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I just finished reading a book ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haniaw gave me over the holidays: THE JESUIT AND THE SKULL: TEILHARD DE CHARIN, EVOLUTION, AND THE SEARCH FOR PEKING MAN by Amir D. Aczel. Hania -- who knows me very well -- realized this was exactly the kind of non-fiction I like to read, and she was right. I was fascinated by the under-story in this: the character of de Chardin, who is a gorgeously flawed person. One could write a fine novel about this.
You have a Jesuit priest who is also a scientist, who is writing about evolution and who has found a way to reconcile his faith with what science was telling him, but who -- because his beliefs now were at odds with church doctrine -- was not permitted to publish books and essays on his findings. Yet de Chardin's faith and adherence to the oaths he'd taken as a Jesuit would not allow him to renounce that faith and break away so that he could follow the path his mind was following. He took the rebukes of the powers-that-be; he allowed them to exile him from the Paris he loved to China.
There he found new passion with the fossils of the Peking Man -- that was interesting, yes, but again, what interested me far more was another under-story: his long relationship with Lucile Swan. Here again, when he was obviously in love with the woman (and she with him), he could not abandon his oaths and the required celibacy of the priesthood, and so ended up destroying a friendship that was very precious to him.
Teilhard de Chardin would be a wonderful novel character: intelligent and conflicted, at odds with himself and the world. I must steal some of that...
I would have loved to have seen Aczel examine more closely the contradictions within de Chardin; instead, he skirts that wonderful conflict and makes it only a sub-plot to the Peking Man tale. I kept wanting him to delve more deeply into the psyche of de Chardin, to explore the relationship with Lucile Swan, to give us a more fully developed portrait of the man. Instead, he keeps us at arm's length. That may be due to a lack of source material; after all, Aczel is writing non-fiction and is cleaving as closely to the facts as he can.
We novelists don't have that problem. When facts get in the way of story, we'll plow them under...
Thanks for the read, Hania!
haniaw gave me over the holidays: THE JESUIT AND THE SKULL: TEILHARD DE CHARIN, EVOLUTION, AND THE SEARCH FOR PEKING MAN by Amir D. Aczel. Hania -- who knows me very well -- realized this was exactly the kind of non-fiction I like to read, and she was right. I was fascinated by the under-story in this: the character of de Chardin, who is a gorgeously flawed person. One could write a fine novel about this. You have a Jesuit priest who is also a scientist, who is writing about evolution and who has found a way to reconcile his faith with what science was telling him, but who -- because his beliefs now were at odds with church doctrine -- was not permitted to publish books and essays on his findings. Yet de Chardin's faith and adherence to the oaths he'd taken as a Jesuit would not allow him to renounce that faith and break away so that he could follow the path his mind was following. He took the rebukes of the powers-that-be; he allowed them to exile him from the Paris he loved to China.
There he found new passion with the fossils of the Peking Man -- that was interesting, yes, but again, what interested me far more was another under-story: his long relationship with Lucile Swan. Here again, when he was obviously in love with the woman (and she with him), he could not abandon his oaths and the required celibacy of the priesthood, and so ended up destroying a friendship that was very precious to him.
Teilhard de Chardin would be a wonderful novel character: intelligent and conflicted, at odds with himself and the world. I must steal some of that...
I would have loved to have seen Aczel examine more closely the contradictions within de Chardin; instead, he skirts that wonderful conflict and makes it only a sub-plot to the Peking Man tale. I kept wanting him to delve more deeply into the psyche of de Chardin, to explore the relationship with Lucile Swan, to give us a more fully developed portrait of the man. Instead, he keeps us at arm's length. That may be due to a lack of source material; after all, Aczel is writing non-fiction and is cleaving as closely to the facts as he can.
We novelists don't have that problem. When facts get in the way of story, we'll plow them under...
Thanks for the read, Hania!