Paradise Re-Read

Part 1

Re-reading a book reveals as much about the people we were on the occasions we opened its cover as it does new insights into the work itself.  The words on the page remain the same, but we don’t.  In this way, books act as mirrors for our interior lives:  portraits of the reader’s mind in youth and then, later, with the added wrinkles of experience.

I have read Milton’s Paradise Lost in its entirety twice (though with a hundred of more targeted returns to particular passages).  The first time was at university when I was 21, the second time twenty years later.  To be frank, the motivations in both cases had little to do with the seeking of aesthetic pleasure.  While my experience of the poem through my first reading was more or less a slog, a task willed to completion at the gunpoint of an end-of-term exam, my more recent reading was filled with surprising rewards.  Well, maybe something a little more shadowy than “rewards.”  Shivers, perhaps.  The tremblings of deep recognition.  And of fear.

I had grown up in a town in southwestern Ontario, a landscape of long winters and too-brief summers punctuated at their ends by the smell of cow manure drifting in from the bordering fields.  It was a place of almost Victorian reserve, quiet and churchy.  When it came time to apply to university, I assumed I’d stay close to home and attend one of the schools in the mid-size cities within an hour’s drive.  But then, at the last minute, I applied to McGill, in Montreal.  I knew nothing of it other than it’s good reputation and its location in a city whose hockey team is the storied but loathed Canadiens (I am a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan, and therefore, given my team’s  recent history of mediocrity, am left with no choice but to seethe at our betters).

            Montreal offered the small town me a dizzying variety of novelties – none more distracting than the beautiful, sophisticated young women sitting next to me in lecture halls.  There was every reason in the world to not read a long, difficult poem written over four hundred years ago about stuff from the Bible.

            The one thing I took with me was the star of the show.

            Milton’s Satan is wholly different from the devil of the horror movies I loved to watch at the time.  And while there was a lot the villain had to say in the poem, he never kicked it up into action mode to the degree that I wished.  Still, it was on old poem with the devil in it, and for me – solidly on the anti-hero side of the fence, even then – it was enough to pull me through the sticky cobwebs of blank verse.

            Jump ahead a couple decades and the younger man’s improbable dream has come true:  he is a professional writer, a novelist, summoning protagonists who share central concerns or histories with himself and putting them in dark and threatening contexts to see how they manage.  For them, it’s about the collision of the human against the inhuman.  Ghosts, wraiths, undead killers.

And then David Ullman came along.