The Children's Iliad
Plus: righteousness and peace will kiss each other
Creatures, yesterday I encountered Nature: a lithe and mistrustful, long-legged cat, stripes and leopard spots against a coat of amber flamelike fur, crouching down beside a car to tug a foul treat from the gutter. I think this cat would like the Borribles.
Dirty Old Town
Normal kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is. It doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they have what is called a “bad start.” A child disappears from a school and the word goes around that he was “unmanageable”; the chances are that he’s off managing by himself. Sometimes it’s given out that a kid down the street has been “put into care” because whenever he got home from school the house was empty; no doubt he’s been Borribled and is caring for himself someplace. …
So Borribles are outcasts but unlike most outcasts they enjoy themselves and wouldn’t be anything else. They delight in feeling independent and free and it is this feeling which is most important to them. ...They are ignored and that suits them down to the ground because that way they can do what they want to do in their own quiet and crafty way.
Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles series shaped me; it’s hard to remember a time before I read them. They’re about feral children who can live forever in their squats and gangs as long as they don’t get caught. The first book is the epic tale of their war with the great rats, the Rumbles, wealthy rodents who live in the countryside and satirize British children’s television characters, apparently. I knew nothing about that but I knew I liked tales of sympathetic turncoats, arrogant little jackasses who get their comeuppance, anarchic alley thieves, and similar aspirational figures.
And I loved the novels’ lyricism of filth and sweat and city noise: the London of boxing gyms and costermongers with broken teeth, the “gentle stagger[]” of the early boozers and the late, the delicious crunch of ice crystals in an orange shipped by lorry. A sensual wonderland of industrial pollution, commerce and manufacture, the London equivalent of that scene from “True Stories” where they’re speeding down the highway past the endless blank warehouses and the voiceover asks, “Who can say it isn’t beautiful?”
Look at this, man:
They leaned against the embankment wall and looked across the broad sweep of the river to the gasometers and the Chelsea Flour Mills opposite. The surface of the Thames was an alarming greeny-gray colour and only the floating rainbow whorls of diesel oil and petrol brightened the dull water. The horizon was cut out in dirty brown and black against a sky of diluted yellow ochre, and the sun had not shone all day.
They should have been depressed and frightened but somehow the very extent of the sight inspired them all with pride and determination. The shift of the waves nudging clumps of rubbish downstream; the hooting of tugs and barges as they passed; the unmoving blocks of black smoke from Lot’s Road Power Station; the smell, like varnish, of the Thames in London, all these things combined to make their hearts swell and they looked at each other and smiled modestly, knowing that whatever was before them, they would be equal to it.
And I grew up in DC when it was the Murder Capital—when you went out of town and met other kids they’d be super weird about it, you definitely developed a chip on your shoulder (if you were already a certain kind of person) from being asked all the time about whether you were scared or whether you’d seen somebody get shot.
Napoleon stood up in the prow, his legs spread, his hands on his hips, like a ruffian pirate captain. “This is the River Wandle,” he said. “An ordinary little river that flows under the houses.”
“It stinks,” said Bingo.
“You’ve had it too easy,” retorted Napoleon, “this is Wandsworth where the best Borribles come from.” …
He bent and scooped up a handful of the river water and cast it into the gangway of the boat. The eyes of the Borribles were attracted by the evil-looking liquid while their bodies were repelled by it. The water hardly disintegrated at all but green globules of it rolled into the crevices of the woodwork to lie there glowing.
I wrote for the UK Tablet about my long gay romance with the figure of the spy or traitor (link requires registration but fwiw I really like this essay!) and the two books that started that theological love affair were The Man Without a Country and The Borribles Go for Broke. But you can love it for all kinds of reasons: for its parable on avarice, for its wild loping worldbuilding, for the electric current of mistrust and awe that passes between two of the boys; for its heroic adults who smell bad and sleep rough, for its tenderness and sans-souci. For its willingness to gorily kill kids on the page!
There’s nothing else like the Borrible books. Get them before they get you!
“Kiss? What is ‘kiss’?”
I was on my evening prayer the other day when I noticed something. My partner got me onto the Magnificat, and I really like its daily prayers; for Tuesday evening, the “Word of the Day” was Isaiah 45:8:
Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above,
like gentle rain let the skies drop it down.
Let the earth open and salvation bud forth;
let justice also spring up!
I, the Lord, have created this.
So a certain kind of person has already caught an echo of Portia, bless her grisly little heart, right? Our gentile girlboss, shiver, with her quality of mercy. Have you heard, it droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven. And there’s all kinds of things to say about this famous speech of Portia’s, this speech about mercy that’s playing on merciless tropes of the justice-obsessed Jew vs. the gentle Gentile, but what struck me in this moment is how Isaiah differs from what Shakespeare has her say. Isaiah is describing not solely a descent from above but a rising from below. There’s a mutuality, a responsiveness; the kiss doesn’t happen without both parties’ joy.
This idea came up in an especially startling way at the conference I presented at recently, at the McGrath Institute for Church Life. I was there to do gay stuff (sign up for updates!) but I got to hear part of a talk by Prof. Anthony Pagliarini, in which he explored how to teach revelation the way revelation discloses itself in Scripture. In other words, how to teach revelation with the assumption that it must be received to be fully itself. He did all kinds of exciting things, but the one I almost yelped at was when he described a tradition in the time of (I think) Gregory the Great: Before receiving the Eucharist, people would bow and recite Song 1:2: “May you kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.” (That’s how he translated it.) And then receive the Body and Blood of Christ!
Since very, very early in my conversion this kiss has been a touchstone Scriptural image for me:
Love and truth will meet;
justice and peace will kiss.
(Ps 85:10)
I was very aware of my privilege and did not think justice would be pleasant for me. Getting what you deserve! Whoof. Okay, I guess. To have justice be an experience of peace seemed impossible. And the promise of the Crucifixion is that it is not impossible, not even for centurions, not even for betrayers. It is brutal but in fact I have found (this is part of the experience of sobriety) that justice is peace. Justice and peace do kiss every day.
Links Losers Like
A new photobook honoring LA’s many wall paintings of Our Lady of Guadalupe (via the Pillar I think)
“The Slingshot (The Little Hunter)” painted by Karl Witkowski, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license. It took me a stupidly long time, when I was a kid, to figure out that the “catapults” the Borribles used were what I’d call slingshots. I think I was in high school when I realized their “torches” were flashlights.