the times | Saturday January 1 2022 saturday review 15F
ew of us now send love letters, but
in the Second World War an RAF
Mosquito navigator and would-be
ordinand, John Morris, wrote reg-
ularly to his fiancée. Elsie, 35, was
in Canada. John, 20, was on active service
in Italy. There he fell chastely in love with
a local girl. Most of us would probably keep
quiet about such a matter, but John, with
deep feeling, told Elsie how he had met the
Ingrid Bergman-lookalike Maria and had
seen in her face “the mysterious imprint of
love, wild, impetuous”. John felt that had
he concealed this turmoil from Elsie, she
would have been “hurt more and our love
would have been damaged by a lie”.
At which point, we might suppose, John
and Elsie split. No. When Elsie received
John’s letter in Canada she dropped to her
knees in prayer, numbly repeating the
words “Dear God!” Afterwards she felt an
“inner glory”, albeit amid “strong under-
lying chords of sorrow”. John and Elsie
were married a few months later and Johnbecame a vicar in Longbridge, Battersea
and elsewhere.
This story is told by their son Richard in
Evensong. The book’s title is cryptic. This
is not a simple celebration of Cranmer’s
order of service for evening prayer, which
remains a glory of the Church of England.
It is, rather, three short books in one: a
memoir of a childhood in Anglican par-
sonages after the war; a dilation on the
author’s career as a church archaeologist
and museum administrator; and finally an
account of John and Elsie’s story, which is
done with tender understatement and is all
the more moving for it. Elsewhere, Mor-
ris’s prose can be dense, so packed with
quirky historical diversions that it loses its
flow, but he writes beautifully about his
parents and allows their love letters, which
he discovered after his father’s death, to
speak largely for themselves.
Today’s Church of England is such a
shrivelled cucumber that one becomes
nostalgic reading of the drive and promi-barrel of laughs Newly ordained parsons with Mervyn Stockwood, right, in 1963are informative detours about bell-ringing
and bell-casting, organ-building and
choirs, 16th-century burial practices and a
long account of Morris’s involvement in a
dig at Kellington, North Yorkshire, where
30 years ago the church had to be saved
from subsidence caused by coal-mining.
We learn about the volcanic winter of
AD536-7 and how that enables meteorolo-
gists to date the Battle of Mount Badon, in
which the ancient Britons defeated the
Anglo-Saxons, to the year 493. Morris
writes about the Venerable Bede’s religious
community in Jarrow and Wearmouth,
and the failure of the Bede’s World
museum, which he ran in the 1990s. It
struggled to attract visitors or support.
Morris clearly regrets that our leaders, not
least in today’s Church, are not more
gripped by a sense of the past. Instead of
learning about the history of Christian
belief in these islands — which might con-
nect them to the land and help them to un-
derstand the souls they aim to cure — they
bridle at what they call “heritage fascism”.
Architectural ideologues at Coventry in
the 1940s imposed modernism on that
unlucky city when rebuilding the cathe-
dral after its destruction by the Luftwaffe.
The city’s medieval layout, what remained
of it, was flattened by bulldozers working
to the planning officer’s Le Corbusier prin-
ciples. Morris is too balanced a writer to
make a hot argument out of this and other
atrocities. A dash of polemic would have
made Evensong a more vigorous read, but
there is an elegiac decency to this book. In
its restrained, courtly way it reminds us of
the Christian context to British life that we
are losing with each ahistorical shrug from
our leaders. Perhaps it is time we all sank to
our knees and cried “Dear God!”nence of its clergy in the mid-20th century.
John Morris’s priesthood brought him into
contact with pipe-sucking thrusters such
as Leonard Wilson, bishop of Birmingham
1953-69, who fought in the Great War and
was later tortured by the Japanese after
being captured as bishop of Singapore.
In the great debates about apartheid
and nuclear armament, clergymen such
as Trevor Huddleston and the flamboyant
socialist Anglo-Catholic Mervyn Stock-
wood became national figures. John Mor-
ris operated at a parochial level, but we
gain an idea not only of the energy of the
church at that time, but also of its episcopal
panache. When Stockwood arrived at a
low-key event in flowing purple robes and
ecclesiastical bling, a fellow bishop mur-
mured: “Ah, Mervyn, incognito, I see.”
If such episcopal peacocks seem like
fast-receding history, that suits the book’s
central section, which considers the his-
tory of pre-Norman British Christianity
and its wildly romanticised myths. ThereWhy losing our
religion matters
Quentin Letts enjoys
this gently elegiac
account of a waning
Church of England
Evensong
People, Discoveries and
Reflections on the
Church in England
by Richard MorrisWeidenfeld & Nicolson,
317pp; £25E
REX FEATUREST
he last thing anyone probably
feels like reading is yet another
pandemic novel, not least one
700 pages long and featuring a
future totalitarian America mo-
bilised to fight waves of deadly infections.
Here, in the joyless dystopia depicted in
the final third of Hanya Yanagihara’s new
novel, food and water are rationed and
conversation between acquaintances is
perfunctory, not least because books and
other art have been banished long ago as
part of the state’s all-consuming objective
to fight the viruses. And yet, in a society
that allows little space for individual
thought, people are still capable of love.
The question of whether life is worth
living at any cost, and the capacity to love
under the most inimical of circumstances,
were the two intriguingly contradictory
themes of Yanagihara’s unwieldy 2015 best-
seller A Little Life, about a quartet of male
friends in contemporary New York. To
Paradise has none of that novel’s febrile
violence. It is also almost wantonly strange,
a triptych of stories set in three discreteLiving and loving in the
land of the not so free
CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMESThe author of A Little
Life returns with an
unsettling triple
vision of America,
says Claire Allfree
bulwark against totalitarianism. To Para-
dise is frequently magnificent, thanks to
Yanagihara’s skill at immersing the reader
deep within the emotional world of her
characters, as they face agonising choices
in the name of sexual and filial love. It is
also perversely evasive and unsatisfactory,
its narrative canvas overloaded and at
times frustratingly opaque. As for humour
— forget it: the tone is relentlessly stately
and sombre.
Yet where A Little Life was an unashamed
tear-jerker, To Paradise operates at a quiet-
er and arguably more powerful register. It’s
at its most moving when it shows its many
sympathetic, fully realised characters try-
ing to find paradise, to imagine a better
future, in an America seemingly locked in
a terminal endgame.democratic ideals, but also question whe-
ther American freedom itself is a myth.
What then to make of the novel’s myste-
rious thematic patterning, which includes
the same grand townhouse as the location
for all three books and a recurring interest
in grandfathers as surrogate fathers, and
children who defy their parents’ hopes?
The reframing of characters — all those
Charleses and Davids — and scenarios feel
like a comment on fiction’s endless capa-
city for revision and renewal, especially
powerful in counterpoint to her epic prob-
ing of America as a failed imaginative idea.
What are we, Yanagihara seems to ask,
if we can’t tell stories about each other, and
reimagine new versions of ourselves? Her
tricksy storytelling seems like a defence of
art and the playful imagination as the lastTo Paradise
by Hanya YanagiharaPicador, 720pp; £20Americas yet connected by looping scenar-
ios, motifs and recurring character names,
as if a Paul Auster novel, or a story written
in code, had smuggled its way in under a
Tolstoyesque wealth of social and psycho-
logical detail.
It’s much easier to read than this might
sound. Book One is set in 1893 in the Free
State of New York, a breakaway state
where same-sex love flourishes, but where
black people are denied full citizenship,
and where David, adrift scion of the
wealthy Bingham dynasty, has fallen for
a penniless musician in defiance of his
grandfather, who has arranged for him a
marriage to the older Charles Griffiths.
Book Two is set in Aids-ravaged Man-
hattan in 1993, where a penniless David
Bingham and his older, wealthy boyfriend,
also called Charles Griffiths, are throwing a
party for a dying friend. Book Three hurtles
forwards to 2093 and to the narrator, Char-
lie, a young woman neurologically affected
by a virus. We are also taken through a
series of letters written decades previously
by her grandfather, a third Charles Grif-
fiths, who was a visionary virologist and
advocate for mass quarantine, that describe
the ever more authoritarian policies imple-
mented to combat the growing pandemic.
All three books ask what it means to be
free. And while One and Three stand as
thought experiments in an alternative
US history, taken together they not only
describe an America in retreat from itsHanya Yanagihara is best
known for A Little Life