James Cary’s book is the exemplification of why you really should never judge a book by its cover. Or in this case why you shouldn’t trust publishers and their PR blurbs. The press release and introduction set you up to expect a highly developed argument, and it sounds an interesting one: the particular type of civilisation that is ruining our “perfectly decent society” is our institutions. “Why” he asks “are we so convinced that institutions will save us, when they are more likely to enslave us?” He will, we are told, desmonstrate this through five major institutions, the media/culture, the economy/banks, the state/politics and the church/religion.
This has the potential to be pretty iconoclastic. Not in daring to criticise our big institutions (that’s become almost old hat) but in challenging the goodness and centrality of institutions in themselves. Much of the influential thinking in recent years has done the opposite, in seeking to revive interest in and promote the centrality of institutions for a healthy society. Both Blue Labour and Red Tory emphasise that social institutions (and they, unlike Cary, would not include the state in this) are what hold a society together and mitigate the all consuming influence of the market. Community organising of many traditions has conceived of institutions as being central ways of bringing people together to undertake common action for the common good. Some, like the respected New York Times columnist David Brooks, believe institutions are so central in shaping the human person that they can “save us from weakness and bring meaning to life”.
Given the near orthodoxy that institutions are important for social health, how then does Cary develop his argument against them? Well, he doesn’t, not really, and not until the very end. This book is in fact a collection of Cary’s columns, a wide-ranging and generally witty series of observations about everything from mortgages to the Year of Jubilee, the Leveson enquiry to satirical summer reading. And, as Cary is a successful sitcom writer (most recently of Bluestone 42 on BBC 3) there’s a lot in there about that as well. It’s almost the negative image of Caitlin Moran’s ‘Moranthology’- funny, but male and right wing rather than socialist and feminist. It becomes increasingly clear that the device of grouping together columns under the five institutions is artificial and often a distraction. Cary admits at one point that it’s a bit “rag bag”. The short pieces are only very rarely attacking a single institution, let alone the whole concept of them. The book is essentially, a tease, dangling a potentially fascinating argument and then refusing to really engage with it.
However, there is also another way in which the book isn’t what you expected to be, and I found this one less frustrating. Those with a working knowledge of the UK publishing industry might spot that Darton, Longman and Todd are more known for spirituality related books than they are big mainstream think pieces, and a few more people may know that Milton Jones, whose blurb is on the front cover is a practising Christian. Other than this there is no clue on the outside or indeed for the first several chapters that Cary is a Christian. Alongside Milton Jones, Douglas Carswell MP (whose unwittingly hilarious blurb says “those we like to think of as experts turn out to have more in common with Inspector Clouseau. You will laugh out loud until you realise what a mess they’ve made of our country”, carefully sidestepping any responsibility) gives a commendation. So does Iain Dale. Neither of these two are known for being particularly pro-religion, in Iain's case rather the opposite. It’s a book pitched at a mainstream audience, clearly designed to be reviewed in the Spectator rather than the Church Times. However, Cary becomes progressively less reticent about his Christian faith. Jokes about Jesus’ twitter followers: (@marymagz: Jesus alive?!?!;-) totes amaze. Mistook him 4 Gardner! LOL!!!) become whole columns on Leviticus 25. Soon “as a Christian” is popping up everywhere. Cary even commits the cardinal sin of admitting to being not just a Christian but (whisper it) an evangelical. In the context of a book that looks like it might sit happily alongside David Willetts and Malcolm Gladwell this is strangely refreshing. While the premise of the argument about institutions felt like a bit of a con, this feels much more how things ought to be, but rarely are. Mainstream books about ideas, politics and comedy written from the actual perspective of the author. Not bringing religion into everything or indulging in inaccessible jargon but “showing your working” where it is relevant.
The author is clearly aware of what a shock this might be to a secular reader. The final part, ostensibly the collection about “church, religion and all things spiritual” begins with the introduction: “this is the point at which one might expect many readers to give up in favour of that Malcolm Gladwell book about some abstract noun you bought on a whim on Amazon months ago and have never got round to reading. Fair enough.” However, he hopes you will keep reading, because it’s only on the final page that his argument, so temptingly dangled in the introduction actually gets explained:
“The state can give you money or a house, but this is not an act of generosity…. Likewise, if you fall on hard times the market does not care…. Similarly the media is not your friend and a science experiment has no soul. This is why the fifth realm, The Church, the odd, overlooked, out of touch church is the most important of all, with its dusty old Bible that is somehow, the best selling book in human history – so maybe the is something in it. And as a church teaches society from the Bible we will find the origins of the unconditional love that we need more than anything else.”
Cary thinks that “institutions tend to make things worse”, because we “applied them incorrectly with the wrong expectations”. They will not, as David Brooks thinks “save us from weakness and bring us meaning”. We want them to get us out of being moral, to replace the need for messy relationships when the only thing that can really save us is love. And for Cary, that is specifically God’s love.
It’s pretty audacious. The marketing of the book is misleading and it would definitely have been more satisfying had it just been advertised for what it is – a collection of witty and insightful columns. However, for its slightly underdeveloped but quietly confident attempt at being normal, and Christian, and funny and mainstream, it is well worth a read.
By Elizabeth Oldfield
