‘She pities the elderly residents of the care home she works for, assuming that none has any children to care for them,’ PAGE 33


A Staging Post for Four Horses: the Hippodrome in Constantinople by Onofrio Panvinio (1529-68)


Exuberant artifice


The Secret Lives of Buildings Edward Hollis PORTOBELLO BOOKS, 448PP, £25 Tablet Bookshop price £22.50


ablet readers will find this extraordinary book impressive on a number of different levels. It is written, the author tells us, “to insist not only that buildings will change, but, perhaps also that they should”. His aim is to “narrate” buildings (rather than tell you what they were like when they first leapt from the architect’s design); and he has an enviable gift for storytelling that makes his prose an ideal medium for what he is about. Some of the stories will make you weep; others will lift the heart. The story that runs all through the book is that of the Parthenon, a building that, he observes, “once was perfect, and never will be again”, that “was a church for a millennium, longer by far than it had been a Temple for Athene”; it is “melting into air, and all the restoration and conservation in the world can only postpone its disappearance”. On every page there are sentences that


T


effortlessly distil genuine scholarship, not just of architecture, but also of languages and history and politics. The author has the storyteller’s gift of being able to put precisely the right word in the right place, in a way that could lead you to skate over the sentence, until you realise that he has used it to say something that forces you into profound reflection: “The ‘barbarians’ of the Dark Ages were the capricious curators of a museum whose meaning we shall never fully understand”; or “So impressed was Nero by the culture of Greece that he stripped her of her works of art”; “The Holy House looks like a simple building, but it is in fact a complex and


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subtle prayer”; “Venice has become a museum of itself … moored like a cruise-liner in an Adriatic lagoon”. Perhaps the most striking feature of this book is the eclectic range of the buildings whose


stories it tells. As well as the Parthenon and the Holy House of Loreto, there is San Marco in Venice, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and Gloucester Cathedral – when you go there again, reread its story as Hollis tells it, with book in hand, as you gaze at the narrative in stone, and witness the birth of that great English triumph, the Perpendicular. There is the Alhambra,“a meeting of


Christendom and Islam at the dawn of the Renaissance”; the Tempio Malatesta in Rimini, and the appalling arrogance of Malatesta’s trial by the Roman Curia; Sans Souci in Potsdam, “a boundless hallucination, one insubstantial pageant”; Notre Dame de Paris – “an arbitrary fiction” is Hollis’ verdict on the nineteenth-century reconstruction by Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus. Then there are two quite unexpected stories: the tragedy of the Hulme Crescents in Manchester, and the Berlin Wall,“in which history comes to an end” – only, of course, it doesn’t. Then comes the Venetian in Las Vegas


“In Which History is So, Like, Over”, and, finally, the unexpected but exactly right climax to the book, Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a gripping story of the clash of incompatible narratives in our time and in the times that have gone before. Here is much to ponder upon, not least for those who want to freeze institutions, such as languages or communities or churches, at a particular moment of their development, or to “turn the clock back” to a time when all was perfect. Buildings, like children and the Latin


Mass or the institution of the Church, defeat the plans that you make for them, and take on a life of their own. That is not to say that I agree with every word in this book; stories are not like that. It is simply that one is the richer for having read it. Beware, though, of reading this book on a train or a bus; you are quite likely to miss your stop. Nicholas King


FOUR COURTS PRESS www.fourcourtspress.ie


OUR REVIEWERS Fernando Cervantes is a reader in history at the University of Bristol.


Nicholas King SJ teaches theology at Oxford.


Florence O’Donoghueis a member of the Irish and English Bars and a specialist in Irish history.


John Jolliffe is a journalist and the author of English Catholic Heroes.


James Moranis head of drama at the University of Nottingham.


Julian Margaret Gibbs is a freelance writer.


AND THE SACRED LITURGY


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D. Vincent Twomey SVD 224pp. Hbk. ISBN 978-1-84682-201-8 £30


GEORGE TYRRELL AND CATHOLIC MODERNISM Oliver P. Rafferty SJ, editor


188pp. Hbk. ISBN 978-1-84682-236-0 £40 order online and receive a 10% discount


18 September 2010 | THE TABLET | 31


BENEDICT XVI


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