Master Georgie
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
phy obviously has a real desire to come to terms with this impossible, demanding, impelling, and aggressively tricky text. The writer wants to know, he wants to engage, he wants me, the...
...It works very quickly in its 192 pages, demanding close attention and not yielding the pleasures of uncomplicated identification with its characters...
...Each chapter moves toward the exposure of one of these plates and the production of the captioned picture...
...Among her more recent books is Angel Matter: The Collected Stories (Henry Holt...
...23.95 paper r,~ THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS I ' ( ) I'~c>\ lxc2 II,tliil~JUl/ kh,ti~,i/ Ihtltlili~,~,' \ I I ) _~f_~]l i ! , ~ : i ~ , ' , ' ' ' - Commonweal 2 7 November 6, 1998...
...Perhaps "not in the United States" is the answer, but from a European standpoint that seems interesting in itself...
...Daniel M. Murtaugh is associate professor of English and director of writing programs at Florida Atlantic University...
...19.95 paper The Word Has Been Abroad A Guide Through Balthasar's Aesthetics AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P...
...John Saward 178 pp...
...He is very clear that the Bible constitutes an unusually "open" text: It can be read in a very great number of ways, as well as approached through a great number of methods...
...We have a lot to thank Cullen Murphy for here...
...It is not an ingratiating one on the first reading...
...While literary theory would now insist that there are multiple readings for any text, this is both more true and more obvious of the Bible (because of the long period over which it was constructed in its present form, because it has been a key text for three different, and frequently contesting religions, because it is not clearly genre-coded, and for other reasons...
...three days ago over two hundred cavalry horses of the Light Brigade stampeded into the camp, their riders having perished in a charge along the north valley...
...Her colonel and she "talk for hours at a stretch," her friend tells Myrtle...
...24.95 paper Christianity and European Culture Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson GERALD d. RUSSELLO, EDITOR "A marvelous introduction to the thought of an unjustly neglected twentieth-century giant.'--Robert Royal 262 pp...
...Sara Maitland is a novelist and theologian...
...All I'd ever wanted, as regards Myrtle, was the recognition that she and I were of a kind, seeing that fate had tumbled the two of us into Master Georgie's path...
...WORTH READING TWICE Daniel M. Murtaugh eryl Bainbridge's Master Georg/e pursues the interests and, to some extent, the methods of her two previous historical novels, The Birthday Boys (1995) and Every Man for Himself (1996...
...He buys at auction a "mare so shocked by its recent subjection to bombardment as to have passed beyond nervousness into a state bordering on imbecility, and therefore manageable...
...The debilitated Dr...
...24.95 paper On the Lord's Appearing An Essay on Prayer and Tradition JONATHAN ROBINSON 236 pp./$19.95 paper I hope I have conveyed that this is a very rich novel...
...December~368 pp./Illus./$34.95 cloth Controversial Concordats The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler FRANK d. COPPA, EDITOR An intriguing survey of the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church with three dictatorial figures...
...But this incompetence was the felix culpa that gave a premise to heroism and models for England's young men...
...Pompey Jones, a child of the streets who learns photography from him...
...An illuminating study Of the theological content of Balthasar's monumental work, The Glory of the Lord...
...Scott's expedition failed, after all, because it lacked the prosaic professionalism of the Norwegian team that reached the Pole with no casualties...
...Hesburgh: A Biography MICHAEL O'BRIEN An engaging biography of one of the greatest Catholic leaders in American history...
...I personally found the archaeological chapters the most interesting...
...Where are the "imaginative," recreative biblicists who use both literary and classical preaching genres...
...The longing that created Potter's hallucination has burned itself into the plate...
...Civil Rights Commission chairman, and priest...
...Theodore Hesburgh's career as Notre Dame president, political appointee, U.S...
...That's unusual, isn't it...
...Potter, attending a funeral for a cartload of naked soldiers, resorts to hallucination and conjures up the image of his longed-for wife Beatrice, smiling and beckoning him with a maternal sweetness that suggests her namesake in Dante...
...In plate 6, George's own corpse is propped among the living to round out "a group of survivors to send to the folks back home" and urged, with them, to "Smile, boys, smile...
...This makes sense and makes for a well-paced and variegated read...
...So the narrative action resolves itself into a pictorial summary, which, as it turns out, falsifies what we have been told...
...Where were the liberation theologians, the Socialist politicized readings of the Bible...
...Each of these tells two of the novel's six chapters, starting in Liverpool in 1846 and ending outside Sebastopol in 1854...
...But these are quibbles...
...In the following chapter, Pompey examines his print and sees a blur in the corner resolve itself into the figure of Beatrice...
...On the miserable periphery of battle, one of its three narrators takes some comfort in being "at least better off as far as transport is concerned...
...Pompey then dismisses the episode as "not being a matter of great importance...
...But to engage, not to submit...
...and Dr...
...That obliqueness characterizes the whole novel The central character, George Hardy, is visible to us only in the cracked mirror of the accounts of three dependents...
...This may be because I know more about the New Testament material and the New Testament scholars, and consequently became more conscious of what seemed to me like omissions...
...Broadly, Murphy divides his book by methodologies, by ways of coming into relationship with the Bible...
...Not in the academies is probably the answer...
...Each is called a "Plate," dated, and given a title which is actually a caption: "Girl in the Presence of Death," "A Veil Lifted," "Funeral Procession Shadowed by Beatrice," and so on...
...He turns to her and away from a rifle raised against him, and, in a variation on Orpheus and Eurydice, he meets his death...
...The most affecting use of photography involves a bit of magic realism...
...It is ironic...
...The three are also linked erotically: Potter through his relationship to Beatrice, Myrtle and Pompey through their separate liaisons with George...
...He is a restless, attractive bisexual, heir to a Liverpool fortune, a surgeon and amateur photographer who feels "that the war would at last provide him with the prop he needed...
...Potter, a pompous and touchingly uxorious amateur scholar who is married to George's sister Beatrice...
...The charge impinges obliquely on the action of Master Georgie...
...And nearly half of the capacity of the Titanic's lifeboats went unused because there were no precautionary boat drills...
...Master Georgie takes us back some six decades to the Crimean War, a scandalously mismanaged campaign which squandered troops to disease and mud and had its most conspicuous folly, the charge of the Light Brigade, burnished into another chivalric myth by Lord Tennyson...
...268 pp...
...The medium that gives its very name to an ideal of Commonweal 2 6 November 6, 1998 verisimilitude conspires with Victorian sentimentality...
...It is generous in spirit and open-minded, and it gives a valuable access to an important area of scholarship that is too often presented as inflammatory or trivial...
...In the novel's first chapter, in Liverpool, that self-protective deference shows itself as she walks quickly behind George, wishing but not expecting that he will turn back to look at her...
...Those two novels dealt with memorable events of 1912: the fatal expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Falcon Scott and the sinking of the Titanic...
...and over all found the Old Testament section more fascinating than the New Testament...
...But go back and read it again, and it will astonish you...
...The three characters are bound to one another in their orbits around George by fated linkages of coincidence which I do not need to detail here, and which are the subject of reflection by Potter...
...The writer wants to know, he wants to engage, he wants me, the reader, to engage...
...In its final pages, outside Sebastopol, rashly, she calls to him from behind because she has hurt her foot...
...The Word According to Eve is highly engaging and readable, regardless of your degree of knowledge...
...Myrtle agrees politely but thinks to herself: "Georgie's not one for talking, at least, not to me...
...Nor would I wish to be his equal, for then I might find him wanting...
...O'Brien chronicles Fr...
...This illuminating book deserves to become a classic and should be on the shelves of every priest...
...January/288 pp...
...That erotic dimension of social class is expressed more tellingly by Myrtle earlier in the novel in a conversation with the mistress of a colonel of the Guards...
...These disasters were celebrated in England for their displays of chivalry in extremis, the attractive, manly imprudence and amateurism which, to the disenchanted and postimperial eye, were largely responsible for bringing them about...
...In plate 1, the twelveyear-old Myrtle acts the part of a pious mourner over the corpse of George's father after joining with George and Pompey Jones in a cover-up of the disgraceful circumstances of his death...
...In the end, tipped out of their wagon into the mud as they barely escape death in battle, Myrtle and Pompey grope toward, then back away from, a sexual union...
...Just then Pompey Jones has set up his tripod and taken a picture of the funeral party...
...George's interest in photography informs the structure of these chapters...
...He is, in different ways, a beloved central concern of Myrtle, a foundling servant girl who bears his children...
...A Spiritual Theology of the Priesthood The Mystery of Christ and the Mission of the Priest DERMOT POWER Inspired by the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dermot Power examines the spirituality of the priesthood...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
