We had an interesting conversation over dinner this evening. LightHusband is reading The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart. We picked it up last summer. I was going to read it, but haven’t gotten around to it, so he’s reading it. Here’s the description on the back cover:

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan–surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountain covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion–a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan’s first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.

Through these encounters–by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny–Stewart makes tangible the forces of traidition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map’s countless places in between.

Stewart walked across Asia; Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey of 6000 miles … according to the wiki on him. This book chronicles his journey through Afghanistan. He walked. This might not sound amazing. But he walked through places that have remained unchanged since Genghis Khan burned them out in the early Middle Ages. These are places that really haven’t made it onto GoogleMaps. Holiday Inn has not set up for business out there (to say the least). He was at the mercy of the hospitality of each local village that he came upon.

Fortunately for Stewart the practice of hospitality is considered a religious duty for Muslims. It is not one of the Five Pillars of Islam, but it’s the next step down. However, every once in a while the head man needed to be convinced that Mr. Stewart was indeed worthy of his hospitality:

After a cool reception, despite a letter of introduction, Babur is banished to the deepest cellar on a straw bed and Rory returned to the mosque to speak once again with Haji Nasir, who is exceedingly tight-lipped.

I reentered the mosque and took off my iced and soaking socks. Haji Nasir watched. He did not suggest I dry them on the stove; he did not offer tea. I clearly needed to persuade him I was worth speaking to. We were eleven days’ walk from Kamenj and had just reached a village that had not heard of Haji Mohsin Khan, so I dropped him from my introductory speech.

“I have walked here from Chaghcharan,” I said. “On the first night I stayed with Commandant Maududi in Baghdad, on the second with Abdul Rauf Ghafuri in Daulatyar, on the third with Bushire Khan in Sang-i-zard, and last night with the nephew of Mir Ali Hussein Beg in Katlish. They have treated me very well.”

Then I took out my notebook and showed him the pictures I had drawn of these men.

He looked at the pictures and said, “You can stay here tonight and someone will bring you some tea.” Then he walked into the inner room of the mosque to pray. (p. 209)

LightHusband went on to describe how Stewart had to remember the genealogy each night of who he had stayed with to establish his credentials for each village. Often he had teenage boys who would take him through the mountain passes. But they did not want money, they wanted to be sure that he told the story of the great honor they had done. They wanted credit. We talked some about that. About honor and credit in that culture.

LightBoy wondered where honor and credit are in our culture. The only place we could think of was in plastic cards. We find places to stay based on our plastic cards. And honor is based on how much money is backing up those plastic cards. Are we really more advanced?

Almost two months ago, Will Samson leaked the information that his wife, Lisa was giving away free (did you see that? FREE) copies of her latest book, Quaker Summer, in exchange for the small price of writing a review of the book once we’d read it. A free book? My eyes perked right up. I’ve come to respect Lisa through her blog and interactions with her on her husband’s blog as well. So I thought that her book would be a breath of fresh air.

My only real complaint about this book is that I finished it the other night and that the people aren’t real. I can’t drive up to Baltimore and find the characters hanging out at the homeless shelter there. I was so sad when I closed the book at 12:15 the other night and had to say good-bye to friends. I fell in love with the main character, Heather Curridge (or is that Courage?). I had been reading it slowly on purpose. To stretch it out and make it last. But there weren’t enough pages. I came to the end and had to say good-bye.

Lisa Samson wrote this book in the first person, as a journal almost. I could even see it as a blog in spots and found myself searching for the “Comment” button. The characters are fairly three dimensional, believable and I wanted to meet them, have coffee, catch up with where they are now.

We walk with Heather through the deepest parts of the valley of her mid-life crisis. In the beginning of the book her life is slowly unraveling but she is the only one who notices. She takes a courageous step and allows the unraveling to continue to see where it leads, and once that is done allows the Holy Spirit to engage her in the re-winding of her threads back together. In that process she becomes whole once again and it feels like an honor to be invited to witness this.

At first I thought the conversations sounded canned and a bit flat, but when I started reading it as a journal they became more authentic, the way one of us might re-hash a conversation on paper. There are nuances and bits that we forget, that we leave out; tone of voice that never makes it onto the page of a diary and thus a conversation that meanders and burbles in real life becomes much more directed and forceful in our memory.

Through the course of this book it becomes very clear that Ms. Samson pretty thoroughly understands theology and many different denominational perspectives within Christendom. She’s a very savvy writer who wraps up some excellent debate about the Kingdom of God and how we can operate within it and for it in engaging fiction that keeps you wanting to know more about the characters without beating you about the head with her theology.

In all, a thoroughly enjoyable book that I’d highly recommend. It will have me thinking through some things for quite some time to come. I may even begin putting dots on my possessions. 😉