Book Reviews

Third Reading Summary: Nicholas Darrow is coming of age, attempting to prepare to become a priest and live a normal life. But his life is anything but typical as the child of an elderly former monk. And he has never really learned to control his psychic powers. And with the death of his mother when he was 14, there is no longer anyone that can solve the problems between him and his father.

Magical Paths is the fifth book in the Starbridge series. As is standard for Susan Howatch’s books, she writes about multiple generations with interlocking storylines and perspectives. Nicholas Darrow is the son of Jon Darrow, the narrator from Glamourous Powers. Mystical Paths has the shortest time period of the series, with most of the story playing out over just over a week.

It is 1968, and Nicholas Darrow has quietly become engaged to a young woman he has known his whole life. He has graduated from seminary and will be ordained soon. In the previous book, set in 1963, we know that Nicholas is on the periphery of Venetia’s coturie, as she calls her set of friends. Christian Aysgarth, the oldest son of Stephen Aysgarth and his first wife, Grace. Christian is forty and married with two young children. He had a successful academic career with a professorship at Oxford and a beautiful wife, Katie, the daughter of a Duke. But in 1965, he died mysteriously in a boating accident.

Nicholas, like his father Jon, has psychic powers, and Venetia comes to him to see if he will perform a seance so that Katie can contact Christian to deal with her guilt over his death. Nicholas knows the danger of trying to contact the dead but thinks he can avoid an actual seance and solve Katie’s problems on his own. But, of course, it goes badly because, as a young man in the 1960s, he thinks he is more capable than he is. And he thinks that those older that could help him are all stuck in the past. Both Venetia in Scandalous Risks and Nicholas in Mystical Paths are 23, and that sense of naivete and confidence leads to problems.

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Third Reading Summary: Venetia Flaxton attempts to find meaning in her life and instead finds a disastrous romance. 

One of the significant complaints I have with the Starbridge series is that it is oriented primarily toward clergy healing and restoration without as much attention to the harm that clergy can often cause. Scandalous Risks is both an illustration of that complaint and an exemption to that idea. As I said with my post on Ultimate Prizes, this is part of a single story arc that starts with the earlier book and then mostly plays out to a conclusion in Scandalous Risks, but has threads that continue into Mystical Paths, Absolute Truths, and the spinoff trilogy that starts with Wonder Worker.

In writing about the first three books, I largely stayed away from the details of the plot, but this is a book I think I have to write about the plot. If you do not want to know anything about the plot, you should stop reading here.

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Summary: Controversial radical, but an important figure both in political and legislative history, and in the history of emancipation and reconstruction. 

Many important people are less well-known than they should be. Thaddeus Stevens is one of them. I think the way that many people to do know who he is and have heard of him is because Tommy Lee Jones played him in the movie Lincoln.

Hans Trefousse’s 2005 biography was the first real reevaluation of Stevens in a couple of generations. (Bruce Levine has a new biography published in 2021 that I have not read.) I picked this up on sale at Audible, which may not have been the best format.

One of the problems with the biography of Stevens is that he is a lawyer and legislator. He was known for being effective with parliamentary rules and procedures. And rules and procedures are not scintillating reading. But they are essential to the work of legislating.

Thaddeus Stevens is best known for leading the House during the Civil War and being the leader of what is commonly known as the Radical Republicans during the Reconstruction Era. He strongly favored public education, emancipation before the Civil War, and civil and voting rights after the Civil War. Radical Republicans were both organized to oppose Johnson and to push for stronger federal actions to protect Black citizens across the country and to punish former Confederate officials more strongly.

Stevens believed former Confederates were not US citizens (and therefore not subject to the bill of rights and other protections) but fell under international rules of war as a conquered territory and should be handled with military law, not civil law. This means that he did not think that the legislature should seat anyone from those territories until there were new votes by the legislature to adopt them as states. (Incidentally, Johnson was a senator from Tennessee that remained with the Union and continued to be seated in the Senate after Tennessee joined the Confederacy until Lincoln appointed him as military governor in 1862 before he was elected Vice president. So under Stevens’ understanding, Johnson should have been removed from the Senate when Tennesse withdrew from the Union.) The implication of Stevens’ understanding of citizenship means that the legislature would have been a smaller body with only Northern legislators, which would have changed the requirements for approving legislation, passing the constitutional amendments, vetoes, and impeachment.

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Summary: A working-class boy becomes a high-powered clergyman, but a tragedy brings about a crisis. 

There are three main reoccurring characters in the Starbridge series, Charles Ashworth (the conservative neo-orthodox), Jon Darrow (the mystical anglo-Catholic), and Stephen (Nevill) Aysgarth (the liberal modernist). Ultimate Prizes is the book where Neville, who is renamed in the book to Stephen) is the narrator.

I never really liked Stephen. His pugnacious personality, which Howatch tries to make a positive feature, annoys me. And while I am not an Anglo-Catholic nor a Neo-Orthodox leaning Christian, Aysgarth’s style of liberalism turns me off even more. Part of the problem is that as much as Aysgarth is shown to have real faith and pastoral skills, and no one in the series is portrayed as perfect, Aysgarth responds the least to spiritual direction and his crises.

In the first two books, Charles and Jon are far from perfect, but the changes they make due to their problems make them better at fulfilling their calling. While Stephen seems to get patched up enough to keep going, but just a few years later has another crisis, and then another, and another. In the last book of the series, which I am reading now, Charles, who eventually becomes a bishop, grapples with whether or not he should have worked to end Stephen’s career in the church because he keeps having problems. That last book is, in part, about the role of grace in the Christian life. But I think the series as a whole makes the case that there are reasons that clergy should be defrocked.

I am not going to give away the details, but in Ultimate Prizes, what is a significant crisis in his life moves toward a later, even more significant crisis in part because Stephen continues to drink heavily and take “Scanalous Risks” because his personality is oriented toward working for “Ultimate Prizes.”

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Summary: Jon Darrow, Spiritual Director and mystic, feels called to leave his role as an Anglican monk and return to the world.

I am revisiting the Starbridge series ten years after I first read it. I have some notes about the series in the review of Glittering Images (the first book) that are relevant to Glamorous Powers. However, I am trying to avoid too much of the story as I revisit the series so that anyone that has not read the series can read these posts without significant spoilers.

Jon Darrow is present throughout the series, but it is Glamorous Powers, where he is the narrator and focus of the story. Darrow is the oldest reoccurring character in the series. He was born in 1880. He married fairly young as a Navy chaplain, but as happens throughout the series, his wife dies young. His mother-in-law helps raise the two children, and after WWI, Darrow becomes a prison chaplain, mostly on death row (he is opposed to the death penalty) until his children are raised. Once the children are out of the house, he becomes an Anglican Monk (there are celibate Anglican monks and nuns, many of Darrow’s age were inspired by the Oxford movement’s return to Anglo-Catholicism). Eventually, Darrow rose to become Abbot of the Granchester Abbey, which primarily offers spiritual direction and retreats for clergy and theology students from Cambridge.

From his role as abbot, Darrow has a vision, which he believes is calling him to leave the cloister and return to the world. This book breaks the pattern of crisis and then spiritual direction and instead starts early with spiritual direction. Part of what I appreciate about the series is that there are a variety of spiritual directors. In this case, the spiritual director is the Abbot General of the order, Francis Ingram. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Darrow. Darrow is mystical, aesthetic, and from a lower-class background. Ingram is upper-class, very rational, and enjoys the finer things in life. Ingram helps Darrow explore the vision and whether it is a call from God. It is not ever discussed in these terms, but this is a spiritual direction of discernment.

Darrow does leave the order, and following the path of the series, he gets himself into a mess because of his pride, his background and the false sense of trying to bring about God’s will in the way that Darrow wants it to happen. God redeems his sin and graciously works all things together for good. But Darrow is broken, which allows him to confront his past, upbringing, early marriage, and children in ways he has been unable to do previously.

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Summary: A promising young theology professor is sent to investigate a bishop, leading to a romance, a breakdown, and a recovery. 

A few months short of a decade ago, I brought this book on vacation. It was my 40th birthday, and we had publicly announced that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So we went on our first cruise, and I devoured the first several books in the series. (I bought the following several books on kindle when in port.)

Before reading the series, I had not understood the concept of Spiritual Direction. I may have heard of the words (although, at this point, I am not sure), but it took the fictional portrayal in Glittering Images for the concept to sink in. Glittering Images is melodramatic fiction. There are fundamental weaknesses to this book and the series that are more visible to me now with some distance, but it was transformational. When I came home, I asked around for a spiritual director. I did not find anyone around me to give me a recommendation. So I looked up the directory on Spiritual Direction International (which has changed its name to Spiritual Companions International) and contacted the closest one to me geographically, just a few minutes from my home. (I would recommend this directory at this point.) I am still meeting with him nearly ten years later, although he has moved twice, and for the past five years, we have been doing video conference meetings. I started training to be a spiritual director about four years ago, and I have been working as a spiritual director for several years (very part-time.)

Back to the book, broadly, the series is historical fiction based on the 1930s to the 1960s focusing on Church of England clergy. Most books have a clergyperson in a spiritual and personal crisis, leading to some breakdown. And then the second part of the book is focused on a spiritual director helping to explore the roots of the crisis and work together toward healing. In this book, Charles Ashworth, a theology professor and Cathedral Canon, is sent on a secret investigative mission to preemptively avoid what might become a public disaster.

I am less of a fan of the first part of these books. I don’t like watching people make bad decisions that cause problems for those around them. However, part two draws me to the series, where people explore the psychological and spiritual causes of their problems and seek to heal the relational connections that have been harmed through sin.

Over the past several years, I have investigated trauma and spiritual abuse more intentionally. Unfortunately, the series, written from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, are not as cognizant of trauma and spiritual abuse as I would like. That isn’t to say there is no awareness, but there are problems.

I want to acknowledge some of the problems before moving on. Most of the books center around the sexual sin of the clergy. I think sexual sin, as described in the series, should be disqualifying, not just temporarily (as the books suggest), but permanently because of the harm it causes and the power abuses involved. The books, even as they often complain about too much Freudian pop psychology, have quite a bit of Freudian pop psychology. Third, most of the books have one of three different spiritual directors that have what is termed in the book as “psychic gifts.” These psychic gifts operate as near magic that distracts from how spiritual direction works outside the books in the real world. I think that Howatch is trying to take seriously charismatic and mystical gifts. But while it provides interest for the books, and I appreciate the mystical aspects, the near magic, which is usually presented as a power of the Holy Spirit, is separate from the role of traditional spiritual direction.

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Summary: Spiritual formation is about encountering God, not gaining knowledge. 

It has been about 18 months since I finished my spiritual direction training. That training was an Ignatian program, although we were not trained to give the whole exercises as Trevor Hudson has done. Ignatius’ exercises have plenty of depth for a wide variety of introductions, and I think Hudson’s choice to use Ignatius and Dallas Willard as conversation partners was a good choice.

Good spiritual writing is hard. Not just because it is hard to use human language to describe both mystical realities and an indescribable God but because it is hard to say something “new.” I put new in parenthesis because very little is actually new in spiritual writing. Culture is always changing, and the situations and emphasis are changing. But the rough concepts do not change much. Dallas Willard is helpful but can be a bit dense and hard to understand. Ignatius is distant in time and requires help with translation to a modern context. Trevor Hudson has written a fairly short and readable book about what it means to seek after God and how to do that.

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Summary: Georgie and Darcy are “invited” to spend Christmas with the royal family. 

This past fall, I reread the Inspector Gamache book to prepare for the 18th book in the series. I enjoyed reading the series back to back instead of once a year because I saw subtle connections between the books I missed when I read them a year apart. But the other part is that the Inspector Gamache books have a depth to them that allows for rereading and the quality across the series is high enough that I want to reread them all.

I have continued to read the Royal Spyness series (which I originally started about the same time I started reading the Inspector Gamache series) because it is light cotton candy. A bit of fluff is enjoyable now and then. I read this in print in two days. The books are not long, and they read quickly. But I can’t imagine rereading the whole series or reading more than two or three in a year because they don’t hold my interest well.

I am reading this one more than a year after it was released because I didn’t want to pay full price for a book I will not reread and do not care about that much. The $1.99 I paid was worth it, but I wouldn’t have paid much more because the series has stalled.

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Summary: The movement for Civil Rights prior to the Civil War is an under-told story and one which is important to the context of both the Reconstruction Era and the later Civil Rights movement of the 20th century. 

Until Justice Be Done provided historical context for an era in which I did not have a lot of background. I have studied the Revolutionary War period and the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. Still, my understanding of the history between the Revolution and the Civil War has primarily been through individual biographies, and Until Justice Be Done was helpful. (It was also on the shortlist for finalists for the Pulitizer as well as several other book awards which both confirms what I thought about the writing and verified the quality of the historical work.)

There were five big takeaways for me from the book.

First, the English poor laws were intended to require the care of the poor but were used both in England and the US as a way to keep the poor out of local communities, which turned the original purpose of those laws on its head. I could not help but think of Jesus’ comments about technically following the law but missing the point of the law (Matt 15:4-10, Mark 7: 1-23) when the religious leaders were claiming that they did not have resources help the poor because they had pledged money to God.

“But race was not the only kind of difference that was significant in this society, and many of the racist laws in Ohio and elsewhere were built atop laws designed to address challenges of poverty and dependency. These legal structures dated back to the sixteenth century and the English tradition of managing the poor. Local governments in England had responded to a rising population of mobile poor people and their demands for aid by establishing regulations designed to distinguish between those who belonged in the community and those who did not. The core idea in the English poor-law tradition was that families and communities were obliged to provide for their own dependent poor, but not for transients and strangers.” (p4)

Second, as hinted at in the quote above, skin color (race) was used to permanently mark people as “other.” Even when used appropriately, the poor laws were temporary categories. Ideally, someone who was poor and who was supported by the community could reach an economic status where they were no longer poor. The temporary status as “poor” became a permanent marker even for non-poor racial minorities. (This was primarily applied to Black residents of the US in the late 18th and early 19th century, where the book is concerned. But it was also applied to Native Americans and, to a lesser extent, Chinese on the west coast. Primarily this was about anti-Black racism, but it included others as well when there were other racial categories present.)

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