Book reviews - Reading of Redemption

How to be Good - Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is so good! There is something about how he writes that draws you in like a friend in conversation. It is almost like your eyes glide off the page, the corners off your mouth are always either on the verge of twitching or caught in a full frontal grin and there’s always provocative questions lurking most pleasantly underneath. And he is my age, well just a fraction older, but his heroes on a soccer or musical front are the same and the fact that he deals with both those issues adds to my sense of empathy.

And his first three novels, if Fever Pitch counts as a novel, have made me reflect on serious issues. I mean how on earth could Arsenal have possibly won the league title in the 89th minute of the last game of the season, at Anfield, with Liverpool just needing to last another 90 seconds and the title would have been theirs. Could only happen in a novel – yet it was a true story!!!!! In Hifidelity he basically wrote my life story with a little bit of license. The sad obsession of a music fan led me to question in the depth of my being how I was putting together my compilation tapes!!!! More time and thought required.

About A Boy arrived just before the birth of my first child and made me reconsider the idea of bringing her up as a Bob Dylan fan rather then allowing her to listen to a huge amount of artificial dross before she reached her sixteenth birthday.

How To Be Good has shook me to the core. Just as easy to read, yet very hard to digest; not the story line but the difficult life changing questions he asks. Football and music were one thing but Nick getting involved in that which is most important to me and that which takes up most of the energy of my grey matter when I am not thinking about music or soccer – God and how to live life! It was not a theme I was expecting so naked and raw. Like another forty-something writer Douglas Coupland, Hornby has taken almost sermonising approach on to how communicate. No need to work out his what he is trying to get at!

Two life-provoking stories are told through the voice of narrator, Kate Carr, as Nick takes a leaf out of his mate Roddy Doyle’s book by trying to write through the eyes of a woman. Kate has been with her partner for some twenty-four years and married for a good part of that. A doctor she has come to a time in her life where she is struggling to live comfortably either with her husband or children. If love is a feeling she has lost it. If love is more than a feeling, perhaps an act of will, then she is having to wrestle with how to love.

In the meantime her husband, David, a grumpy, no hoper apart from being able to make people laugh with his cynicism, has a weird spiritual conversion by being healed by DJ Good News who has little belief in the transcendent but has heat in his hands to rid the world of all its ills and sadnesses. Together David and Good News set about trying to work out how to change the world. The problem is that there is nothing corny or far out about their approach. They give away household items to those worse off than themselves. They attempt to put right acts of maliciousness against friends and family. They try to get the other households on their street to take in the homeless and they are attempting to work out how they can encourage the nation to hand over everything they earn above the national average.

In some ways there is nothing that this quirky odd couple scheme up or try to put into practice that would not be in keeping with an attempt to follow Jesus Christ. There is a similar naivety and madness about his teaching and yet it is that teaching that many, including myself, believe to be the only hope of changing the world from selfishness and injustice and poverty and inequality. Hornby allows us to get a glimpse of how difficult it is to change the ways that the world has moulded us into. David’s children have to face the consequences of his actions. Kate knows that there is something right about it but the bizarreness but is struggling with the practicalities. She goes to Church and is frustrated that the Church of England she goes to has compromised on truth when it is truth she needs. She also sees the great draw of born again Christianity because she like she feels everyone else would love a new start.

So what is Hornby saying? He might not even be intending to but he is challenging Christianity at every count. One feels he might be rather cynical about the Christian faith but he has hinted that what we need is truth, a chance to start again and a behavioural code that might put the things that are obviously wrong right. He wrestles with the consequences and hurdles to such. He asks what it might be to be good there are not many Churches dealing with the depth of root of change that Hornby is looking at here.

I ask as I have often in recent years – is God using the mainstream arts to ask the pertinent questions that his Body just are not facing up to. This is a sermon I will be returning to again and again.

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