{"id":744,"date":"2013-09-01T11:44:18","date_gmt":"2013-09-01T19:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2017-12-18T13:27:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T21:27:35","slug":"review-fludd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/01\/review-fludd\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Fludd"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fludd\"<\/a>
\n Fludd<\/a> by Hilary Mantel<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

I, like other reviewers, read Mantel\u2019s Booker-prize winning novels, and was awed by their genius. When browsing my local library, espying a thin tome by Mantel, plucking it up was done automatically. And I was not in the least disappointed. That same mastery of language. That same reverence, disguised as irreverence. Deeply serious, but funny, the way only deeply serious things can be.<\/p>\n

As to Fludd himself, the character, well. There\u2019s overt references to angels in the novel, and so I guess we\u2019re supposed to make out that he\u2019s some sort of super natural creature. You know, a very human kind of super natural creature. But I kept seeing demon, not angel. That\u2019s hard to justify, given the way events in the novel play out. So I\u2019ll try to do so in this way: religion is man-made, is a folly of fear, and so, angels and demons are not real. A demon, then, isn\u2019t necessarily the evil being that a religion would have us believe.<\/p>\n

Neither would an angel be. But in so far as a religion is not real, it nevertheless is structured by very real emotions in our hearts (and spleens). Angels are messengers, demons are seducers. And there it is, Fludd the seducer, the facilitator of emancipation from the outright silliness of religion.<\/p>\n

Specifically, Catholicism. Every time I read a book with Catholics in it, it\u2019s either reverential, and has almost no information, or it\u2019s caustically critical, and rife with absurdity. I find it hard to believe that intelligent human beings actually believe this stuff. But they do, and they let it rule their souls, and mire them in misery, and any angel sent to free someone from such misery must, by the rules of the structures of that fake religion, come formed as a demon.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what I got from Fludd<\/i>. But you can probably tell I\u2019m anti-church as it is. Fludd preaching to the choir, then.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fludd by Hilary Mantel My rating: 3 of 5 stars I, like other reviewers, read Mantel\u2019s Booker-prize winning novels, and was awed by their genius. When browsing my local library, espying a thin tome by Mantel, plucking it up was done automatically. And I was not in the least disappointed. That same mastery of language. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: Fludd”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-c0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}