Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday August 29, 2010
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THE TENTH PARALLEL: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Eliza Griswold
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0-374-27318-7
317 pages
$27
Reviewed by Michael Mewshaw
Several hundred miles north of the equator, a lengthy portion of the tenth parallel forms what Eliza Griswold calls a "faith- based fault line" along which Islam and Christianity intersect and often clash in bloody spasms of violence. Starting in 2003, during the Bush administration's global war on terror, Griswold traveled extensively in this area, reporting on conflicts and tense truces in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Although many of these events might be described as religious wars, Griswold takes pains to point out that they are also struggles for local political and economic control, as well as geopolitical grabs for emerging markets and resources, especially oil.
An American poet and experienced journalist, the author brings to her book a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of place. By her own admission, she also brings personal baggage. As the daughter of Frank Griswold, the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, she grew up a preacher's kid, deeply steeped in Christian traditions and at home with evangelicals and international proselytizers such as Billy Graham's son Franklin. But she has done her homework on Islam, and as a young woman traveling alone, she appears to have encountered no obstacles in Muslim countries that she couldn't overcome.
Admirably evenhanded, she recounts the excesses of fundamentalism on both sides. For readers more accustomed to hearing about Islamic inflexibility, she recalls the callous myopia of Christianity. "Dr. Richard Furman, the head of the World Medical Mission, the medical arm of (Franklin) Graham's organization, told me that in one of the Samaritan's Purse's African hospitals, the doctors will draw a plus or minus sign on a patient's chart to indicate whether he is an evangelical Christian. If not, his operation may be postponed until someone shares the Gospel with him lest he die without an opportunity for salvation."
With no self-congratulatory New Journalistic posturing, she visits some of the riskiest places on the planet and tracks down terrorists, warlords, renegade priests and aspiring Christian martyrs. Like any ambitious reporter, she's not reluctant to take advantage of official press conferences in Khartoum or an NGO helicopter into otherwise inaccessible Mogadishu. What's extraordinary, however, is her persistence in leaving the beaten path to interview the American son of a Somali warlord or a U.S. missionary who survived a Muslim kidnapping that killed her husband or a repentant terrorist responsible for dozens of deaths in Malaysia.
But unfortunately, the sheer surfeit of names, places, dates and historical data sometimes threatens to swamp the narrative, and Griswold has the same trouble as the reader holding so much information in mind. Early on, Anglican archbishop Benjamin Kwashi says, "God has moved his work to Africa." Later, Griswold recycles the quote. When Franklin Graham meets Sudan's President Bashir, she describes the palace grounds where "Charles 'Chinese' Gordon was murdered by the jihadis." Two pages later, she repeats herself. On four occasions she writes that Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population. Three times in 10 pages, she refers to the island of Mindanao as the main home of Muslims in the Philippines. On countless occasions she notes that most Muslims in northern Africa are Sufis.
The reason for this repetitiveness would appear to be that "The Tenth Parallel" draws heavily on articles published over several years in newspapers and magazines. When they were stitched together into a book, extraneous material somehow escaped the copy editor's blue pencil and has left lumpy seams.
More crucially, it escaped someone's attention that Griswold repeats herself in structuring scenes. The result is a pattern of interviews with "the most notorious member of Balik Islam" or "the most powerful commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front" or the Pope of Terrorism, Hassan Al-Turabi, "the architect of the most violent jihad of modern times." After building expectations, the author often rushes through the actual encounter without producing anything meaningful. It's understandable how she might be grateful just to get in and get out of so many menacing situations alive; no one can fault her courage. But the cruel truth of journalism is that an interview that doesn't advance the story needs to be omitted.
Still, Griswold deserves credit for going where so few dare to venture. In a sense, like the best Christian missionaries, she serves as a witness in both meanings of the word, showing readers and people on the ground something valuable about women, whites and Americans.
Michael Mewshaw is the author of 11 novels and eight books of nonfiction, most recently, "Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Journey Across North Africa."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE NOVEL: An Alternative History Beginnings to 1600
Steven Moore
Continuum
ISBN 978 1 4411 7704 9
698 pages
$39.95
Reviewed by Alberto Manguel
We tell stories to know the world. Stories teach us who we are and where we are. They allow us to ask why and to imagine ourselves as someone or somewhere else. Readers can bring to life the world that another person, perhaps centuries and oceans away, has put into words for them and make it their own. Every reader becomes a wanderer like Ulysses, a lost adolescent like Holden Caulfield, a murderer like Raskolnikov, a seducer-victim like Lolita, a justice-seeker like Don Quixote. Through the ages this distinctly human impulse to inhabit an imaginary world has taken on many forms before becoming what is known today as the modern novel.
Steven Moore, a former managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, has attempted to trace the roots of the modern novel to the first stories told around campfires in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Moore's survey is splendidly comprehensive and shows a true passion for his subject. Ranging from those early ancestors to the classics of Asian fiction, from the love stories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the philosophical fables of the Enlightenment, and well into our time, the book displays Moore's impressive knowledge of the world of make-believe. Not only does he explore the delightful intricacies of such classics as Apuleius' "The Golden Ass" and the Sanskrit Panchatantra, but he guides us through the adventures of early Egyptian heroes (from which Agatha Christie, among others, drew inspiration), the love tribulations of the Greeks, the colossal enterprises of Indian demigods and the vast family sagas of Japan and China. The Arthurian legend, the Scandinavian epics and the picaresque tales of medieval Europe are also subjects of his keen analysis.
Moore makes deft connections between past and present, too. For instance, he tracks the lineage of a genre he calls "tranny classics" -- a group that includes Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckenbridge" -- back to a late 11th-century anonymous Japanese novel "The Changelings," a book whose gender-crossing protagonists seemed scandalous to generations of readers well into the 19th century.
As astute and thorough as this book is, however, it is based on a tenuous premise: That "the standard history of the novel" states that the form "was born in 18th-century England." This is not quite fair: A whole library of histories of the novel has traced the genre's origins to the same ancient sources that Moore discusses. Margaret Anne Doody's "The True History of the Novel" (1996) is perhaps the best known, but in the 1930s, Dorothy L. Sayers was tracking the detective novel back to the Bible and the Greeks. In the 1890s, Spanish scholars searched for models of Don Quixote in ancient tales such as the Alexander Romance and the Kalilah and Dimnah story cycle.
Though it is true that the word "novel" did not come into common use in Europe until the 18th century, the thing itself thrived under many other names in the literatures of almost every country. When in the early 16th century the tag "novel" began to be used in English to describe a certain kind of narrative (a short history first and an extended tale afterwards), the split between fiction and reality became so ingrained in the collective psyche that less than two centuries later, in 1726, when Jonathan Swift published "Gulliver's Travels" as a "true account," a certain Irish bishop observed that "the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it." For the Irish bishop, a book had to be fiction or nonfiction: It could not be both.
Leaving aside the question of originality, Moore tells his story with erudition and wit, and in doing so restores to the reader of good fiction confidence in the craft. Ultimately, Moore's book is less a genealogical history of the novel than a reader's treasure trove. It is also a celebration of challenging novels such as "Finnegans Wake" and "The Death of Virgil." These books, Moore points out, "are admittedly not for everyone" (and he could add to the list the remote classics enshrined in the libraries of archeologist-scholars); "but they are for some of us." Exactly.
Reading, in the deepest, most difficult, ultimately satisfying sense is, and always was, the craft of an elite, but, in spite of what demagogues and anti-intellectuals would have us believe, an elite to which almost anyone can choose to belong.
Alberto Manguel is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, "A Reader on Reading."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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