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The second book I've read this month with the same theme, people being kidnapped and locked away in rooms where they are kept as prisoners. In this case, the woman gives birth to a child in the room, and the story begins on his fifth birthday, and is told through the child's eyes.

The child, Jack, knows no other world than Room. He gets some impressions of the world outside from books and TV, but their captor is not generous, and the mother tells him the world they see on TV or read about in books is not real, because he does not want him to be disappointed by knowing he is a prisoner, and that there is a world out there he cannot reach. She employs their time together by teaching Jack to read and write, so he has some knowledge and skills that most children his age do not have, but is deprived of sensory and physical knowledge that other children do have, he has never touched or felt grass or trees, or seen or touched live animals.

A historical novel for children, [b:The Dragonfly Pool|2544359|The Dragonfly Pool|Eva Ibbotson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1319453762l/2544359.SY75.jpg|2965195] is set at the beginning of the Second World War. Tally Hamilton is the daughter of a doctor in a poor area of London, and war seemed increasingly likely she is given a scholarship to a boarding school in Devon, where her family think she will be safer from the expected air raids.

Tally goes reluctantly, especially when her snobby cousins tell her what their posh boarding school is like, but she discovers that it is quite different. It's a kind of progressive school where the children have a lot of freedom, and tally really enjoys it, and makes some good friends. She persuades the school to enter a folk-dancing competition in an obscure East European country threatened with a Nazi takeover, and Tally and her friends find themselves in a position to attempt to foil a plot against Prince Karil, who find the free English school children a refreshing change from stuffy court protocol. But the danger is real and they have to find a way to escape it.

Author [a:Eva Ibbotson|57462|Eva Ibbotson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1594950052p2/57462.jpg] was herself a refugee in a similar position, and also attended a school similar to the Delderton School in her story, and so her descriptions of the setting and events ring true, and gives the reader a feel of what it was like to be there.

There was a point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, where it felt as though some of the descriptions were overdone, and at that point I was thinking of giving it four stars, but it recovered again towards the end.

This is the kind of book one hears about long before one actually reads it. I saw it in the library and thought such a book of short stories would be nice to read before going to bed.

I'd read bowdlerised versions of some of them as a child, such as the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, which has found its way into children's anthologies of short stories, as have some of the others, such as those concerning Sindbad the Sailor; actually he wasn't a sailor, he was a businessman who chartered ships to carry his merchandise, but the ships invariably got wrecked, casting him up on a strange shore, where after some hardships he usually acquired more merchandise, and restored to prosperity, returned home.

Most of the stories have the same or similar tropes, which can be summarised by the song from Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera "The Mikado" --

Taken from the county jail
By a set of curious chances
Liberated then on bail
On my own recognizances
Wafted by a favouring gale
As one sometimes is in trances
To a height that few can scale
Save by long and weary dances
Surely never had a male
Under such-like circumstances
So adventurous a tale
Which may rank with most romances.

And many of the romances that it may rank with are those in this book.

Bill Hodges is a retired detective, bored with his retirement, facing the question "why kill time when you can kill yourself" when a letter drops into his mail box, claiming to me from the perpetrator of one of his biggest unsolved cases, a mass murder in which a stolen car was driven into a queue of job seekers.

Bill knows he should take the letter to his old colleagues in the police, but the letter invites him to an internet chat site, where the killer taunts him, and he turns private detective, seriously seeking to catch the killer before he kills again. And the closer he gets, they more it becomes clear that only he, and his associates, a young black student and a middle-aged woman with mental health problems, will be in a position to stop the killer before he kills again.

It's not a whodunit, since the reader knows who that is all along, but rather the story of a race against time to find where the killer is going to strike next, and to stop him.

Silas Bird, a twelve-year-old boy, lives with his father, a pioneer photographer, in the Mid-West of the USA. His mother died when he was born. His father is kidnapped by a gang of counterfeiters who believe that his photographic skills will help them. He tells Silas he will be back soon, and that he should stay and wait for him at home.

Then a horse belonging to the kidnappers returns to Silas, who takes this as a sign that he should follow his father and try to rescue him. He calls the horse Pony, and, though he had not ridden a horse before, sets off to follow the kidnappers through the woods, accompanied by his invisible friend Mittenwool, a ghost that only he can see.

The story is set in the 1860s, and in that sense is a historical novel, in that the historical background shapes the story. It is also a horse story, as Silas gets to know the horse that came to him, and took him on the quest to find his father. It is a ghost story, in which Silas's ghostly companion Mittenwool is not the only ghost. It is a crime novel, involving the hunting of a gang of counterfeiters. It is also a Bildungsroman, in which Silas grows up a lot, finding himself having to make critical decisions without adult guidance.

It's the kind of book I would love to have read when I was 12 years old.

A police procedural set in North-Eastern Scotland.

Sergeant Logan McRae and his team have to deal with a great variety of crimes, major and minor, and also have to deal with overlapping investigations by other branches of the police. As the title implies, this book deals mainly with missing and dead persons.

One man is arrested for torturing another, and the children of the torture victim are missing. In another case, the body of a young girl is found, and she appears to have been murdered, but no child of that description has been reported missing. An investigation into the theft of ATMs leads to a drug-dealing suspect, and investigations are sometimes hampered by jurisdictional disputes between different police teams, so the Sergeant McRae finds that he sometimes commended and reprimanded for the same incident.

There are some unexpected plot twists which lead to Sergeant McRae and those he loves being put in danger as well.

Odd Thomas can see dead people. His ability to see dead people has sometimes caused him to get into trouble in the past, which is why he is now a guest at a monastery in the Sierra Nevada of California, hoping to find some peace and tranquillity.

But, because his ability to see dead people allows him to see the ghost of a monk who is thought to have committed suicide, and now occasionally rings the church bells, Odd Thomas also has keys that allow him access to most parts of the monastery and the nearby school for disabled children. Odd Thomas also has the ability to see bodachs, shadowy harbingers of death, whose gathering in the rooms of some of the children in the school suggests that they may be under threat of death. As a snowstorm builds up, and a monk disappears, Odd must try to discern the nature of the threat, so that it can be neutralised.

[a:Dean Koontz|9355|Dean Koontz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1581963714p2/9355.jpg] has written many books. I have read four of them, and of those four this is by far the best. This one is the third of a series of books featuring Odd Thomas, a young man who has had a difficult life, and earns a living as a cook in a fast-food restaurant in a desert town in the western USA, where he has helped the police chief to solve puzzling crimes with the aid of his ability to see dead people.

I read the second book of the series, [b:Forever Odd|16433|Forever Odd (Odd Thomas, #2)|Dean Koontz|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348816320l/16433.SY75.jpg|2789370], and was not very impressed (see my review here), but was intrigued by the description of this one, and the fact that it was set in a monastery. This setting, I thought, might give me a clue to the worldview of Dean Koontz, and to get an idea of where he was coming from. I wondered whether, in view of the setting, it might be comparable with the novels of [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg] whose book [b:All Hallows Eve|143225|All Hallows' Eve|Charles Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347477101l/143225.SY75.jpg|138160] featured two dead girls.

Koontz uses some of the same ingredients in his novels, so that his books could be described, like those of Charles Williams, as "supernatural thrillers". Some of the same tropes are there -- a supernatural blizzard, ghosts, the temptations of power. In most of Koontz's books, however, the ingredients seem to be clumsily put together, and the theological implications are obscure. Here they are much clearer, and one of the tropes is an interesting analogy with a current concern: just what is the nature of the "intelligence" that we debate about when we talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Doro, an immortal being who has lived for thousands of years, moving from body to body of hosts he kills, has a breeding programme which eventually produces Mary, at telepath who has powers almost equal to his own. She discovers, or creates, the Pattern, which enables her to draw others to herself, and creates a kind of community. But Doro seeks to inhibit its growth.

This belongs to a subgenre of the science fiction I read in my youth, most of which was written in the "psi boom" of the early 1950s. These stories featured people who had "psi-powers", such as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, precognition and the like. [b:Mind of My Mind|6609765|Out of My Mind (Out of My Mind, #1)|Sharon M. Draper|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347602096l/6609765.SX50.jpg|6803732] deals mainly with people who are telepathic, and thus able to read other people's minds. When young, this ability is latent but those who have it undergo a rather traumatic transition to become "active", which causes many of those who have the ability to go mad or die.

Over the years the subgenre has broadened and extended to fantasy literature, where characters have a much wider range of "superpowers" available to them, over and above the traditional psi powers.

[a:Tom Holland|52292|Tom Holland|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1223405186p2/52292.jpg]'s thesis is that the moral and ethical values of Western Civilisation have been shaped mainly by Christianity, and in this book he tries to follow and explain the process by which this happened. He covers a broad sweep of Western Christianity, sometimes illuminating particular historical events and periods as he does so.

I think it is a book that would be useful for most Christians to read; Western Christians, because it is about them and their history; Orthodox Christians living in the West, or in any society where Western values are influential, to help them to understand the society in which they live. It would also be useful for Orthodox Christians not living in the West, because the West is influential even in places where its values are not dominant. It will be useful to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia, especially those colonised by the West, to see what Western values are based on.

For an example of the last point, Holland makes some interesting comments on how the Western concept of "religion" came to be applied outside the West. In a sense the British East India Company applied the concept of "religion" to India. This concept had been shaped by the history of Christianity in the West, especially in the Early Modern period, and it could be said that the British East India Company invented Hinduism as a religion. Holland could, however, have said a little more about how the concept had developed in the West before being applied to India. He does point out that in the premodern period "religion" referred primarily to those who had taken monastic vows or something similar, but modernity has changed this understanding. A useful book on this topic, for those who would like to know more, is ["Religion" and the Religions in the English Enlightenment] by [a:Peter Harrison|134860|Peter Harrison|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png].

Tom Holland is not himself a Christian, as he makes clear in the last chapter, but he acknowledges that his values are based on Christian presuppositions. In general I agree with most of what he says; I might, however, differ from him over what he does not say.

He appears to give a survey of the history of Western Christianity, but there are significant lacunae. Some of the gaps seem to have things that do not support his thesis, or that might cause readers to modify it. He does not, for example, mention the Great European Witchhunt, in which large parts of Early Modern Christendom appeared to revert to pagan values with regard to witchhunts. He should have at least made some attempt to explain such a dramatic reversal in terms of his theory. For more on this, see my article on Christian Responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery.

Another gap that stood out for me came in the penultimate chapter, dealing with fairly recent events. He describes events of the annus mirabilis 1989, when authoritarian regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa and a wind of freedom blew through the world.

Holland notes that both Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk tended to interpret South Africa's liberation, and that of many communist countries, in 1989/90 in biblical terms, as the writing of God's finger on the affairs of state. loving enemies etc. But Western leaders tended to see it differently. As Holland puts it:

This, however, was not how it tended to be seen by policy-makers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx turned out instead to be closer to a hell emphasised the degree to which the true fulfilment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Confucian, or Muslim, or Hindu. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived (Source: Holland 2019:489)

Secularism, liberal democracy and the concept of human rights are all values which, according to Holland, the West derived from Christianity. I don't quibble with him there. But I don't think they were the values the "policy-makers in America and Europe" thought most important. Those policy-makers included people he did not name, and those who dominated in the 1980s were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose chief values were enshrined in the ideology of neoliberalism, which they had been pushing for the previous eight years and more.

The Neoliberalism they pushed for very strongly, and applied in their own countries, has continued to dominate the world economic system, and may seen as a watered down version of the ideology propagated by Ayn Rand, an atheistic despiser of Christianity and its "altruism". That ideology has been influential in the West since the 1960s, and certainly was held by some people in Reagan's administration, if not by Reagan himself.

In the five years since Holland's book was published, however, events have shown that the West is rapidly abandoning any traces of Christian values that remain.

According to Holland:

That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance and shelter and refuge from persecution:these were never self-evident truths.

The Nazis, certainly, knew as much -- which is why, in today's demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they -- because communism was an expression of concern for the oppressed masses -- rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless society.

But in the five years since Dominion was published, Tom Holland's thesis has been completely overturned. The mass murder precipitated by racism in Gaza in 2023-24 has not been seen as at all abhorrent by Western governments, as can be seen by their frequent protestations of support for the perpetrators. The Western values that Holland says are based on Christianity, like human rights, and concepts like "crimes against humanity" are safely stored away in the musical banks described in [a:Samuel Butler|72703|Samuel Butler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235638432p2/72703.jpg]'s novel [b:Erewhon|516570|Erewhon (Erewhon, #1)|Samuel Butler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1175460304l/516570.SY75.jpg|924128].