PhilPaine.com

A most plea­sur­able third read­ing of an old favourite of mine. Edgar Pang­born’s gen­tle and humane nov­els had a tremen­dous influ­ence on me. The book that real­ly hit the mark was A Mir­ror For Observers, but the Davy sto­ries were almost as good. This nov­el intro­duces the char­ac­ter at the age of four­teen, but hops back and forth in time. The back­ground is post-apoc­a­lyp­tic, with the human pop­u­la­tion of upstate New York and New Eng­land reduced to an ear­ly Medieval lev­el of tech­nol­o­gy and the Huly Mur­can Church pro­vid­ing what lit­tle social cohe­sion exists. But this is not a remake of Miller’s A Can­ti­cle For Lei­bowitz. Pang­born saw orga­nized reli­gion as more of a repres­sive and regres­sive force than Miller did. Noth­ing rings false in Pang­born’s imag­ined world. The young Davy is a randy lit­tle raga­muf­fin, and his picaresque progress is more along the line of Field­ing than Bun­yan. But unlike most picaresque writ­ers, Pang­born nev­er placed sex in oppo­si­tion to love, or to moral­i­ty. Rather, he under­stood that sex stands at the heart of moral­i­ty. Spi­der Robin­son has remarked that “Edgar Pang­born said again and again in his books that love is not a con­di­tion or an event or even a state of mind — that love is a coun­try, which we are some­times priv­i­leged to visit.”