Scorn

I was recommended this book by a friend and I'm so glad I gave it a chance. The author Paul Hoffman cleverly combines a tongue-in-cheek tale of psychology, gruesome murder, large hadron colliders, and among other things - a warewolf! At the same time, the story is driven forward by the very real horror, corruption and abusive power that goes on within the Catholic Church, how this has resonated throughout history and how it has affected people on a personal level, like the central character Aaron Gall. A thought-provoking, witty and insightful journey that I would highly recommend to anyone.

Paul Hoffman provides the kind of paradox that always makes me smile and sometimes guffaw. The irreverence for institutions that self serve is both rewarding and enlightening. If you loved the left hand of god you should certainly read this!

All I can do is recommend this novel wholeheartedly and with passion I haven't felt in a decade to anyone who loves brilliant, clever, funny, engaged and at times, humbling fiction. Hoffman's mind and wits are sharp as ever.

A storm of a read particularly for anyone who has suffered at the hands of unreflective religious teachings

ridiculous and angry, very enjoyable!

The cover (designed by MECOB) to Paul Hoffman’s Scorn is an adaptation of Velázquez’ magnificent portrait of Pope Innocent X. The pope’s gilded throne and the rich fabrics draping his body speak frankly of wealth and ease, while the man himself is unsettlingly shrewd, calculating and worldly, his watchful eyes already hinting at the existential anguish and capacity for horror depicted in Francis Bacon’s wonderful series of studies of a caged and screaming pope.We should never judge a book by its cover, of course, but in this case we might wish to bend the rule: a figure of immense authority and power is seated within a blood-red void, seemingly unaware of the angel of death perched confidingly against the crown of his head, as if eating into his brain. The image is arresting and hyperbolic, and it prepares us for what is to come.To call Scorn a work of righteous anger would barely do justice to its earth-shattering rage, its apocalyptic howl of protest, its caustic humour, irony and indignation. The power of these emotions literally cannot be contained; the novel overspills its own boundaries, spreads outwards into the world by means of its copious epigraphs and epilogues, illustrations, quotations and allusions – even mixing genres and providing external links. ‘Real people,’ such as Tony Blair and the Queen, converse with outlandish fictional characters; reality intrudes at every moment. Conventional storytelling alone, it seems, is not enough to carry the burden of the novel’s scorn.‘Come here, Your Grace. I want to chastise you,’ says one of Scorn’s principal characters, quoting Lt. Harry Kello’s chillingly playful request of doomed Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a film whose theme – the slow death of the soul – is shared by Scorn. The souls in Scorn, however, are murdered rather than eroded. They are the souls of children starved of just about everything that makes life worthwhile, among them decent food and shelter, freedom from fear, love and fellow-feeling.In Scorn, to begin with, those who scorn are the nuns and priests in Catholic churches, schools and institutions, aided and abetted by the silence and concealment mandated by the Vatican itself. To be clear: Paul Hoffman is not primarily addressing the worldwide scandal of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Rather, his ostensible focus is on the mundane cruelties and deprivations that were inflicted by nuns and priests on a daily basis, and what that does to individuals who then have to make their way in the world.Or so it seems, for Scorn is full of unexpected juxtapositions and misdirections. Soon after an episode of exceptional cruelty endured by little Aaron Gall (the nearest to a hero the novel has to offer), Scorn wrongfoots the reader by enlarging the scope of wickedness: ‘While he was being branded on his little soul … Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward was creating the conditions for thirty million people to starve to death. While a few dozens of children were living in fear of Mother Mary Frances, some parents in Xingyang were eating theirs.’This exhilarating and audacious manoeuvre is typical of Scorn’s exploration of power and injustice, which are so imbricated at times as to be mutually indistinguishable. All injustice, every abuse of power, every concealed crime, are interlinked and intimately connected. ‘The spirit of the times,’ we are told, ‘moves through everyone,’ so that a love affair, for example, can perish on the rocks of a historical injustice, the profits from which are still enjoyed by the privileged few.Appropriately, Scorn’s many adversions to historical iniquities are paralleled with references and allusions to historical fictions, among them Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The personification of Evil, it appears, is a film buff who can quote with ease from works ranging from Double Indemnity (1944) to Pink Flamingos (1972).In Scorn the story of Aaron Gall’s experiences is coupled with a police investigation into a series of grotesquely bizarre murders. We listen in as victims engage in a verbal battle of wits with their murderer for the higher ground of self-exculpation, offering reasons and excuses, even defiance, each successive victim increasing in sophistication and sophistry. The investigation itself is inflected with issues of class and privilege, antagonism and deceit.The story becomes increasingly fantastic as the novel progresses, which will enthrall many readers and perhaps puzzle or disappoint others. Much depends on expectations. The novel takes a big risk right from the start by promising (quite literally) that it has an astonishing twist in the tail. Said twist is entirely predictable, however, very early on, so it might have been better left unsaid – not that this a serious flaw, but readers who count on such things are bound to feel cheated.Otherwise, Scorn is a wildly anarchic, countercultural phantasmagoria of a novel, reminiscent at times of Jonathan Coe’s Number 11. Its unquenchable outrage and its marked preference for form over character can be exhausting as well as compelling. Its nuances of argument about power and morality are hardly matched by nuances of characterization: persons are more-or-less representative types moved around like billiard balls. This is not a novel of rounded individuals confronting one another in a fully realized world. That isn’t a weakness, but it is a particularity of a book immersed in its own moral purpose. Scorn is often funny even as its purpose is intensely serious: we are called upon to grasp the perfidy of power, the depth of the world’s structural violence, our limitless capacity for self-delusion and hypocrisy.In other words, Scorn is a witty and acerbic novel that tells the truth, that seeks to animate rather than console. That in itself provides reasons to rejoice, particularly in an era when humanity’s gargantuan appetite for cruelty and stupidity is draped in dazzling robes of blood-red splendour.

Note: This book was received from the publisher in return for an honest reviewJust after I started reading Scorn at the beginning of the week I included it in my WWW Wednesday post, I was a couple of chapters in and I said I thought the book would be a marmite book, people would either love it of they would hate it. Despite that statement I ended up smack bang in the middle, I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either, I do still predict that this book will be hugely divisive.So what is Scorn about? Aaron Gall is a physicist working in Geneva as part of the team working at the Large Hadron Collider, when there’s an accident and a small black hole opens up in the middle of his brain leading to the events of the book, which sees the murder of a number of people linked to the Catholic church.The book deals with the very topical subject of abuse, sexual, physical and mental, of children by members of the Catholic Church, it’s a controversial topic, and it’s certainly dealt with in a quite controversial way! I understand things than happened to Aaron and others, both in fiction and reality, was terrible; and the part of me that studied Psychology at university has a very basic understanding of things that could happen as a result of damage to the amygdala occurs, but what happens in the book can be brutal, and graphic, it’s not a book for the fainthearted!Things I liked – I liked the two police officers, Scrope and Lister, their banter amused me, both from wealthy families they served together in the military before being fast tracked into the police, and safe to say not the most liked by the rank and file of the force.I also liked the random doodles throughout the book,I had a proof, so I’m assuming they remain in the finished edition. I liked the way they broke up the text slightly, it’s a big book!I also liked the cryptic crossword clues – I have a friend who likes reading the answers to cryptic crosswords and then trying to figure out how you were supposed to get there from the clue, I’m not the biggest crossword puzzler but I did enjoy trying to figure them out!For full disclosure I have to admit there were also aspects of the book I wasn’t keen on. Firstly throughout the book there are frequent sections where the author speaks directly to the reader. I know that there are people out there who won’t mind that in the slightest,and there are people who will love it. For me, I felt it pulled me out of the main story line each time it happened. In a similar manner there were quotes between each of the chapters, in some cases relatively substantial blocks of text, which while relevant to the overall themes again tended to pull me out of the story line.Finally a number of real people appear in the book, including The Queen, Tony Blair and The Pope. I read a lot of crime fiction and thrillers and don’t consider myself squeamish, but having things happen to real people made parts of the book a little uncomfortable for me.Would I Recommend?I would very rarely tell anyone not to read a book, and I’m not here either. Yes I had some issues with it, but I also enjoyed some of the dark humour and I’m just one opinion in a very large world. As I said I think this book as the potential to be controversial, I’m sure some people will find it to be anti-catholic, but I would encourage anyone who is interested by premise of the book should pick it up and give it a go

The book is repetitive and argumentative to exhaustion. As an essay against the catholic church is very poor and adds nothing to the general debate; as a fiction book does not have a sequence that captivates the reader throughout the pages; its over and over again the same irrational action, full of "god ex machine" expedients. It's light years away from Hofman's excellent "The left hand of God" trilogy. Heitor

Outstanding book. Written by my brother!