Reading · Christianity Today

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Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey—the basis for Christopher Nolan’s hit film—begins, “Tell me about a complicated man.” Today’s three books, as reviewed by professor Paul Marchbanks, could easily begin the same way. These creative works follow challenging, thought-provoking figures: an ancient Roman dictator, a poet musing on faith, and a sinner drawn into a search for God. Can these stories identify something redemptive amid flawed heroes in a fallen world? Read on to find out.

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Taylor Berglund
Senior Features Editor, Christianity Today

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By Paul Marchbanks

Toward the close of Robert Harris’s Agrippa (2026), the novel’s eponymous narrator admits he lacks the secretaries who helped shape Julius Caesar’s memoirs, adding that he “cannot abide long books that drag on to no purpose or try to end with some grand philosophical conclusion.” Indeed, those seeking a historical novel leavened with the psychological and spiritual musings Harris wove into Conclave should look elsewhere, as should those looking for more about Israel or Judea in the period than that provided by Agrippa’s brief encounter with a middle-aged King Herod.

Slowly dying from a spear wound taken during a recent, unnecessary skirmish, and uninterested in glorifying the wartime successes that won him high praise, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa provides a dry if detailed account of the civil wars prosecuted by Octavian (later Augustus) that ultimately erased Cicero, Mark Antony, and upward of 80,000 other Roman citizens. Though replete with sea battles, politically motivated wife swapping, and much backstabbing (a literal, frequent occurrence in the period), this telling ostensibly void of “lies and pretence” remains anchored to a narrator who barely knows his own mind and shares still less with his reader.

This work of historical reclamation does suggest that Agrippa felt secret remorse when proffered advancement cost him his first wife, just as his third wife’s adultery grieved him without motivating action. A mover and shaker on the world stage, he remains impotent to alter personal situations set in motion by Octavian, the ruler and friend he once swore to protect. If Harris had foregrounded those public work projects that palpably excite Agrippa, like putting demobilized soldiers to work building aqueducts and creating the Pantheon’s celebrated oculus, perhaps this characterization would feel less opaque.

In one sense, the curtain boldly withdrawn by the open dialogue of Glimmerings remains suspended in Christian Wiman’s latest collection of poems. The Dance whirls the reader straight into intimate struggles, including fear surrounding a bone marrow transplant and the hard-won reminder that beauty’s ubiquity does not secure its value: “It is suffering that makes it shine.” Elsewhere, beauty proves a bugbear when a café’s attractive server excites a “longing that has no trace of desire,” an unwitting spectacle “you can’t keep yourself from glancing at, / though you can feel the damage accruing.” Recognizing the injury done to self and others by the ruthlessly prurient gaze, Wiman considers the cage dancer cavorting above a throng of dancers “lost in their own mazes of unlove” and provocatively wonders if the pendant performer might exercise a creative freedom worth the cost to self-respect.

A few poems zoom out to indict a bloodier species of aggression, like that directed toward Cathars following the Council of Tours in 1163 and that of the raging “gunned man” of today primed by shock jocks to pull triggers. Cultures like our own, “corroded by a peace / they never learned to share,” stand too ready to find connection only “in the slaughter.”

Amid musings on faith, a characteristic veil drops, a mesh obscuring as much light as it admits. Is the loud echo following the apostatic shout proof of God? Can the poem asking soulful questions prove “effective, for a time, against decay” without intimating answers?

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer embraces the tension between recognizing others by their “fruit” (Matt. 7:16–20) and withholding judgment as we cannot know their hearts (1 Cor. 4:5).

Percy knew his protagonist’s obsession with the backsides of the secretaries he hires and hassles would irritate early readers of The Moviegoer (1961). Today’s Christian audience, eager to locate beauty in the inner self (1 Pet. 3:3–4)—and trained in harassment prevention—will wish to toss Jack “Binx” Bolling onto the dung heap and be done with him. If, however, poet Robert Browning was correct that recognizing God’s handiwork in faces and figures helps the observer “find the soul you have missed, / Within yourself, when you return [God] thanks,” then we should resist the urge to label Binx an irredeemable scoundrel.

Gratitude for beauty—found in both women and dust motes floating through rays of sunlight—stuns Binx, drawing him into an attitude of awe that signals a soul desperate for something outside itself. The “vertical search” that drew Binx toward deep books and tall questions in his 20s concluded with the verdict that answers about material existence were “in principle reachable,” yet a “horizontal search” preoccupied with personal relationship continues unabated.

If “a curtain comes down in [Binx’s] head” when he hears the word God, is he doomed? Do selfless love for a dying, believing half brother, curiosity about Ash Wednesday, and a surprisingly selfless act signal a soul on the brink of redemption? Percy leaves it to us to decide.

Complicated Men and the Search for God

This edition is sponsored by HarperCollins Focus

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Paul Marchbanks is a professor of literature and film at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is Digging in the Dirt.

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