This is What I Get for Listening to Women's Hour I Guess

This morning, on Radio 4, Jenny Murry and friends were having a rather heated argument about a school text book (on music, since you asked). There's a campaign to get it banned from being used in schools? Why? It was written by a convicted paedophile.

This sparked a wider debate on whether the private lives of authors or artists should colour our views of them. In the basics of the case in hand, I'd be inclined to suggest that the book in itself commits no crime. To use it in the school where the author was active, and the surrounding region, would be in very poor taste, and likely to cause offence, sure. But the author is not a famous man, and surely in the wider area, the book (which even those calling for the ban said was 'very good') can be used to benefit children? This isn't to mitigate or offset the hurt caused by the author, of course, but should children be denied a useful learning tool? The discussion did not reveal any subliminal messages in the text, so can a book be harmful just because of its (obscure) author?

For me, though, there was one moral issue which could be used against the book - since royalties from sales would go to the author, there is a sound case for arguing that schools should not buy new copies, thus funding a convicted paedophile. I wonder why this was not mentioned?

What do you think, readers? Verily, tis a moral maze.

It's Always the Quiet Ones

Intrigued to learn, from today's Guardian, that famous stoat-resembling football manager Sven Goran-Eriksson owns 150 suits. I suppose a man who effectively received £13,000 a day in unemployment benefits from the FA has little better to do than purchase endless numbers of identical bespoke whistles. Like a northern housewife who just can't give up the tabs, Sven obviously suffered from a serious tailoring problem.

Now this isn't something I can begrudge him; given equal resources, I would do exactly the same I think. Although I can't help but wonder how much more interesting life would be if he branched out a little from his usual blue flannel. A zoot suit would lend a real air of unspoken, mafiosa menace to his half-time team talks, for example. Accessorizing with a cravat could add a sense of louche bravado that has been sorely lacking in Manchester City's play over the past few years.

The article compares Sven to Beau Brummel - this is true, in the sense that both men were rejected by England, and spent their last years as outcasts, living off the kindness of foreign benefactors. Whether Beau Brummel had carnal knowledge of Ulrika Jonsson is not a matter of historical record, but we can only assume that he probably did - another link is formed!

Interestingly, Beau Brummel used to rub his trouser legs with cut glass, to give them that 'worn' look. He also used to wash his boots with champagne, something which the Topman crew have yet to take to heart in the same way.

Thus the Seeds of Our Downfall Are Sown

You know what really fucks me off? Writers who put 'an' in front of words that begin with 'h'. 'An' historical event, is it? I've only noticed this hideous practice creeping into general usage over the past few years, and it needs to be crushed with an iron fist, before we all turn into cheeky cockerney sparrows, talking like Russell Brand.

Five years in a Cornish tin mine. That'd sort these people out.

Christopher Hitchens: God is Not Great

When Hitch first revealed plans to release a diatribe against religious beliefs, the idea was mocked in Private Eye. A spoof of the book ended: ‘This is not written to show that religion is wrong; it is written to show that I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.’ However, while ‘God is Not Great’ cannot be evaluated seriously without referral to Dawkins’s ‘The God Delusion', there is a significant difference in emphasis between the two works.

These differences will tell the reader a great deal about the relative characters of the two writers. Dawkins presents a clear, well-structured and elegant argument, striking at the root of religion, and the implausibility of an omnipotent creator. Hitchens, on the other hand, is wide-ranging and angry, focussing not so much on the existence of otherwise of god, but on his personal hatred of the effects of religion. To sum up the two books, Dawkins’s is the equivalent of a fascinating lecture; Hitchens’s book is the literary equivalent of a drunken rant at closing time.

Obviously, Hitchens is a figure who provokes extreme reactions, from those who laud him as ‘our generation’s Orwell’ to those who loathe his carefully cultivated public persona and deplore his support for American interventionism. For those who dislike Hitchens, ‘God is Not Great’ will provide plenty of grist for the mill. He is very much a figure in his own text, with constant references to sex and drink, and unnecessary sentence constructions (‘a showbiz woman bizarrely known as Madonna’). It must be said, though, that Hitch does show some restraint in the ‘intellectual arrogance’ department. He waits until page 5 to call Dawkins ‘cringemaking’.

Likewise, for fans, Hitchens includes passages on Mother Theresa, the Kurds and Islam which must be the literary equivalent of a touring rock band playing ‘the hits’ early in their show.

Although Hitch states that he has been writing this book ‘all my life’, the early chapters especially are written in the shadow of September 11. His writing occasionally lapses into tabloidese, for example referring to Saddam Hussein’s ‘atrocity weapons’. What exactly is an atrocity weapon? I’m sure there have been atrocities committed with clubs, or bare hands, in human history. I am sure that if ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had ever been found in Iraq, the terminology Hitch employed would have been much more clear.

As you might expect, Hitchens is not as strong as Dawkins when it comes to evolutionary theory, and other scientific detail. The sections in which he cannot avoid dealing with such issues feel rather fumbled. However, when he is on the more comfortable ground of textual criticism, historical analysis and editorialising, the book takes off.

The fact that Hitchens attempts to deal with the effects of religion rather than the central prop (the existence, or otherwise, of god) allows his book to take on a wider range of issues than ‘The God Delusion’. While his views on Islam are fairly predictable, it is interesting to read about atrocities carried out in the name of Buddhism, from the Tamils of Sri Lanka to the Japanese emperor-cult of Hirohito, complete with ‘kamikaze’ suicide bombers.

Possibly the greatest achievement of the book is the way in which Hitchens analyses the lessons totalitarianism learned from religion. After pointing out the Vatican’s collusion with Italian and Spanish fascists, and compromise with National Socialists, Hitch goes on to show that while Russia and China ostensibly rejected the church as a symbol of an oppressive past, the ruling elite learned from the past when it came to dominating their subjects.

Hitchens points out the iconoclastic renderings of Lenin, the creation of ‘relics’ through embalming, the use of ‘sacred texts’ for indoctrination, and most importantly, the persecution of ‘thought-crime’, which had previously been the sole preserve of religion.

Having first read ‘The God Delusion’, it can sometimes be hard to fathom the purpose behind this book. When Hitch gets round to tackling the issue of ‘can morality exist without religion’, you can’t help but think, ‘yes, we know, we’ve already been through this.’ The fact that his book came second does Hitch no favours either – his pamphlet-y style means that his arguments feel less full than those put forward by Dawkins. Furthermore, Dawkins is better equipped to give us a view of the universe in all its magnificence; some passages on the natural world and cosmos in ‘The God Delusion’ are genuinely awe-inspiring, which is not something you can say for ‘God is Not Great’.

Also, I would argue that while Dawkins may not win huge numbers of converts, the angry rantings of Hitchens are likely to prove less persuasive still.

Still, this is not to say that ‘God is Not Great’ is not an entertaining read. Hitchens’s style keeps the book moving on at great pace, and anyone interested in textual analysis of the ‘sacred texts’, and indeed their historical providence will find the mid-section of the book informative and interesting. The anecdotal style also helps to bring several important messages home for the reader.

As I said at the start of this review, the individual readers’ reactions to ‘God is Not Great’ are likely to be coloured by their prior opinion of the author. If you’re the sort of person who will donate to ‘buy Hitchens a drink’ campaigns, then you’ve probably already bought it, read it and loved it. If you’re on the ‘drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay’ side of the argument, then you’ll probably have his pronouncements on American foreign policy niggling away in the back of your mind throughout the book, and you’ll eventually fling it out of the window after the umpteenth reference to sexuality (something of an obsession for our Chris, here).

As a drink-soaked (anti-war) Trot myself, I’m fairly ambivalent about the Hitch. His iconoclastic persona is somewhat ridiculous, but then again some of my best friends are ludicrous iconoclasts. Is ‘God is Not Great’ an essential book? No. Is it well-argued? Yes and no. Is it entertaining, stylish? Yes, very much so.