Simon Jenkins, England's Cathedrals (Little, Brown)It is with some disquiet that one orders this book from Amazon for £8.99 when its cover price is £30. I know nobody pays the cover price for a book these days but, really, it's worth £8.99 for the photographs alone. As you read through it or just idly gaze at the sumptuous architecture, it takes some effort not to worry about the Amazon employees and the over-stretched delivery drivers they use, the abuse of who makes such a bargain possible.
Ever suspicious of how I'm being manipulated, I realize I have bought a book released just in time to catch the Christmas market but, what can you do, that is what the world is like. One can hardly not buy it.
Simon Jenkins is much admired for his previous volmes on 1000 churches and 1000 houses. His cathedrals are a bit more rationalized to not include some that he doesn't allow to qualify for the book without quite denying that they are cathedrals.
Rather than pile praise upon praise, then, which would be easy enough to do, especially for a succinct introduction outlining the whole history of the English cathedral, it is tempting to let one's discomfort find fault if and where it can. The book will be a best seller, be celebrated for its accessible, useful summaries and points of view and no amount of my trying to undermine any of that will do it any damage.
Jenkins admits to reservations about his five star rating system but that doesn't prevent him from persisting with it. It might not be entirely appropriate to measure the sublime as if he were writing for Which magazine or assessing mobile phones. If Chichester isn't quite Ely, Wells or Durham, I'm not convinced that makes it a four. And Gloucester's cloisters are featured on the cover but not considered good enough to raise it to a five either.
There is something partisan happening in the sub-text that I'm nowhere near ecclesiastical enough to precisely identify. Perhaps if A.N. Wilson reviews the book, he might say what it is. The history of the English church, Henry VIII, the relationship with Rome, the diverse fragments of both the Catholic orders and the degrees of Protestant distance from orthodoxy are a vexing array of interpretations that shaped these buildings and not being well-versed in them has its advantages. It's about God, isn't it, but perhaps more significantly for many of us, it is about ingenuity, imagination, design and, of course, wonder - but wonder at the architecture and all of those things that are, for those of us who struggle on in the bleak realms of doubt or disbelief, human qualities and inventions, like some say God is, too.
The book immediately has the effect of making one want to go to many of these places but some are further than a day trip away. However, having been several times to those within striking distance from here, the reports on them seem to miss things that I would have mentioned.
Salisbury was built on soft ground donated for the purpose and its design is too heavy and so it sank a bit and it can be seen that the main pillars at its centre have sunk by different amounts but for Jenkins Salisbury's main problems are compositional. Even though this is the cathedral that was completed as it is now in relatively short order, in the same style, which means almost in one lifetime, rather than the mix of periods found in most cathedrals that grew over centuries rather than decades. And Salisbury only gets four stars, too. It is a rigorous marking system.
Portsmouth has two cathedrals and, no, they would never pretend to be at the glamorous end of the league table and so one star for St. Thomas's, the 'oddest of cathedrals' (where 'ordinary' would do), might not be an issue and St. John's, the Catholic seat, is not included and so presumably gets no stars at all. It might not even want to argue with that itself. But if you live in Durham and regret that Portsmouth is too far for you to come, I can tell you at first hand that it is not true that, of St. Thomas,
The jolliest feature is the tower lantern, long a landmark for sailors on the Solent.
It's a tremendous book to have. You must order one if your conscience can be assuaged. But, as increasingly is the case on the BBC, in The Times or any other place that was once esteemed for its authority, you can't rely on anything these days and perhaps we never should have thought we could. I doubt if this will become the reference book that serious students of cathedral architecture will first go to but it is plenty good enough for me.