Over Christmas I have read two books by Tom Davies; his biography Testament and his most recent novel The Tyranny of Ghosts. Not having read any of his work for some years it was fascinating to revisit the uncomfortable issues about faith and popular culture that his writings raise. The following is a synopsis of his career that I wrote several years ago:
Tom Davies is a seer. As a travel writer and semi-professional pilgrim, his descriptions both evoke and enliven the ordinary sights and people that he passes by, pausing just long enough to perceive significance. As a prophetic visionary, he uncovers the apocalyptic battle-drop against which ordinary life is played out. His best works involve journeys in which observation mingles with vision and where he runs the gamut of emotions from despair through boredom to wonder.
Trained as a journalist with the Western Mail, he later wrote for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Observer before biting the hand that had fed him by castigating the media in the books (travel, theology and novels) that he wrote subsequent to his conversion. His career came full circle with a column in the Western Mail under a pseudonym and published as The Visions of Caradoc.
His work is a tracking of the bloody footprints of Romanticism through literary, social and media history. Davies defines the Romantic Mind as emphasising the imagination and emotion over and above reason and intellect. It cultivates sensation and emotion for their own sake and has a persistent attraction to the morbid, the supernatural, the cruel, the perverted and the violent. He believes that: this Mind is predominant in Western media and culture; has been the gasoline in the bottle igniting a blazing orgy of violence that is speading uncontrolled through the world; is to be identified with the Biblical Man of Lawlessness, a tide of evil which engulfs the world as a necessary precondition to the return of Christ. In a Caradoc article he sees the television dramatist, Dennis Potter, as characterising this Romantic Mind.
By contrast, as Caradoc, he argues that the Christian artist should "generally seek to affirm that which is pure, good and lovely. He would always be seeking to mediate the beauty of the ordinary world to us; he would be looking for new insights into reality and, in this way, celebrate the fantastic wonder of creation.
The Christian artist would never bother with a pervert, preferring to study a normal man at work or play; he would never gaze at a scene of horror when he could find as it floats, like a falling leaf, through the real world. The art of the Christian is the most difficult art of them all."
This sermon is delivered to Idris the Pointless, a Van Gogh in safety pins, who promptly informs Caradoc that his latest project is paint "portraits of the homes of all the convicted murderers in the Valleys". Davies' self-deprecating humour and confessions of personal weakness leaven the fire and brimstone of his prophetic vision and allow us both to absorb his warnings and follow his evocations of wonder. He has said of the Biblical prophets that "With their wild veerings and ravaged visions they all had a questionable sanity". He would count it a compliment if we admitted him to that same company.
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Sam Phillips - Baby I Can't Please You.
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