In this book, he isn't so brutal but he is clear, in a storytelling way, of a vision for humanity and life. This looks at some key players in the romantic period on the cusp of the enlightenment, struggling to work out what it means to be human and what is our relationship with God, eternity and the world. It was an interesting experiment that I wasn't wholly on board with but halfway into this book I thought this would have been a great book recommendation for our series at church on being human. Today I think we face the same issues the romantics were facing, with the end of the modern era and the rise of post-Christendom and biological technology again we are faced with what it means to thrive in this world.
The book starts with Klavan's struggle with Jesus and not understanding the sermon on the mount and then via a long excuses through the romantics we return to Klavan's take on Jesus and some of his teachings.
The way the thinkers/poets/storytellers were analysed in this book, was more through the story of their lives rather than a solely analytical study of their art. There was analysis, but a good chunk was more talking about who they were, their relationships with each other, their fallings outs and wrestling with the living. It showed how their work is a byproduct of their life, culture and relationships. In this section, I have two stand-out moments or chapters.
There is a chapter on a famous evening called The Immortal Evening. Haydon hosted a dinner with Wordsworth and Keats, along with Monkhouse and Charles Lamb. Later Kingston turned up. This evening involved struggles with the religious and scientific, with dabbles of art criticism and poetry. The Enlightenment was beginning to do its thing in culture and so the romantic or the artist was trying to make sense of this new world. What was the artist and the poet to make of a change, was the shackles of the past a better thing than what was ahead. There was a discussion of Milton and Voltaire and even a toast to Newton. This chapter shows the great struggle they were facing and so turns to us with our own cultural shift in acknowledging traditional in decline and our new optimistic progressive future, what are we to make of our same moment?
There was another great meeting before this one involving another group of people. This time a group of poets gathered to read a ghost story and decided they could do better. One of the group, Lord Byron declared that they were to each write a scary story. There were four people there, Bryon, Shelly, Polidori and Mary. Two didn't become much, but Polidori took Bryon's and worked on it to make the first full-length vampire story, The Vampyre. Mary took a little longer than the rest but finished her which became Frankenstine. This was the first ever sci-fi and a great success. Klavan then quite cleverly unpacks this story, how Victor Frankenstein usurps God by creating a life without a woman. In fact, in this story, it shows a world where women aren't needed and men become monsters.
The rest of the chapter delves into gender roles and how the Industrial Revolution with all its technology and materialism was made to free up people but all that did was upset the feminine role - along with a critique of monster movies. It looks at the life stories of the poets/scary story writers and shows a complication of affairs and children, some of whom were left motherless due to suicide. Mary also complained of the double standards men had with views of what sexual freedom looks like. This was a great chapter on materialism, and what it means to be male and female. I wasn't expecting all of this in a chapter about Frankenstein, but this alone was the price of the book and well worth a second read.
The last section of the book is looking at Jesus and how we might be able to look at His teachings, perhaps through a romantic lens. Overall Klavan said what most of the commentaries say about the passages he looked at, but he did have his own creative writing flar to it. Once or twice I did think he was a little off the mark of what I thought standard commentaries would say on the text, but he did say upfront that he wasn't an expert in this. He did manage to tie the previous romantic chapters into the Jesus texts that he looked at, so issues of eternity, humanness, male and female, and meaning were looked at and perhaps built upon. To me it did feel like a bit of a gear shift in the book, it perhaps could have been two books, one looking at the romantics and a cultural comparison and one looking at some of the teachings of Jesus. There was some connection, but this was probably the weaker of the sections (but I guess if someone hasn't read a commentary this could have been very interesting to them).
Below I close, I don't really know where to put this line, but I loved it in its simplicity. Klavan says:
Rousseau does indeed say many false things beautifully—that is how you become a famous French philosopher. If German philosophers have the talent of rendering essential truths wholly incomprehensible, their French counterparts have the opposite gift of saying eloquently what has no bearing on reality at all.
I loved that line, as it is true. Klavan writes with style and some depth and humour. This would be a good book to look at for understanding what it means to be human in this world and how those in the past have coped or struggled with shifts in culture.
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