Book Review: The Body of This Death by Ross McCullough

The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster by Ross McCullough

This epistolary novel set in a not-too-distant future presents letters from an unnamed archbishop dealing with a lot of modern problems. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality dominate pop culture and a lot of life, so much so that people ike the archbishop, who participate only minimally, are seen as pariahs. He cautions his correspondents about the dehumanizing effects. He also deals with the rise of Islam, writing to a woman who is concerned about her daughter interacting with a young ward of the archbishop's who might be converting the daughter by her example and conversation. The government has become more totalitarian and thus much less tolerant of the teachings of the Catholic faith. Things come to a head as he is accused of a crime by the state.

The book provides a lot of interesting reflections on contemporary issues. The imagined future of virtual reality and associated technology is plausible if pessimistic. The decoupling of our human bodies from our "spiritual" or "real" selves has been an ongoing problem exacerbated by medical and technological experimentation that does not respect the human person. Trying to sort out a genuine ecumenism with Islam has been a problem for centuries with fundamental divisions keeping progress from being made. Overbearing states have been a problem for a long time too, from the Pharaohs to the English Henrys (I'm thinking of II and VIII) to Communist and Fascist governments of the twentieth century. The theology in the book is solid and well thought out.

My problem with the book is that it tries to be too clever. The back has a quote comparing this to The Screwtape Letters, something that immediately caught my interest. My expectation was set far too high because C. S. Lewis is a very high bar to get over, something McCullough does not manage. A lot of the phrasing apes the nifty paradoxical style of G. K. Chesterton, though again it just did not work for me. The book ends with a bunch of posthumous letters that were either never sent or found later. The earlier, presumably chronological letters, have notes guiding the reader to specific posthumous letters which have more or less related discussions. Again, I found this more artificially clever than genuinely interesting. Reading this book was very unsatisfying to me, even though I agree with the a lot of the ideas.

Not recommended--the structuring and style obscures the content too much.