows in at the top of the cabin, and is removed at the bottom. So the exhalations from the person behind you aren't sitting in an invisible fug around your head. Incidentally, you may have noticed that the smell from the toilets doesn't spread through the aeroplane. Air from the toilet is often not recirculated, unlike the rest of the air.

"But I caught flu! And I was on the same aeroplane as someone who had it!" Well, the more likely culprit, in my opinion, is the airport you were in beforehand - lots of queueing, sitting in crowded gate areas, probably a much greater diversity of people than were on the aeroplane. That and the fact that travelling is stressful, and stress makes it more likely you will get ill.

Received wisdom...

... is that the growth in sales of bottled water is a bad thing, and shows the ultimate decadence of our society.

It's not that simple, of course - it rarely is.

I drink bottled water at work, now. We are provided with half-litre bottles as required - as much as we can reasonably drink - in addition to tea and coffee. It didn't happen when I started in the job, though we did used to be able to get soft drinks free - orange juice, lemonade, cola. So I now drink bottled water at work instead of soft drinks. I would not be able to take my own tap water into work. Well, not unless it was in a container of less than 100ml. Water is much better for my teeth, and probably cheaper for my employer!

I used to work for an airline which on longhaul flights would provide all passengers with a bottle of water. So the passengers would drink bottled water in preference to more soft drinks and alcohol.

You also see a lot of what I suppose I now ought to call the "younger generation" not drinking tea or coffee, but carrying bottled water around. In restaurants, even fast food places, and at places like Boots where you can get a packed lunch for less than a fiver, bottles of water are one of the options.

So in a lot of cases, it isn't so much the case that people are drinking bottled water instead of tap water. Yes, they could wash up and rebottle their own tap water in some circumstances, it's true, which would be better. However, the fact is that a large proportion of the use of bottled water isn't at the expense of tap water. It's at the expense of soft drinks and beverages which are less healthy than water.

"Bananas hung the way nature intended"

It was one of the reasons for shopping at Morrisons - they displayed a selection of their bananas on hooks. This was a good idea - it meant the fruit was easier to see, and less likely to be bumped around.

However, they weren't hung the way nature intended. Bananas grow upwards.

Larkin on Poetry

Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one's deepest impulse in writing ... is to my mind not 'I must tell everybody about that' (ie responsibility towards other people) but 'I must stop that from being forgotten if I can' (ie responsibility towards subject).

When writing a poem I am trying to construct a verbal device or machine which will, upon reading, render up the emotion I originally experienced to as many people as possible for as long as possible.

Letter to John Shakespeare, quoted in "Telegraph Review", 25/4/2009

Thoughts on "American Gods"

I was encouraged to read "American Gods", by Neil Gaiman, and I thought a blog post to try and gather my thoughts on the book was in order.

If you want a flavour of what it is about, have a look at the Amazon page. I'll try not to include too many spoilers.

The book brought to mind a whole shelf-full of others. The supernatural elements evoked the magical/real worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently", Eoin Colfer - even perhaps Doctor Who! The fluid evocation - homage? pastiche? - of the unseen U.S. reminded me of Garrison Keillor and Bill Bryson. And those were just the connections I was able to make. However, it would be misleading to suggest that this book is simply a cobbling together of other people's ideas. On the contrary, this is a story that these books would aspire to - the plot that succeeds in drawing all these threads together.

However, in my opinion, it comes nervously close to failing. Gaiman is obviously a well-established writer, held in critical high regard. That allows him to make demands on his readers that a new writer would not be able to; but for a new reader (me!) coming to this book, it felt as though it was on the edge of being overblown and indulgent. On top of the main plot about the clash between modern and ancient gods, there is a police procedural "whodunit" here, a collection of essays about the connections between various people from American history and their gods, and a studied gaze at small town America. All of these would have stood up on their own - for all of them to cohabit inside one book brings it close to being a literary orgy. And why is it necessary for literary masterpieces to break the 400 page barrier?!

The main character, Shadow, is indeed a shadow. "I'm not sure you're alive, either. Not really," his dead wife tells him at one point. Shadow does eventually act to demonstrate to himself the fact that he is alive. But even so, he seems somewhat unengaged. (Spoiler alert!) He manages to single-handedly stop the twilight of the gods - but I was left wondering why he would have bothered, really. If at some stage he had had a kind of ultimate existential experience which was motivating him, it didn't really stand out from the other experiences he had along the way. One of the reviewers on the blurb describes the book as "heart-rending". I disagree. It was good enough, but none of the characters, with the possible exception of a young woman called Sam Black Crow - not even Shadow - really engaged me enough to care about them. Certainly this is an excellent book if it is considered within a particular genre - it garnered SF awards, for example. But in absolute terms, I didn't think it was earthshaking.

To come - thoughts on some of the ideas in "American Gods".