Shaw, Martin. Liturgies of the Wild. Sentinel (Penguin Random House), 2026. NF; 2/26.

It’s rare that I start a book and don’t finish it, and even rarer that I review a book I haven’t finished. Like never. But that’s what happened here. If you’re interested in mythology, Orthodox Christianity, and have a new age-ey orientation I’m guessing you could find this book worthwhile. My problem with it is completely subjective. Not to put too fine a point on it it gave me the creeps, or more accurately I gave myself the creeps. I’ll try to explain…

Lately for some reason I’ve had unusually vivid memories of all sorts of events in my life. These memories have a different and for me important character to them. (I should say I’m hoping this isn’t some supernatural force preparing me for death, touch wood). I’m intrigued by how clear and detailed these memories are. They involve scenes from childhood, high school, university, kids and family, and so on. I like them and hope they continue.

I had put Liturgies on my list of books to read probably because it was about mythology. I’ve been interested in mythology since my English lit days in the 1960s when a then-influential expert, Northrop Frye, was writing literary criticism and celebrated basic human stories, artistic creativity and the imagination. When I reviewed his The Educated Imagination he says:

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never … get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us…. In ordinary experience we’re all in the position of a dog in a library, surrounded by a world of meaning in plain sight that we don’t even know is there.

Frye went on to say experiences of the imagination are not just fantasy, they represent a more real world.

Now Martin Shaw talks a similar talk. Today it would be a minority of people who remember Northrop Frye and so most might imagine Shaw has something new and exciting to say. But there was a non-proselytizing authority to Frye where Shaw is advocating changes in your life including conversion to Christianity and reimagining your personal story as mythic. He also underwent a hermit experience way off in a cabin or tent reading all sorts of books for years, which reminded me of mythologist Joseph Campbell who was described in his The Hero’s Journey. Such rites of passage seem to be required for spiritual gurus.

So back to me and my wee-bit unusual memory experiences. Reading the first few pages of Liturgies I at first imagined that in this “your life is a kind of myth” idea there might be something worth thinking about. I admit to being impressionable like that. But further along I sensed Shaw repeating himself in a didactic way I wasn’t quite so impressed with. So I did a bit of superficial reading about him and ended up bothered by something banal in his guru persona, combination of down-to-earth and big-university appointments, and for some reason the way he looks:

See how serious I am? And this big grey beard and penetrating gaze are respected by Stanford and Cambridge even though you can see I’m a creature of the wild forest… What happened at that point was I got a bit troubled. Not by Shaw mind you but by my propensity to get interested in things which then end up turning into meaningless pop-imaginary falsehood. Self-promoting celebrity. By my interest I get taken in, my serious thoughts become trivialized, and I have to face I’ve made a fool of myself.

So I decided NO. I got that there was no point in reading beyond the first two dozen pages of this book and making myself unhappy.

I know. This is just me. I’m quite sure there’s nothing wrong with Martin Shaw. As we say these days he is what he is. But what I really don’t like at all is a hideous common human habit of dealing with very bad or very good things, very important things, by turning them into something shallow and worthless so they are easier to deal with. Practising this easy trivialization steals away life’s magnificence and its horror so we can manage it, and get on with what Northrop Frye called ordinary experience, like a dog in a library.

I’m not sure if I’ve conveyed how much the potential for this upset me. Anyway poor old Martin Shaw and his book don’t matter in themselves. I’m okay just to have held onto something and avoided turning it into damn foolishness, even if I created that foolishness myself.

No score.