Who is on your Top 10 List of Greatest Works of Christian Fiction?

[JamalChristophr]

‘Brideshead Revisited’ is amazing (as is everything that Evelyn Waugh wrote, imo). He was a Catholic convert.

Thanks. *Brideshead Revisited * is on my short list.

 

[Cat]

Thankyou also Cat, maybe I should read Ben Hur, I liked the movie a lot so it seems that spoils the book a bit in a way. Maybe not.

Which of your 5 other recommendations do you think has the most Christian element to it- either directly or indirectly?

Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

But you have to read it keeping in mind the time during which it was written. Today there are blacks and whites who use the term “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative for those blacks who try to “act white” or who play up to white people to get personal gain.

IMO, these blacks or whites who use “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative have not read the book, neither do they understand the impact for the good that this book had on Americans back then. It literally galvanized many white people into becoming active with the abolitionist movement and protesting slavery in the U.S… Even if people are offended by the depiction of blacks in the book, they need to recognize that this book was written before the Civil War and times were different then.

I often wish that this same kind of book could be written about abortion. Some authors have tried, but the results don’t have the same impact on Americans as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had back then.

 

[RonPrice]

REVISITING BRIDESHEAD(Section 1)

Revisiting Brideshead was televised last night.1 I had seen this 11 part series on television back in the 1980s or early 1990s after it first came out in 1981. I had not read the novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by English writer Evelyn Waugh which was first published in 1945. In 2015 I had the pleasure of seeing the 2008 film version.2 I wrote about the TV series and the film after I had retired from my 50 year life-experience as a student and in paid employment, 1949-1999, and after I had seen the series a second time in Australia.

The Flyte family who lived at Brideshead symbolises the English nobility, and Waugh’s marvelously melancholy elegy brings that nobility to life. One reads in the book that Brideshead has “the atmosphere of a better age.” Viewers, millions, enjoy the opulent and aristocratic edge, the glitter and gloss, the grandeur and the glamour of this wealthy family estate, and of a time in our history now quickly dying-out, if not long gone. In this one house, as one reviewer put it, is a fading, a dying, empire; or is it just sublime real estate. For many, in the millennial and generation Z, I can just about hear them clicking on the remote and uttering a now familiar word, a word especially familiar to people like me who retired after more than 30 years in classrooms: borrrring!

There’s room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age, though, room at least for the baby-boomers and for the silent generation among the viewing public, with the glitter and gloss of society now often tarnished beyond repair in our complex 21st century.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:55-12:45, 19 & 20/9/’11, and 2ABCTV, 8/2/'15, 10:05-11:30 pm.

1981 was a bad year in the UK
with 2 & ½ million out of work
and a list of bad news to fill all
those English heads to the top.1

There was nothing like this bit
of escapism from the real world
into a nostalgic, a romanticized
past, homoerotic suggestiveness,
Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 vision.2

I’ll let all you readers find out
what it all meant to Waugh, to
his critics & to modern viewers
whose views are available for us
to see on that new source of info:
the internet, the world-wide-web.3

1 See Wikipedia for all the bad news in 1981.

2 Waugh wrote in the preface to the 1959 edition of the book that he was appalled by his book, and that he found rereading it distasteful. I was only 15 at the time, and had read none of Waugh. I lived in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in love with sport and at least 3 girls. The plot of the book was set in 1943-1944, in the months when I was in utero.

3 I was particularly interested in Waugh’s defence of Catholicism, his critique of secular humanism, and his emphasis on the many forms of conversion that take place in peoples’ lives.

Ron Price
20/9/'11 to 12/2/'15.​

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

Part 1:

In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to a revised edition of the book in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year—I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in the middle of my adolescent baseball and ice-hockey careers. By my 20s my sport-playing days had ended, although I have remained a Baha’i all my life.
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 In the end, this is a common experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike, especially in our troubled-age. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2

Part 2:

Waugh saw this novel, Brideshead Revisited, as his magnum opus but, on reading it later in life, he found what he called its "rhetorical and ornamental language…distasteful."3 Readers with the interest in this film and this novel should surf-about on Wikipedia and other internet sources for all sorts of bits-and-pieces of information and analysis.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh(1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, W.W. Norton & Co., NY., 1987 & 1992, resp., V.2, p.492; and3 Wikipedia.

Go to Section 2 for the rest of this post…Ron Price, Australia

 

[RonPrice]

Brideshead Revisited(Section 2)

Part 3:

Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made, and then
begins the delicious process of
exploring it limitlessly.”1…This
is perhaps the most succinct &
sufficient description of process
in the act of conversions that ever
were written in that 20th century.

Waugh’s own conversion from the
“absurd caricature” of what might
be called ultra-modernity to that
real world of Catholic orthodoxy
was greeted with astonishment by
the literary world and it caused a
sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in
these last 30 years know of this?
I did not until today and, wanting
to know something about how this
television series and film came into
existence in those last twenty-five
years: 1981 to 2007, I learned that
there was much to learn with a little
research and reading, and not even
reading E. Waugh’s book at all…

Part 4:

“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."

Waugh concluded the above press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the “most complete and vital form” of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.

Ron Price
14/7/'11 to 12/2/'15.

 

[RonPrice]

It has been more than 6 months since I was last on this thread. I’ll add another writer of fiction below who was also a Christian.-Ron Price​

SOLUTIONS TO THE RIDDLE

In the summer that my travelling-pioneering life began as a Baha’i, in 1962, C. S. Lewis wrote a preface to what became his last book, The Discarded Image. I had just turned 18 and was about to start my last year of high school. Lewis’ book was an introduction to medieval and renaissance literature. The book was published in 1967 by which time I was living among the Inuit on Baffin Island. Lewis died the year after he wrote that preface. He died on the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy, November 22nd 1963; it was also the same day I re-enrolled in first year university in Canada and took one of the only two courses I ever took in medieval and renaissance history.

C.S. Lewis is best known for his children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia(published 1950-56); he was a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien another writer of children’s works and especially the famous series The Lord of the Rings(published 1954/5). More than 50 years later both Lewis’ and Tolkien’s works are still making it big and even bigger in adaptations to film and TV. This year I am 71 and I recently read that Lewis’ books have sold several hundred million copies and **The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe **has grossed US$750 million worldwide. –Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29/7//'07 to 9/11/'14.

I was playing baseball and not into
reading when your famous Chronicles
were published so long ago. It was too
late when your study of the middle ages
came out in ‘67: the Inuit were occupying
my attention, a first marriage & an illness
that kept me away from fiction books.

Your Christian convictions puzzled me
for there were so few of academic ilk
who took that path to sorting the puzzle
of life on the great journey of existence.

But then, there were even fewer who took
my path as the solution to the riddle of life.
Numbers are never a good guide to truth.

I kept running into your life over the years:
The Screwtape Letters at Teachers’ College,
the film about you in 1993—Shadowlands,
Surprised by Joy in ’74, part of the declining
Christian tradition—one of the few parts I
liked and I wish you well, now, in your
journey to the infinite and its sea of lights.

Ron Price
29/3/'07 to 14/8/'15.

 

[Sugabee43]

I loved The Spear; by Louis de Wohl, about the centurion who was at Jesus’ crucifixion. It was lovely.

Not fiction, but Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, by H.W. Crocker III, was awesome!