Bamboo Palace, Christopher Kremmer.
HarperCollins, 2003. isbn 0 7322 7756 6, rrp $29.95
An investigative journey through the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Christopher Kremmer attempts to find out what happened to the Lao royal family, deposed after the Vietnam war.
Kremmer spends three months travelling through Laos, asking questions. The only replies, however, are whispers—contradictory whispers. What he hears speaks not only of the fragility of life, but of the fragility of a people and their culture.
The author tells the story of the Lao royal puppets, locked away and languishing. Yet for one performance, the puppeteer painstakingly unwraps each one, and ceremoniously brings them to life. Kremmer’s description is exquisite. Here he has found the metaphor for the royal family. We glimpse another world, another time—destroyed by the post-1975 Lao revolution.
Kremmer—journalist and author of The Carpet Wars—has been in many hot spots around the globe, yet he believes it’s in ‘cold spots’ (places no longer making news) that some of the best stories can be found.
In Bamboo Palace, Kremmer searches for the universal voice, ‘one of thousands lost in the abyss of war and revolution: a voice of resilience and survival and faith.’ He finds it, in the testimony of Khamphan
Thammakhanty, a salt trader’s son—the last known survivor of the royal death camp.
It is Khamphan’s testimony—worthy of a book in its own right—which is gripping. The author’s travelogue serves simply as a device to hold the more powerful story.
Michele M. Gierck
The Suicidal Church: Can the Anglican Church be Saved?, Caroline Miley. Pluto Press, 2002.
isbn 1 86403 182 4, rrp $29.95
Kierkegaard railed against the passionless Christianity of his culture and in his last years launched an impassioned critique of the institutional church in Denmark. As can often be the case, his passionate arguments received a passionate response—of denial.
Caroline Miley, an academic art historian, has launched her own vehement attack on the church in The Suicidal Church.
Kierkegaard found that society and the church were too integrated in his time. Miley has found that the Anglican church of modern Australia instead is becoming peripheral to most people and losing the trust of society. Her language protects her from any charge of passionless Christianity: Miley writes as a person betrayed. She has sought an expression of Christ in the church and instead found an expression of human Christians.
As the church is an organisation of human beings this will always be the case. As the church