A Song for Issy Bradley

'A Song for Issy Bradley' by Carys Bray. As usual I read about this on a blog very recently and now cannot remember where. I am not sure I would have requested it if I had realised it was about a Mormon family, but once I had read the first chapter I already wanted to persevere with it. It is not that I have anything against Mormons in particular, just that books about 'faith' do not really interest me. This book gave me a fascinating insight into a world that is utterly outside my knowledge, and, although the author is a 'lapsed' Mormon (if there is such a thing), I felt it was a very open and honest picture of their beliefs. The thing with the Mormon religion seems to be is that it is not so much an overarching code but more a rulebook that governs every single aspect of how you live your life. Maybe it's just my interpretation of the way it is presented, but it seems mostly to be a list of things that you cannot do. The story is, however, just as much about a family struggling with grief.

Claire is an incomer, having met her husband Ian at university and been converted then married into the faith. Their four children, Zippy, Al, Jacob and Issy have been raised within the Mormon church and their father has recently become a 'bishop', which seems to be kind of pastor, someone who offers both spiritual and practical guidance for the congregation. So on the day of Jacob's birthday party he is whisked away on urgent business to visit the sick and Claire is left to cope with all of Jacob's excited expectations, and the stressful experience of having strange children in the house. Issy, feeling unwell, is dosed up with Calpol and left in bed to sleep it off. When they finally realise how sick she is, it is too late. The story moves between each person in the family, watching as they struggle to make sense of their loss, while also dealing with their own private concerns. 

While his rule book props up Ian and gives him a way to handle everything that life has dealt, it gives him no mechanism to support Claire, who refuses to grieve in the proper manner. The older children bottle up their feelings, absorbed as they are partly with other concerns; Zippy (Zipporah) with a crush on a fellow church member, and Al (Alma) with his football. Jacob however has other plans, and he begins an experiment to test the power of his faith. This is the part of the story I found so heartbreaking, not the death of a child. If you bring up a child to believe that prayer and faith will be answered if it is strong enough how is he supposed to understand when it does not work. The children in the story were all so well drawn, struggling to balance the demands of their religion with what they see and experience in the real world. Claire collapses into herself and hides from the world, in a very graphic portrayal of grief. But Ian I hated, for the entire book. His narrow dogmatism was, to me, everything that is bad about organised religion. His hypocrisy is just predictable. His wife is handling it all wrong; you should not be sad for someone who has gone to heaven, nor mourn over the body that is left behind, and he lies to cover up her failure. The scene where he rapes his catatonic wife on their daughter's bed was the most disgusting thing I have ever read a character doing. He does not redeem himself in the end, in my eyes; he steps outside his box for a tiny moment, because he realises it is the only way to draw his wife back inside. 

I will leave you with a lighter moment that I laughed at, in fact I giggled aloud at several points in the book where the author seemed by be gently mocking her lost religion. Here Zippy has 'snuck out' to a party, and is offered something to drink:
" 'No thanks,' she says.
'Oh, yeah. You're Muslim, aren't you?'
'Mormon,' she mutters.
Will's wearing a cardigan and big glasses that he probably doesn't need. At least he's talking to her, even though she'd rather not talk about religion because whenever she has to stick up for the Church the words come out wrong. Dad makes it all sound sensible and logical, yet when she borrows his language and ideas, it always sounds absurd.
'Oh, right, A Mormon,' he says. 'You shouldn't be at a party, should you? It's not allowed, is it?'
'I'm allowed.'
'Sorry, I must've got mixed up.'
'I think it's Jehovah's Witnesses, the no-parties thing.' Zippy's face grows hot under its glaze of make-up. She's embarrassed to have been mistaken for a Jehovah's Witness. Dad says they don't let people have blood transfusions and they believe only a few people can get to heaven. She doesn't know much about them, but they sound weird and she doesn't want anyone to imagine that she's got anything to do with them." (p.208)

Ignoring that I found the subject matter a little outside my comfort zone this was a lovely book, beautifully written, and honestly portraying the good and bad sides of family, faith and religious community. I liked the way she gave them miracles and answered prayers without making it seem significant. While I can see that having a guiding message would help you through such an experience, when it tells you what you are supposed to be feeling it has crossed a line. Even though it ends hopefully for them as a family I was left feeling somewhat ambivalent.

Thinking some more

I recently had a copy of the awesome Tim Minchin's book 'Storm' from the library, and discovered that I was several years late to the party, and here it in animated form on Youtube. You can't beat someone with wit and panache dealing it out to people who spout crap.


In other news, this photograph:

from the Guardian's 20 photos of the week (13th December), has been on my desktop.
It had this caption:
"In a photograph by Siegfried Modola, a regular contributor to 20 photographs, a man holds a girl as she tries to escape an arranged marriage in Baringo County, Kenya. As Pokot tradition dictates, the future husband arrived at the girl’s family home with the last settled dowry of livestock and a group of men to collect her. She was unaware of the marriage arrangements that her father had made as her family said she might have run away from home."

It was a combination of the desperation of the girl and the determination on the face of the man that struck me so forcefully. It summed up so much of what I have been reading over the last year, on websites and blogs and in the news, about the struggles that women continue to face in the world, particularly about rape culture and rape as a weapon of conflict, violence against women in general and street harassment, and here is a young girl who does not even own her own life, and is being carried off to be traded for livestock. The Guardian (again) mused over the idea that women had 'won' in 2014, but as this witty video by Phoebe Greenwood points out, despite all the attention that 'women's issues' received in the media, things are not all they appear to be. And I am reminded that no matter how far women think we have come, there is so far still to go. 


And this, that popped up on Upworthy and just makes you go 'wow':
How Wolves Change Rivers from Sustainable Human on Vimeo.

Census Campaign 2011

You may or may not have noticed this recent addition to the top of the sidebar. I don't delve into the world of politics very often, even less so religion but I am just writing a brief post to encourage other bloggers to consider linking to the Census Campaign website (run by the British Humanist Association). This is definitely not an 'anti-religion' issue, the aim of the campaign is to get people to pause and think about what they really believe.

As the website points out:

"In 2001, a highly leading question, "What is your religion?" was added.

By assuming that all participants held a religious belief, the question captured some kind of loose cultural affiliation, and as a result over 70% responded 'Christian', a far higher percentage than nearly every other significant survey or poll on religious belief in the past decade." In spite of vigorous efforts by the Humanist Association this same question will appear in the 2011 census.

So what the campaign is wanting people to do is really consider the nature of their own beliefs, irrespective of their parents, their upbringing, whether they might have been christened or baptised, and asking that if they do not have any personal faith/belief in any kind of deity they should tick the 'no religion' box. Statistics from this census will be used to decide all sorts of political/economic policies over the coming years and a skewed result about the extent of religious commitment would not be a good thing (why it matters here).

They make some interesting arguments (here and here) for the importance of answering the question rather than just ignoring it (it is the only voluntary question) and if you are interested enough they have some blog buttons available (here).