ArteFact

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..."

The fiction of British-Maltese writer Fiorella De Maria depicts women in fierce struggle with the forces which undermine human dignity: yet they illustrate that God is not in the storm. He is in the silence, where we can hear Him, and furthermore, hear ourselves think. Above all, He is the safe harbor from which we are launched into a great, though sometimes painful adventure.

Clare Kipps, Sold for a Farthing (Frederick Muller, 1953).

Looking back is a notoriously tricky business. Memories can entrap us, or themselves become distorted in our attempts to curate the past. In many ways, Kazuo Ishiguro's oeuvre is a study of human memory—falsified, true and otherwise. Writer Michalina Ratajczak traces the theme as it is woven into three of his novels, including his most recent, The Buried Giant.

In his acclaimed novel Silence, Shūsaku Endō questions the viability of the tree of Hellenized Christianity taking root in the “mud swamp” of Japan. What was once hospitable, fertile ground for the seed planted by St. Francis Xavier, becomes the land of a hunted and persecuted Christianity, as depicted in the story of two missionary priests and the community in their care.

As the Oscars pass Scorsese by, Mark Thomas thinks he knows why.