CHRISTMAS BOOKS II
Books of the Year
A further selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of the Spectator's regular reviewers
Stephen Spender
THE Body and Society by Peter Brown (Faber, £32.50), author of a great biogra- phy of St Augustine, is the first new book I read in 1989 and remains perhaps the one which has made the greatest impression on me. It is concerned with the attitude of Christians — and also of pagans — towards the body, particularly with regard to sex- uality. Attitudes are far more complex than one might assume from a reading, say, of 1890s' aesthetic writers (`Thou hast conquered, 0 pale Galilean') — that the Christians were opposed to sex (some of them were not) and the Pagans for it (some of them were not.) The body is, as it were, the constant factor in human life and history, and to enter into the past and read what were the attitudes of society at particular times in history towards it is like having that past played out on one's own physical senses. The period of which Peter Brown is writing is one in which Paganism was being superseded by Christianity; whereas that in which we today live is one in which Christianity is being superseded by a version, or versions, of neo-Paganism. Reading this book, I have the impression that in some respects our age is a kind of mirror image of the centuries of early Christianity, in which the attitudes towards the body of that period are seen in reverse.
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