It took one of those three for two deals at Waterstone’s just before Christmas to persuade Cranmer’s Curate to purchase a modern novel with anything to do with the Booker Prize on the front-cover.
Your curate has just got round to finishing Ian McEwan’s prize-winning Amsterdam on an afternoon off.
It would be burlesque of your curate to attempt a literary review of Mr McEwan's masterpiece. Though published in 1998 on the eve of the Millennium, the post-Christian decadence it so powerfully describes is all the more real in Britain now. It is his 'Ecclesiastes' work, portraying fallen human society as it really is and reading it drove your curate to confess his manifold sins and wickedness.
Mercifully, Ecclesiastes is not the last word in God's unfolding revelation. There is the New Testament Gospel of redemption through our Lord Jesus Christ, so beautifully summarised in the 1662 Prayer Book absolution at morning and evening prayer:
'He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel. Wherefore let us beseech him to grant us true repentance and his Holy Spirit, that those things may please him which we do at this present, and that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy; so that at the last we may come to his eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’
It is this Gospel that allows for the possibility that the prefix in post-Christian Britain could be swept away by an Evangelical revival, leaving a future Amsterdam to describe the deep moral ambiguities of a sub-culture rather than mainstream society.
For fallen man of Amsterdam this is impossible but not for the almighty God of the Gospel.
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