Camille Bacon-Smith, an academic folklore specialist, has spent almost two decades applying the methods of ethnographical research to the subculture that has grown up around science fiction literature, movies and artwork. She regularly attends SF conventions, reads fanzines, interviews both leaders and rank-and-file of the science fiction community and otherwise investigates Fandom in much the same way that Margaret Mead studied Samoa. "Science Fiction Culture" is the summation of her efforts. As one of the natives under scrutiny (being a long-time science fiction fan and past chairman of the World Science Fiction Convention), I read it with interest. Unhappily, though, it is one of those books that tries to do far too much and therefore accomplishes almost nothing.
If I wished to be denigratory, it would be easy to utilize "insider" knowledge to catalogue the book's numerous errors of fact. On the one page that mentions my own name, I found five mistakes. None of them is serious (two surnames are misspelled, two people are assigned to the wrong home towns, one very well-known fan - universally referred to as "Peggy Rae" - is called "Peggy"), but they do suggest that the author is not in total command of her material. She is particularly weak on the development of Fandom before her own contact with it. To take an important example, she guesses that the sudden growth in the size of the World Science Fiction Convention in the 1960's resulted from the entry into Fandom of the "counterculture", whereas the initial spurt (from 850 members in 1966 to over 1,500 in 1967) is readily explained by the advent of the original "Star Trek" television series. The next abrupt doubling, between 1977 and 1978, followed closely on the release of "Star Wars".
In addition, like any other stranger in a strange land, the author is at the mercy of her informants, who sometimes feed her biased information and once in a while, it appears, simply pull her leg. Her account of the bidding for the 1993 Worldcon reflects only the views of the successful bid and unfairly dismisses its opponents as motivated by resentment over being left out of leadership roles. (She also muddles the chronology of the contest.) As an instance of leg pulling, someone has given her the idea that a famous 1940's diatribe, which, among much else, deplored the (alleged and improbable) influence of homosexuals in Fandom, is a scandalous secret. This "secret" is, in fact, so familiar that another outsider, mystery writer Sharyn McCrumb, introduced a lightly fictionalized version into her novel "Zombies of the Gene Pool".
Despite some degree of inaccuracy and dubious interpretation, "Science Fiction Culture" might still be worth an additional star, were it not for three fundamental flaws. First, the author's prose is awkward, jargon-heavy and tedious. Second, she frequently theorizes before assimilating sufficient data and sees only what her theories tell her to see. Third, and most fatally, she devotes only about a third of her text to her nominal subject, an ethnographical investigation of Fandom. For want of space, vast reaches of pertinent data are virtually ignored (e. g., fanzine publishing and Fandom outside the United States) or greatly oversimplified (e. g., conventions other than Worldcons). The author apologizes for some of her omissions. It apparently does not occur to her that she could have avoided major gaps by writing a better focused book.
The sections peripheral to Fandom consist of, first, lamentations on the travails of progressively chic groups (women, homosexuals, youth, sadomasochists) as they try to enter a supposedly white, male domain and, second, miscellaneous observations on the state of science fiction publishing. The "travails" aren't very interesting. As the author concedes, women were integrated into Fandom decades ago and homosexuals have encountered little resistance. The other groups that she discusses (by "youth", it should be noted, she means the minuscule "goth" subculture, not people who are chronologically young) occasionally hang out at science fiction conventions but seem quite uninterested in associating with anyone beyond their own circles.
Worthwhile accounts of "outsiders trying to become insiders" could be written about the relationship to Fandom of neopagans, libertarians, evangelical Christians or even role playing gamers, and it would be interesting to explore why certain ethnic minorities (blacks, Hispanics, Asians) rarely become fans. "Science Fiction Culture" has nothing to say on any of those topics.
The section on the publishing industry may be of interest to aspiring writers, though a few statements are curious. Is it really common practice, as the author implies, to adopt a pseudonym in mid-career in order to fool chain store computers? I know of one prominent SF writer (Harry Turtledove) who writes historical novels under a pen name (H. N. Turteltaub) for that reason, but are there many other examples? If so, we aren't told about them here.
Except for tenure committees and fans who want to see whether they have made it into the index, it is hard to imagine an audience for this book. It would certainly have been a better work if the author could have cast off the shackles of academic orthodoxy and come to her data, evidently extensive and valuable, with fewer conclusions ready made.

This collection will surprise many readers. According to academic urban legend, the title story, an incomplete novel recovered from C. S. Lewis's papers and first published nearly 15 years after his death, is shoddily written, bereft of moral or theological significance, imbued with obscene and homoerotic imagery, and quite likely a crude forgery. That evaluation has been propagated so energetically and successfully that it is hard to remember that the book received generally favorable initial reviews and once upon a time bid fair to become the Lewis counterpart to "The Mystery of Edward Drood".

Having last picked up "The Dark Tower" two decades ago, I thought that I remembered a rather crude, incoherent adventure story, from which it would be pleasant to dissociate the purported author's reputation. It turned out, however, that I was remembering the image formed by the critics, not what was actually there.

Taking into account the fact that it is an unfinished draft, the prose of "The Dark Tower" is comparable to "Out of the Silent Planet". Both are in the vein of pulp science fiction, of which Lewis was an avid reader, and both suffer noticeably from the author's inability to weave convincing pseudo-scientific patter. In "Perelandra", Lewis solved that problem by substituting the openly supernatural for the scientific. Perhaps he would have hit upon the same device if "The Dark Tower" had reached a second draft.

The novel's central concept is movement among parallel universes, then a new idea in science fiction (first popularized by Murray Leinster, whose classic "Sidewise in Time" appeared in 1934). Lewis explains it by drawing on the relationship of lines to planes, an analogy long employed by theologians to illustrate how infinitely prolonged time differs from eternity.

In the opening chapters, a scientific team initiates contact between our time line and an "Othertime" that is, judging by broad hints in the surviving text, in thrall to one of the fallen eldils introduced in "Out of the Silent Planet". The central element of the plot, already in motion before the fragment breaks off, was evidently to have been an Othertime invasion of our world via the eponymous Dark Tower. A young scientist is prematurely caught up in the struggle by being switched with his double in Othertime, finding himself in the role of a loathsome tyrant torn between the habits of his assumed body and the moral impulses of his this-earthly mind.

The involuntary visitor to Othertime suffers a physical deformity that is the ground for accusing the work of obscenity. A small, wasp-like sting grows out of his forehead, containing venom that, when injected into the spine, converts humans into vacant automatons. The Freudian implications are obvious (and are pointed out by the narrator), but that is the extent of overt or covert sexuality. Readers who can find pervasive erotic imagery here probably spend their time covering up naked chair legs. The presence of any homosexual interest is sheer fantasy.

One cannot know, of course, simply on the basis of reading it, whether "The Dark Tower" comes from Lewis's pen or that of a skillful forger, but it presents Lewis-like concepts and cannot be relegated to pseudepigraphical status on the basis of any deficiency in literary merit.

Two of the "Other Stories" printed with "The Dark Tower" are also disputed. One, "The Man Born Blind", is an artfully fashioned parable, telling of a man who, given sight for the first time, grows suspicious because no one will tell him what light looks like. The editor dates the tale to the 1920's on tenuous evidence. Forensic tests have reportedly shown that the ink of the manuscript was manufactured after 1950, which is consistent with the high quality of the narrative and its implicit theological themes.

The second challenged story, "Forms of Things Unknown", relies on a surprise ending that becomes too obvious too quickly. It is akin in quality to the two other (unquestionably authentic) short stories printed here. "The Shoddy Lands" is an unsubtle message story, while "Ministering Angels", Lewis's lone attempt at comedy, is better in concept than execution. Rounding off the volume is "After Ten Years", comprising the shards of what was to have been a retelling of the aftermath of the Trojan War. Lewis was seriously ill when he started it, and his death left it too fragmentary to evaluate.

"The Dark Tower" and "The Man Born Blind" are the scorned stepdaughters of the Lewis literary family. It is time for readers and critics to look at them first hand, rather than uncritically accept some stepmother's assurance that, yes, Cinderella is really, really ugly and a changeling to boot.

In August 1678 Titus Oates, an unemployed clergyman of dubious habits, disclosed to a mentally unbalanced colleague, the Rev. Israel Tonge, the existence of a large scale Roman Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II and set up a puppet government that would return Protestant England to the days of Bloody Mary. Oates had learned of this plot, he claimed, after converting to Catholicism the year before and spending a few months at a French seminary (from which he had been expelled for moral and intellectual deficiencies). Leading members of England's underground Catholic priesthood had supposedly spoken freely in front of this unprepossessing novice, enabling him to construct a dense narrative of names, dates and "facts". Tonge, author of numerous paranoid anti-Catholic tracts, was delighted to have such a witness to Papist malignity and rapidly pushed Oates in front of the authorities, including the king himself. From this beginning followed, over the next year and a half, over 30 executions for participation in the imaginary plot. The pursuit of the "plotters" was not the only, perhaps not even the greatest, miscarriage of justice of the era, but it is surely the best remembered, and most of the victims have since been recognized by Rome as martyrs for the Faith. Six of them were canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

John Kenyon's history, first published in 1972 (Phoenix Press reprints the slightly revised 1984 edition), is the classic account of the Plot, a story interesting both as a striking episode in English history and for the light it casts on similar conspiratorial accusations in later eras (even in our own). Professor Kenyon furnishes a firm, clear record of frequently baffling events, demanding of the reader only a modest acquaintance with Restoration history and politics. He also explains, as plausibly as one could hope, why belief in the Plot took root and flourished.

Oates and the copycat informers who supplemented his fantasy with ever more lurid tales drew on a deep-seated fear of Catholics and Catholicism, heightened by the perception that Romanism was steadily gaining strength and enjoyed special favor at the royal court (where, indeed, the Queen and the King's brother, the Duke of York, were Catholics). A few Catholics confirmed the fear mongers by talking wildly about restoring the old religion (and a small number, like the famous Guy Fawkes, really did attempt murder and treason), but the typical recusant was a staunchly conservative landowner, attached to the existing order and wishing only to practice his religion without excessive harassment. One reason why the Plot did not claim a far greater number of victims was that Protestant gentry in the countryside refused to believe charges against their Catholic neighbors and protected them from the power of the judiciary.

Anti-Catholicism was a constant in the English polity. Compounding it were more adventitious factors: the partisan hatreds left over from the Civil War (the judicial murder of Charles I was less than 30 years in the past), the paucity of sources of information about current events and, most important in this particular case, the Crown's lack of political confidence. Charles II and his advisers believed that their domestic enemies were powerful, malicious and intractable. They knew that the government was short of financial and military resources. Thus, even though no one at Whitehall truly believed Oates, the safe, expedient path was to allow "justice" to devour a few sacrifices, while waiting for a backlash against the hysteria. The waiting strategy in fact worked, and a powerful Tory reaction made Charles' last years politically comfortable, but the Plot martyrs gained no benefit thereby.

Amidst these large explanations, Professor Kenyon does not lose sight of the particular and accidental. Oates was an exceptionally bold liar, who commanded belief by sheer effrontery. And his story gained sensational publicity at an early stage when the magistrate before whom he swore his first deposition turned up murdered a few days later. He then garnered undeserved credibility when a search of the papers of Edward Coleman, the Duke of York's sometime secretary, revealed correspondence with Louis XIV's confessor. To deflect the informers from York, Coleman was sent to trial and execution. His fate naturally made the uproar worse. Instead of escaping suspicion, the Duke finally had to be sent abroad to appease the mob.

Other blameworthy behavior abounded. Especially appalling is the conduct of the judges at the accused conspirators' trials. One reads these accounts with a renewed appreciation of the virtues of our own judicial system. Heartening, on the other hand, is the courage of the victims, none of whom, despite intense pressure, recanted his faith or implicated others with a false confession.

Professor Kenyon recounts these improbable events with care and even-handedness. Indeed, he almost turns the latter virtue into a vice by searching for some shred of justification for unjustifiable conduct. He suggests, for instance, that Edward Coleman was, by the standards of the time, actually guilty of treason, when all that the evidence shows is an effort to gull the French out of subsidies. Less forgivably, he insinuates that perhaps the homosexual Oates had obtained authentic tidbits of information about Catholic activities in the course of affairs with high-ranking Jesuits - a completely unnecessary hypothesis for which there is no support at all.

Though its long-term impact was minor, the Popish Plot remains of interest to students of Seventeenth Century English politics, English Catholic history and conspiracy manias, for all of whom Professor Kenyon's volume is essential reading.

(A curious footnote: Phoenix Press's cover reproduces period illustrations, which are interesting but have nothing to do with the subject of the book. Instead, they portray scenes from the later "Rye House Plot", which differs from the Popish Plot in two hardly trivial respects: First, it was a real conspiracy. Second, the conspirators consisted largely of Protestants who had believed and even sponsored Titus Oates.)

C. S. Lewis would doubtless have scoffed at the idea of a reference book about himself, just as he disapproved of university courses devoted to modern authors on the sensible ground that "helps" to reading them are not needed and come between the writer and his audience.

Nonetheless, students and "fans" of the great Christian apologist and literary scholar now are offered two thick compendia on his life and work. Each has its virtues and faults, and both are worthwhile investments - though not a substitute for the straight, unfiltered Lewis.

The "Readers' Encyclopedia", reviewed here, contains articles by 44 contributors, many of them very prominent in the world of C. S. Lewis studies. The one striking absentee is Walter Hooper, Lewis' semi-official literary executor and solo author of the rival work, "C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide". This omission is, as the saying goes, not accidental.

In more than 400 pages, consisting of a 57-page biography followed by topical entries, the Encyclopedia covers the full scope of Lewis' life, work and thought. The "work" draws the greatest attention. There are articles not only on the major books but also on virtually all of Lewis' shorter pieces, including even letters to newspapers. In addition to summarizing content, most of the contributors consider its significance, respond to the views of critics or advance criticisms of their own. They may admire their subject, but this volume is not the production of a fan club.

Weighing the Encyclopedia against the Companion, the latter is heavier (almost twice as many pages), but the former is wider in scope, with more attention to CSL's career as a scholar and more systematic coverage of his entire body of work. It makes room by treating topics more succinctly. Epitomes are shorter, there is less biographical detail, and quotations from the Lewis canon are less extensive. Unfortunately, one space saving idea was the omission of an index, the need for which is distinctly not obviated by putting articles into alphabetical order.

Often both works are excellent, though many times in different ways. The Companion's life of CSL's close friend Owen Barfield tells much about the man but is rather imprecise on his ideas and how they influenced Lewis. The Encyclopedia's fine article fills those gaps.

Elsewhere the Encyclopedia is clearly superior. The Companion's discussions of "An Experiment in Criticism" and "The Personal Heresy" leave out the context in which Lewis developed his critical theories. The Encyclopedia gives him a place in the debates occasioned by the "New Criticism".

The Companion has its innings, too. Its introductory biography is fuller and less given to unsupported psychological speculations. The Encyclopedia writer, curiously, accepts the conjectures of the anti-Christian polemicist A. N. Wilson on major issues (e. g., Lewis's relationship with Mrs. Moore and the impact of his debate with Professor Anscombe), even while pointing out that Wilson in unreliable in detail and malicious in intent.

There are spots, inevitably, where both volumes are weak. Neither describes the substance of Professor G. E. M. Anscombe's famous critique of Chapter III of "Miracles" or how Lewis amended the text to answer her criticisms. Those matters are surely of more lasting import than whether Lewis did or did not feel "defeated" after debating Anscombe.

They can also fail in different ways on the same topic. The Encyclopedia's article on "The Dark Tower", the now controversial novel fragment published after Lewis's death, is a one-sided diatribe on behalf of the theory that the work is a forgery. The Companion naturally does not allude to that allegation (as Walter Hooper is the accused forger), and it also says virtually nothing useful about the story. In fact, the uninspired plot summary is marked by omissions and mistakes. (The writer does not realize, for instance, that "Michael" is the given name of the protagonist, not of his Othertime double.)

Finally, each volume has its (very small) share of this-can't-be-real lapses. An Encyclopedia article begins, "C. S. Lewis followed traditional theological thinking of his time in presuming the Holy Spirit was the third person of the Trinity." What a ripe example of the liberal historicizing that CSL so persistently combated! But it is probably a more serious matter that the Companion barely notices "The Allegory of Love", Lewis's pioneering work on medieval love poetry that laid the foundation of his academic reputation.

But let me pause here. It is easy - and an occasion of intellectual sin - to scrutinize every inch of a mighty edifice in search of blemishes. Overall, the Encyclopedia is a capacious and well-wrought work. It may not be a work that C. S. Lewis would have desired anyone to undertake, but I do not think that he can be displeased with the quality of the result.

C. S. Lewis would doubtless have scoffed at the idea of a reference book about himself, just as he disapproved of university courses devoted to modern authors on the sensible ground that "helps" to reading them are not needed and come between the writer and his audience.

Nonetheless, students and "fans" of the great Christian apologist and literary scholar now are offered two thick compendia on his life and work. Each has its virtues and faults, and both are worthwhile investments - though not a substitute for the straight, unfiltered Lewis.

The "Companion and Guide", reviewed here, is the production of one man, who has devoted almost his entire adult lifetime to editing and writing about Lewis. The rival "C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia" is a composite work whose contributors range from giants in the field to eager amateurs.

When he first met C. S. Lewis in June 1963, Walter Hooper was an American schoolteacher who had dropped out of studying for the Episcopal priesthood and never gotten started as a graduate student in literature. Instantly star-struck, he volunteered to help with secretarial chores. Within a few months Lewis was dead of a heart attack, and this 32-year-old foreigner, whose academic credentials consisted of a master's degree in education and who had never published a word on any Lewisan topic, improbably became the great man's de facto literary executor. Within a year he had edited the first collected edition of Lewis' poems, and he has worked at the same stand ever since. The double meaning of the present volume's title is no accident. The book is a companion and guide to readers of Lewis' work, but Lewis has also been, metaphorically, a lifetime companion and guide to Walter Hooper.

"Companion and Guide" weighs in at almost a thousand pages (twice the length of the "Readers' Encyclopedia"). It leads off with a hundred page biography that may well be the best life of Lewis yet written (not that the competition is very formidable). The next and longest section discusses each of CSL's books, with the inexplicable omission of "The Allegory of Love", his seminal tome on courtly love and medieval poetry. Of greatest interest are the accounts of how the works came to be written, which draw on Lewis' vast, incompletely published correspondence and on conversations with his large circle of friends. Also provided are epitomes, which are useful for reference but sometimes flabby, and haphazard excerpts from book reviews. The last feature calls attention to one of the Companion's defects: Hooper is too much a Lewis partisan to pay much attention to detractors. The uniform, almost gushing, praise of the quotations is not representative of contemporary reaction to Lewis. It would be very surprising if smashing modern idols had made him popular among the high priests of idolatry.

Closely related to the discussions of the works are short essays on "Key Ideas". Relatively long pieces summarize Lewis' positions on such topics as "Imagination", "Natural Law" and "Reason". Shorter ones range from "Bulverism" to "Monarchy" to "Quiddity". These rapid presentations of Lewis' point of view, quoting liberally from his own words, are excellent as far as they go, but have little critical depth.

Next come a "Who's Who" of people who were important to Lewis, a miscellaneous "What's What" of places, organizations, concepts, terms and facts ("The Kilns", "Oxford University Socratic Club", "Anthroposophy", "Don(s)", "Stage Plays of the Chronicles of Narnia") that relate to Lewis in some fashion, and an 84 page bibliography of everything by Lewis that had appeared in print through about 1996.

The strength of the Companion is the immense fund of information that it provides. Its weaknesses are the author's uncritical devotion to his subject and the lacunae in those areas that don't interest him. The academic side of Lewis' career, in particular, is underdeveloped. One finds little about the controversy over the Oxford English curriculum, in which Lewis played a prominent role. As already noted, "The Allegory of Love", which made CSL's reputation as a scholar, gets scant notice. Important essays like "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato", "Donne and Seventeenth Century Love Poetry" and "The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line" receive none at all.

The readers who will find the Companion most useful (and will prefer it to the Readers' Encyclopedia) are those who are interested in CSL primarily as a Christian thinker and novelist and who are more concerned with gaining a fuller appreciation of his writings than in examining what others have written about him.

Since another reviewer has raised it, one must address the question of Mr. Hooper's reliability. When he first came to Lewis studies, a callow outsider abruptly elevated beyond his expectations or deserts, he sought to enhance his statute by falsely claiming a long and intimate association with Lewis. That was a foolish course of action and gained enemies who have hounded him for decades with increasingly sensational accusations. I have no way to judge whether any or all of the charges are well-founded, but they are mostly of interest to biographers of Hooper, not to students of Lewis. Save in marginal areas and subject to normal human frailty, there is no valid reason to impugn the Companion's accuracy. One may leave the last word on this topic to the Readers' Encyclopedia, which, in the course of a far from flattering article about Mr. Hooper, calls the Companion a "landmark volume". Its author may, for all I know, be a bad man, but he is a good encyclopedist.

The review posted below by David Kathman succinctly summarizes the content of this scholarly polemic against the absurdities of the literary "Oxford Movement". I just wish to note that the 1999 paperback edition is a straight reprint of the 1994 hardbound. Therefore, while it addresses the orthodox Looney-Ogburn-Whalen school of anti-Stratfordianism, there is nothing about more recent mutations. Readers who want to keep up to date on the controversy should take a look at Professor Kathman's Shakespeare Authorship Web site, which discusses virtually all of the Oxfordian arguments and links to such interesting material as a complete edition of the Earl of Oxford's extant letters, which may prove disillusioning to those who cherish an image of the earl as a polymathic genius.

Even though it does not swat the very latest fantasies of Authorship Cultism, "Shakespeare, In Fact" is both entertaining and useful. Reading it will leave one better informed about not only the narrow question of who wrote Shakespeare but also the broader context of the Elizabethan stage and Renaissance literature.

The editor (or, more accurately, compiler) of this volume is honest about how he put it together: He clipped interesting stories about unsuccessful dot.com companies and slipped them into a file. When the file was thick enough, he arranged the stories more or less topically, padded them with his file of recent non-dot.com "computer failure" articles, obtained reprint permissions and, voila!, produced a book (or, more accurately, a "book").

The stories are grouped into chapters, and between the chapters comes the editor's intellectual contribution, consisting mostly of jejune observations that we have all seen or thought before.

If you read The Wall Street Journal and The Industry Standard, you have already read most of this book, and the parts that you haven't read are of marginal interest. On the positive side, the articles are interesting, even though their moral is generally one that was old when Charles Dow was knee-high to a debenture: Don't throw money into an enterprise that you don't understand.

And the moral of this review is: Throw money at this book if you want a permanent anthology of schadenfreude. Otherwise, you got some bucks to invest? Right here I have the Next Great Thing. . . .

Origen (c. 185 - c. 250) is, with Tertullian, one of the two prolific ante-Nicene Christian authors who is not recognized as a saint. That verdict on Tertullian, an apostate to the Montanist sect, is not surprising. Origen, however, was the most prominent Christian teacher and scholar of his day, remained steadfastly loyal to the Church, died as a martyr and was admired fervently by such great and unquestionably orthodox theologians as Gregory of Nyssa. Notwithstanding such credentials, his ideas fell under suspicion soon after his death, and "Origenism" has since borne a taint of heresy.

Joseph Trigg, an Episcopal clergyman and author of a previous life of Origen ("Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-century Church" (1983)), would like to restore his subject's reputation and introduce him to contemporary Christians. To that end, he has assembled this anthology of a dozen selections: seven Biblical commentaries, four homilies and a letter to St. Gregory the Wonder Worker. Most of these are excerpts from, or fragments of, longer works, but each is substantial in itself. None will be familiar to the non-specialist. Not included are Origen's best known treatise (the source of many later doubts about his orthodoxy), "Peri Archon" ("On First Principles"), and his apologia "Contra Celsum", both readily found elsewhere and neither typical of the author's work.

Origen's great subject was the interpretation of Scripture. These texts illustrate his approach, which differs strikingly from that of any modern commentator. The underlying theory is that, because God is the author of the Bible, every word of the text is significant. But, because God is supremely subtle, that significance is not evident to the untutored reader. The plain, obvious meaning is, to Origen's mind, usually the least important. The deepest, spiritual truths can be uncovered only through learned scholarship, augmented by prayer.

These principles lead to minute, painstaking analysis. Book I of the commentary on John's Gospel, 46 pages in this edition, is devoted to discussing two words. The conclusions reached through this effort can be unexpected and may often look arbitrary, as when Jeremiah's lamentations over Jerusalem are construed as an allegory of the mission of the Apostles or Jesus's washing of his disciples' feet is taken as symbolic of Christian pedagogy.

Because this way of reading Scripture is so foreign to our habits, these writings, if perused quickly and carelessly, are more likely to bewilder than enlighten. Origen's method and assumptions obviously bear no resemblance to modern Biblical scholarship, despite his sedulous care to establish the most accurate possible text. Nor can he be grouped with the fundamentalists. He agrees with them that the Bible is the very Word (and words) of God. From that premise, the draws the unfundamentalist conclusion that statements of fact are frequently not to be taken literally and that ordinary Christians get little out of Scripture without expert guidance.

To read Origen as more than an historical curiosity requires, then, the adoption of an unfamiliar perspective on the Bible. Fr. Trigg's introduction, while offering a useful account of Origen's career and posthumous reputation, unfortunately pays little attention to furnishing equipment for such a feat of intellectual imagination. A work like James Kugel's "The Bible As It Was", dealing with the very similar ancient Jewish hermeneutics, may help supply this need.

Origen is one of the most famous names in early Christian history, and this collection, though not fare for a casual Sunday afternoon, is the best available way for laymen to see a great mind at work in its most characteristic mode.

Whatever its impact on India, the two centuries of the British Raj were an inspiration for novelists, poets, painters, film makers and popular historians. Lawrence James falls into the last group. His "Raj" is a set of overlapping portraits: some exciting, some grandiose, some grim, some exotic, all animated and colorful. They do not quite blend into a coherent picture of British rule but are fascinating to view.

Mr. James has set himself the task of covering political, institutional and social history. Although he limits himself to the British point of view, the job is too big for even a bulky volume like this one. As a consequence, many years and events receive brief notices or none at all. (By comparison, Sir Penderel Moon's "The British Conquest and Dominion of India", which concentrates almost completely on politics, is over twice as long.) The institutional and social accounts likewise jump around. There is, for example, a section, set before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, on the onerous taxation imposed on Indian villages, in which we are told of tax rates of 50 to 75 percent of net income. Later, in a different context, appear economic statistics for a single locality, which have the villagers paying taxes of about five percent. The discrepancy is not explained, nor even alluded to. Did the British wisely cut taxes after the Mutiny? Were rates drastically different in different areas? Did widespread evasion make the nominal rates a sham? Are the figures for some reason not comparable? There is no way to tell, and the question is surely not unimportant.

Elsewhere, as in the section on the Princely States, the author recounts a multitude of details without leaving a clear impression. One would like some estimate of the balance between playboy rajas and their hardworking counterparts, and between princes loyal to the paramount power and those who submitted only under duress. The mere alternation of scandal and praise is not satisfactory.

If, however, one looks at the parts without worrying about their sum, this is an informative (and certainly lively) book. Subjects range from concise histories of the Raj's most dramatic eras (its formation in the 18th Century, the Great Mutiny and the nationalist struggles of the 20th century) to taxation and policing to the social and sexual lives of the sahib class to India's participation in the World Wars to literature and films about the Raj. Unhappily, the author's serviceable prose is too frequently marred by copy editing that is wretched even by the low standards of our day. Jarring is the frequent use of "whom" where "who" would be correct (a most unusual error). Surrealistic is this garbled statement (p. 451) about a corps of staunchly Islamic troops: "Pathans, always highly receptive to Pan-Islamic appeals, were responsible for two mutinies of the 130th Baluchis during the winter of 1914-15, both sparked off by fears of being forced to follow Muslims." My puzzlement lasted until I figured out that "to follow Muslims" was supposed to read "to fight fellow Muslims".

Some earlier reviews on this site decry Mr. James' supposed partiality for the British rulers and inattention to the masses of their subjects. That is a misguided criticism. The author is alert for signs of racialism, arrogance and ineptitude among the British, occasionally to the point of unfairness. Were those Englishmen who deplored Hindu customs really more blameworthy than the post-1948 politicians who sought to suppress them and turn India into a secular state (an effort that is now encountering a dangerous backlash)? As for his summary evaluation that the Raj was good for the subcontinent, that is a left-handed compliment. He reckons that, given the realities of 18th and 19th century geopolitics, India was bound to fall prey to some form of European imperialism and that the British form was more benign than any of the alternatives.

It is true that he is strongly critical of Mahatma Gandhi's insouciance concerning the outcome of World War II and of vain, incompetent Lord Mountbatten's handling of the partition between India and Pakistan. Anyone who thinks that India would have been better off in the Far Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere or that Mountbatten deserves no blame for the butcher's bill of 1948 should turn elsewhere for reading matter, preferably to works of utopian fantasy.

The Raj is such a sprawling subject that no single volume can paint it entire. This one, while imperfect in many ways, is a good starting point.

Anthony Trollope declared once that "Lady Anna" was "the best novel I ever wrote". Readers did not agree. Appearing between the masterpieces "Phineas Redux" and "The Way We Live Now", it sold poorly and has been neglected ever since. Trollope blamed this failure on his audience's objections to the heroine's choice of a husband, though similar complaints, much more vehemently expressed, had not sunk "The Small House at Allington". (There Lily Dale remains faithful to the memory of a cad, scorning the devoted attentions of a worthy suitor. Anna's wooers, by contrast, are both good men, though vastly different in rank and personality.)

"Lady Anna" is, in fact, a well-knit narrative with more suspense than is usual for Trollope. Will the courts declare Anna to be Lady Anna Lovel, heiress to 35,000 pounds a year, or merely Anna Murray, a pauper? Which of her suitors, the sometimes surly tailor Daniel Thwaite or her handsome, good-natured cousin Lord Lovel, will Anna prefer? Will Daniel's political principles lead to a breach with his childhood sweetheart? Will the impoverished Lord Lovel find honorable means to support his noble rank? The plot takes surprising, if not astonishing, turns; the characterization is as deft as ever; and there is a leavening of subtle humor, such as Daniel's cross-purposes consultation with a quondam radical poet (a thinly disguised Robert Southey) who has evolved into an intractable Tory.

The book's weakness is that the leading characters are, by and large, decent folk at the beginning and, except for one who falls into a state akin to madness, remain decent, if not unchanged, to the end. Conflicts end in rational compromises. Everybody eventually sees everybody else's point of view. Even the lawyers on opposite sides of Lady Anna's case get along amicably. (One solicitor does have the sense to grumble that such harmony is unprofessional.)

Trollope's liking for this novel may have arisen from the fact that it is light, sunny and fresh. There may be an evil earl in the first chapter and a mad countess in the last, but how pleasant for the writer to be free for a time from the political intrigues, financial manipulations and cynical worldliness of the Palliser saga and "The Way We Live Now"! Moreover, "Lady Anna" was, in its creator's mind, only a prologue. The last paragraph promises a (never written) sequel, where the characters doubtless were intended to meet sterner challenges. There are hints that the scene would have shifted to Australia and America and that the hero's and heroine's homegrown principles were to be put to the test in those lands. Thus the author had much in view that he never disclosed to his readers, perhaps accounting for part of the discrepancy between his opinion and theirs.

No one who has not read all of the Palliser and Barset novels, not to mention "The Way We Live Now", should pick up "Lady Anna". I recommend it immediately after the last-named. It will cleanse the palate and leave a lingering regret that the rest of Anna's and Daniel's and Lord Lovel's adventures will never be known.

Incidental note: The introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, the one that I am reviewing, is an extraordinarily silly example of lit crit bafflegab. Don't read it before reading the novel. Read afterwards, its wrong-headed ideological interpretations may prove amusing.