Review

Books

Culture

29 December 2023

5 min read

How children’s books challenge us to hope harder

Reading an award-winning children’s book challenges Elizabeth Wainwright much more than expected - to imagine and hope.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A close up of face, showing an eye, mostly obscured by a closely-held open book.

This year, the Waterstones book of the year prize was awarded to Impossible Creatures, a fantasy book for children by Katherine Rundell. This was not the children’s book of the year; this was overall book of the year – it beat novels and non-fiction books for adults. I felt momentarily but deeply joyful when I heard the news and was curious why.

During the pandemic, I found myself unable to read the non-fiction books I usually turn too. Even adult fiction felt heavy. It was children’s books and authors I turned to. Philip Pullman, Dodie Smith, Alan Garner, Ursula K Le Guin. Others new to me. On reflection, I wasn’t reading these books because they were in any way easier, because they weren’t – they asked me to think and hope and imagine much harder than a lot of adult books, despite everything the news would have me believe. And it is for that very reason that I sought these books out. The Waterstones prize made me think a bit more about this – and why it might matter now especially.

Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

First, I thought about my time as a District Councillor in local government. Here, I quickly learned all sorts of things about planning, environment, community, working across opposition and more. I needed to call on my perseverance, patience, strategic thinking. But the things that I found myself calling on again and again were imagination and relationship-building. Building relationships – especially with people who weren’t like me – was the only way to get things done. And imagination because it’s the thing that recreates, that sees things as they could be not as they are. Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”, and I’ve seen how that’s true. It did not feel enough, for example, to try to fix problems of dwindling budgets with more cuts and more inefficient meetings. Instead, imagination asked me to think about what this budget-setting process might look like at its best, and how the wider community might help us decide priorities, and how we might restructure our work so that the District doesn’t just scrape by, but thrives. It asked me to step out of business-as-usual, and imagine business-as-it-could-be.

Jesus too shows us the importance of imagination – he so often called out who he saw people to be, not who they were. And he points us now towards what is yet to come. He calls us to wait, and to trust in his arrival – however distant it might feel. Children’s books often do this too: Frodo trusting that the ring would be destroyed, imagining life outside of the grip of the darkness of Mordor, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bastian’s imagination helping to save Fantasia in the Neverending Story. Jo March showing the possibility of another kind of life in Little Women. Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful.

Second, the children’s books I read during lockdown gave me hope in a way that books for adults didn’t at the time. Hope is, I think, innately tied to imagination. It asks us to look ahead, even when things aren’t clear, and walk forward. Rebecca Solnit explores hope, optimism, and activism in her short book Hope In the Dark. She says,

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

I think the best children’s literature shows us how to hope, and shows us what right action can look like when we invoke that hope. In Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, Mal and Christopher must save the ‘Archipelago’ – where mythical creatures still live – and the world beyond them from a growing darkness. Hope shines bright, reminding the reader that it is not naïve but necessary and world-changing, if we let it be. Hope changes things. In the New Testament, Paul tells that along with faith and love, hope will remain. When it feels like the world – fictional, or real – is falling away, hope will remain. Coupled with imagination, bound with faith and love, made active with hands and hearts, it might just pull us through to things we cannot yet see.

When she won the National Book Award, Ursula K Le Guin underlined the necessity of imagination and hope right now:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Jesus was the ultimate realist of a larger reality. He asks us to love in the face of hate, to believe that food and wine can come from faith, to believe so hard in love – not as a pink heart-shaped commodity, but as a world-shaking force – that we might literally see resurrection. Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time, grounded in people and soil and society, but always pointing to the bigger truth he knew, and to a world that did not yet exist. I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful. Importantly, this is not a rejection of the world as it is – we are called to love our neighbours here and now, to build the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But in what is, there is the seed of what could be, there is a light that shines in places that are still dark. I think the gospel, and the best children’s books, help us to see that light and see what it might illuminate. Jesus knew that children’s minds were perhaps better at seeing this light – he even says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Allowing ourselves to imagine, to hope, is perhaps the only way we’ll take the kingdom of heaven seriously here on earth.

Katherine Rundell herself has pointed out that children’s books don’t just make good readers, they make good people. I think that with imagination, hope, courage, and more, they help call forth the people we are becoming, and the world that could become. That is why I turned to them during lockdowns, that is why I turn to them now as parts of our world seem dark, and that is why I turn again and again to Jesus – the ultimate realist of a larger reality.

Review

Ambition

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

6 December 2024

6 min read

Why we’re fascinated with power behind closed doors

Conclave captures the powerful chemistry between heaven and earth.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

A cardinal glances to the side as he stands amid a gather of clergy,

Cardinal Thomas Lawrence played by Ralph Fiennes.

Film Nation.

An ecclesiastical election, conducted behind closed doors, by a group of old men hardly seems a subject for a riveting thriller. Yet, back in 2016, Berkshire-based novelist Robert Harris thought otherwise. Conclave became an international best-seller.

Now it’s been turned into a movie. And, according to the cognoscenti, a rather good one at that. British Vogue lauded it with great enthusiasm:

“It’s a treat in every sense – visually, sonically, dramaturgically – and, as we hurtle into this bleakest of winters, exactly the kind of galvanising, pulse-racing shot in the arm we all need.”

Really?

Well, following its UK premiere at the London Film Festival in October, the BBC were quick to report a potential flurry of Oscar nominations and even that it was ‘thought to be a strong contender for the best picture award’.

So, what’s going on? How has this dangerously dull and turgid subject turned into a narrative that tames the critics and converts the sceptics?

A late night showing on the day of its release at the end of November beckoned me to find out. So off I went with my wife, after she had finished Gospel Choir practice.

Directed by award winning film-maker Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), it stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini.

The premise is simple. The Pope is dead, and the Cardinals of the Catholic Church convene from around the world to choose his successor. But this, of course, is only the beginning.

Sequestered in the Vatican the prelates are cut off from outside influence as the secret process of electing a new pontiff is enacted. But this does not stop events, past and present, from impacting and shaping their deliberations.

Overseen by Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), the British Dean of the College of Cardinals, the story unfolds as he negotiates these successive revelations and happenings. Along the way he is also wrestling in his own faith for spiritual reality and personal integrity.

As they gather, the not-so-friendly fraternal rivalry of the cardinals and the manoeuvring of the leading contenders sets up a presenting series of tensions for the Conclave:

Cardinal Bellini (Tucci) is the Vatican’s theologically progressive, yet diffident, Secretary of State
Cardinal Tremblay (Lithgow) is a slippery and ambitious, self-promoting Canadian conservative
Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is the forthright and reactionary traditionalist Patriarch of Venice
Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is a theologically conservative and populist Nigerian who offers the possibility of making history as the first Black pope.

Then, at the last minute, into the mix enters a cardinal that no one knew of. Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is a Mexican who arrives claiming the late pope appointed him Archbishop of Kabul in pectore (in secret) prior to his death.

Shuttling between their living quarters in the Domus Sanctae Marthae and the Sistine Chapel, the venue for their voting process, the story unfolds. A complex interplay of ecclesiastical politics, theology and spirituality intermingle with issues of identity, character and choice to make for a heady mix. At stake, or is that on offer, is the power of the Papacy.

Reflecting the church at large the Conclave is a community of conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and progressives, populists and academics, activists and administrators.

Like the world at large, all human life is here. Men with hidden secrets, driven by ignoble motives that often dress themselves in more noble apparel. Ambition, greed, ego and privilege rub shoulders with graciousness, sincerity and self-sacrificial service. Sometimes even in the same person. The human condition is a complicated one. It seems that power retains its age-old allure and ability to corrupt.

And maybe that’s it. For all the secrecy and mystery that surrounds a papal election, right down to the colour of the smoke, it is a human concoction. Human fingerprints are all over it, just like they are all over the church.

The church aspires to be better. To be shaped by a higher ideal. To properly be ‘the body of Christ’ and represent the imago dei in the world. To so inhabit the love and grace of God that through its life and witness God might touch and transform the world for the better. Yet, as one of the Italian cardinals correctly, if too easily, argues, “We are mortal men; we serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.”

Indeed, the great apostle St. Paul had to confess, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect …”, but he is committed to go further, “… [yet] I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” There is an ideal to pursue.

As the cardinals progress through successive rounds of voting the field of candidates narrows and the required two-thirds majority comes within reach. Yet the prospects of the main characters rise and fall through the twists and turns of the plot as it heads to its inevitable climax.

Then one final, unexpected and flabbergasting reveal hits the audience from out of left field. It is a masterful denouement to the tale.

Speaking about how it all came together Harris revealed:

“I approached this not as a Catholic and not as an expert in the Church. So my preparation began by reading the gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking … There's also this question of can you freeze anything at a point nearly 2000 years ago? Haven't the world and humanity evolved?”

As we drove home at gone midnight I found it hard to disagree with Vogue.

The visual spectacle created by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine plays wonderfully with the renaissance setting of the Vatican. It is a beautiful and luscious feast for the eyes.

Volker Bertelmann’s teasing creativity with the score made the drama come alive and heightened what has been an unforgettable experience.

But for me, most of all, it was the drama. The story that was told. The unfolding of events and the interplay with people and their motives, their relationships and their vested interests. It is layered and nuanced and complex, just like real life.

It has left me pondering once again the chemistry between heaven and earth. Between our freewill and agency as individuals and the mystery of the divine presence and the fruit of prayer.

As the cardinals prepare for the final vote a waft of air blows gently through a broken window in the Sistine Chapel and rustles their voting papers. Is Berger tipping his hat to the presence of the Spirit of God, present and active in human affairs?

Perhaps the last word should go to Robert Harris.

“With temporal power, or indeed spiritual power, it is very difficult to avoid factions, scheming, the lesser of two evils—all the compromises that go into running any huge organization and trying to keep, not just hundreds, but thousands of people onside … I have a lot of time for politicians, just as I have a lot of time for these cardinals, because they are grappling with almost insoluble problems. But someone has to do it. Someone has to run a society. And I've tried to write about them with a degree of sympathy.”