FOREIGN PARTS

in most of Europe. Biblical is the word. National Geographic recently produced a map showing the impact of human beings on Africa. Predictably the Sahara Desert and the Congo Basin are almost blank. South Africa and huge conurbations glow with roads and buildings, mines and factories. And Ethiopia shows the same intensity of human impact as dense urban settlement. Yet from an aeroplane window the Ethiopia highlands can look like the Alps in the sun. You have to walk the ground to see how crowded the landscape is. Every tree is known and owned, every rock has been touched. For centuries Ethiopia has been tilled and fought over, dug and gouged. Rather than cutting stone to build churches, the Ethiopians carved them into the rock, underground or by tunnelling into cliffs, building in reverse. In search of these churches, Philip Marsden walked from Lalibela to Akusm, the Zion of Ethiopia. They are extraordinary, many of them deliberately cut off from the earth by sheer cliffs, with trap doors in rock ceilings that are accessible only by cowhide ropes or rusty chains. Their inhabitants are enigmatic: astounding in their discipline, devotion to God and resilience, yet unable to reach out to outsiders with a biblical message of universal love for humanity. They seem to be a remnant of the church of the Dark Ages, where monasteries were a refuge, an escape to find salvation away from the evil of the world. Counter to fashion, Marsden writes sparsely, with little about himself. His sentences are tiny clear brush strokes building a picture. His reactions to things are understated; he feels a little thirst here, momentary awe there, but I know little about him by the end of the book. However, I do know a lot more about Ethiopia, and it feels like the Ethiopia I have glimpsed. Unlike that of the rest of Africa, Ethiopia’s history – kings and wars and legends – is its own. The book begins with a thumbnail history of the country (just 439 words), starting with the founder, descended from Noah, and the royal family, begotten by the union of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Ethiopians were already part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition when the Brits were running around in woad, worshipping bits of wood. Ethiopia is an ancient civilisation whose Coptic Christianity goes back to the fifth century. Protected from Arab invasions and Western venturers by its inaccessible mountains, it developed a distinct Christian and monastic tradition of its own. It joined the

Europeans in carving up Africa in the nineteenth century, and saw off the Italians at the battle of Adwa in 1896, one of the few clashes with outsiders in the nation’s history. As Marsden shrewdly points out, however, the victory ‘sealed Ethiopia again, froze its spectacular traditions and earned it another glorious century of isolation’. Ethiopia’s seclusion has also left the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions far more entwined and tolerant of each other than in the rest of the world. I have always felt that being Christian, Muslim or Falasha Jewish in Ethiopia was like being Baptist, Methodist or Anglican in Britain. There are no outside political factions to exploit religious differences. Indeed, Marsden finds a Muslim village and reminds us that the Negus, the Ethiopian ruler, gave sanctuary to Muhammad’s companions when they were persecuted in Medina. The beauty of this book is that Marsden does not interpret, he reports. He is eyes and ears, recalling faithfully what he is told by the monks and priests in their own words. So we learn that in the history of one of the monasteries 150 people once arrived with clubs and ropes to drive out a holy man, who ‘turned their clubs into leopards and lions and tigers and their ropes into snakes. The 150 were killed by those beasts and [the man] saw them and they were lying on the ground like dead flies.’ Then there is another holy man, who was so holy that he prayed for twenty years without sitting down. His right leg rotted and fell off and is now preserved in the monastery of Debra Libanos. Obligingly, as if writing a tourist guide, Marsden informs us: ‘once a year on his feast day, it is taken out and pilgrims are permitted to drink the water used to wash it’. Just occasionally he slips in a slice of philosophy or theology from somewhere else to show that Ethiopian concepts are no less profound or unique for all the country’s isolation from the mainstreams of European and Arab theology. Ethiopia’s isolation has allowed outsiders to build up myths, such as those of Prester John, the beleaguered Christian priest king, sought by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century; and of Emperor Haile Selassie, sought by Rastafarians, who regarded him as divine (Selassie was amused but embarrassed by their attentions and gave them land quite a long way from the capital). The truth of Ethiopia is of such mythic proportions that I am not sure if this book will add to outsiders’ understanding or baffle them even more. To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 78

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 FOREIGN PARTS

H ARRY M OUNT TV’S SOCRATES

T HE C ALLOFTHE W EIRD

★By Louis Theroux (Macmillan 289pp £17.99)

I MUSTDECLARE my connection to Louis Theroux. I was in the year below him at school and university. He hasn’t changed very much. He was just as gentle then – dopey even – as he was on the telly in Weird Weekends, when he investigated the strange American sects he writes up in this book. What is less apparent on telly is his acute intelligence, telegenically veiled by that dopiness. He was so clever at Westminster that he jumped a year. And he got a First in Modern History at Magdalen. But he never had the brittle arrogance that often goes with that sort of record. To be clever without wanting to glory in it, put dimmer people down or make an act of covering it up (viz Boris Johnson) is rare. At school and university and on the telly, he showed his intelligence in a soft, Socratic way, asking interconnected questions whose answers gradually built up until you emerged as a pretty good fool. This is all a roundabout way of saying how beautifully suited Theroux is to television. The Socratic technique worked like a dream in his Louis Meets… series, exposing the vaingloriousness of, among others, Ann Widdecombe, Neil and Christine Hamilton, and Keith Harris. In a television world of staged aggression that lacks focus (Jeremy Paxman, everyone on the Todayprogramme) and the staged softness of the celebrity interview (Martin Bashir, Sir Trevor McDonald), Theroux’s line in ever-so-nice character assassination is a one-off. Theroux has come less to assassinate than to investigate in this alluring book, where he returns to America to see his old television interviewees six years after he last interviewed them – porn stars, gangster rappers, white supremacists, UFO followers, get-rich-quick gurus and anti-government fanaticists. His aim is no longer to skewer his subjects on the contradictory points of their beliefs. This time, he’s trying to establish what makes them tick, and whether their different sorts of weirdness have shared roots. Paul Theroux’s son writes with just as clear an eye for character and place as his father. His sensitive ear picks up useful neologisms: the ‘aborticide’ of 50 million children since 1970, the horrors of the pair known as ‘Billary’ Clinton, terms coined by anti-government obsessives who tried to set up their own mini-country, ‘Almost Heaven’, in Northern Idaho in the 1990s. And he’s funny, particularly with the Reverend Jerry Gruidl, the Nazi supremacist in Idaho, who admits to

being an Are You Being Served? fan. Theroux asks Jerry to repeat the Mr Humphries catchphrase, ‘I’m free.’ Jerry refuses: ‘But I’m not free! Because this country’s in bondage to the Jews!’ Theroux is alive to the cruel comedy of the nastier sort of weirdness as it comes up against everyday suburban American life. The California home of the two sixteenyear-old sisters in a Nazi singing duet, Prussian Blue, is entirely normal, except for the two little pairs of skinhead boots by the front door. The bumper sticker on their truck reads, ‘My Boss is an Austrian Painter’. The only computer game the girls are allowed to play is one devised by white supremacists, where a skinhead goes through a ghetto shooting Mexicans and blacks who are perched on basketball hoops making gorilla noises. Theroux’s final analysis of American weirdness is true and new. Weirdness is self-sabotaging; that’s why it’s weird. It goes against your moral, financial or social interest to have sex on camera for a living, to pay to be hypnotised into becoming a millionaire, or to prepare for an apocalypse that never comes. Why do it then? Why don’t Theroux’s interviewees come to their senses now, years after he first talked to them on telly? In fact, it doesn’t much matter to the weirdos if something is true or false. What matters is how important it makes them feel. We have all come across the pub conspiracy theorist who grandly tells you that MI6 killed Princess Diana, or that the Druids hummed the stones of Stonehenge from the Preselis to Salisbury Plain. The reason why the pub bores are so proud is entirely that their theories are so unlikely. A man in the pub who told you that Princess Diana died because her chauffeur was drunk, or that the Stonehenge stones were transported by conventional means, could hardly claim to be a curiosity. Once Theroux realised that all his interviewees shared this desire to impress through fantasy, they lost some of their nastiness and edge. The white supremacists seemed more pathetic; the gangster rappers merely irresponsible, as opposed to poetic; the money-making gurus more straightforwardly manipulative than odd. Theroux’s criticisms of the shortcomings of weird Americans are all the more convincing for his willingness to praise them. It’s that even-handed gentleness again. He’s perfectly ready to admit that Jerry Gruidl can also be pretty decent. When Theroux loses his computer, Jerry takes a stack of flyers advertising the lost computer round town and tracks it down for him. Theroux is then presented with the conundrum: what do you give a neo-Nazi for a thank-you present? Very few people know a neo-Nazi. Even fewer know a neoNazi well enough to be done a favour by one. Only lovely, gentle, clever, unique Louis Theroux bothers to buy one a present. He settles for an anti-Bush quiz book. To order this book at £14.39, see order form on page 78

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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