ArteFact

The award-winning original Netflix series, Stranger Things, recently had fans glued to their laptops when all eight episodes of Season 3 were released online on the Fourth of July 2019. It has to be said, the series is not for the faint of heart.

In Paula Huston’s novel A Land Without Sin, it is 1993 in the war-torn jungles of Central America, and Eva Kovic is looking for her lost brother.

Lucy Beckett’s novel The Time Before You Die: A Novel of the Reformation effectively conveys a queasy, uncomfortable immediacy to the whiplash-inducing movements of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and subsequent backlash against the Counter-Reformation, in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Several centuries later, Philip Trower’s A Danger to the State depicts the consequences of the Reformation in the full bloom of the Enlightenment - one of which is that religious truths increasingly serve politically expedient realities.

Morris West, The Devil’s Advocate (William Morrow & Co, 1959).

'To be or not to be, that is the question' voices an even more universal problem than King Lear's: not so much about identity, as being.

In nostalgic conversations among friends over favorite childhood literary characters, I inevitably propose Edmund Pevensie from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Much enthusiasm meets this choice. We all agree that as much as we admire the older Peter, Edmund is more interesting.

At first sight, Dorothy L. Sayers’ character Lord Peter Wimsey, does not strike one as a particularly Christian gentleman... And yet, he displays virtues that only caritas and humility can bring to flower.

Wemmick is a man divided. Divided between work and Walworth, where he lives out an idyllic denial of all that is dehumanising about his workaday existence.

A common criticism of Dickens is that his female characters never rise above being two-dimensional. However amongst the demure angels and the grotesque caricatures, Betsey Trotwood of David Copperfield is a magnificent exception.

"What a piece of work is man..."