The Spiral Staircase: Book Review No. 2

I have practically inhaled this book over the 48 hours since we returned from Chautauqua.  I had decided to embark upon a 12-step program designed to quell all further book-purchases on my part, but my timing was sadly off.  You can't go to Chautauqua and avoid the Bookstore, and you can't go into the Bookstore without being lured by the siren calls of all the books written by the summer's speakers.  I guess I had known that Karen Armstrong had written an autobiography entitled The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004), but I had managed to suppress that knowledge successfully until I saw her name on the program and her book practically reaching to me from its display.

Karen Armstrong

I first encountered this author and her work several years ago at Chautauqua.  She had already embarked upon her prolific career as a writer on the three Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- and was there to speak on some aspect of her work.  However, her first autobiography, Through the Narrow Gate  (1981), had also been displayed on the authors' table in the Bookstore.  In that book, she tells the story of her decision to enter a Roman Catholic convent as a 17-year-old English girl, the seven years she spent there, and her traumatic decision to leave, all of which occurred during the 1960s.  I was fortunate enough to encounter her for a brief conversation after I finished the book, and told her how enlightening it had been to me.  During the 60s I had been a middle-school  student in a Catholic boarding school run by nuns -- a non-Catholic and entirely non-religious girl dropped into a world of sweeping black habits, swinging rosary beads, stiff wimples, smoky incense, and masses intoned in Latin.  Over the course of my stay there, Vatican II "happened," right along with the Beatles and miniskirts, and the nuns, like their sisters around the world, transformed their lives right before our eyes.  As I told Ms. Armstrong, her book, with its insights into the portions of the nuns' existence that we never saw, opened my eyes considerably.  "I never had much of an idea as to what was going on," I said.  "I don't think we did, either!"she laughed. 

Despite her formidable intellect, she is a completely down-to-earth and gracious woman -- all qualities which have no doubt contributed to her career as, I believe she sometimes calls herself, "a freelance monotheist."  Her Oxford training is in English literature; however, her background as a nun provided a springboard from which she moved, quite by accident, into a life's work as an investigator, commentator and writer on world religions.  Because of her expertise on Islam, she has been much in demand since September 11, 2001 as a speaker and contributor to various types of programs.

The Spiral Staircase is, for the most part, a riveting account of the years following her departure from the convent.  During that period, she started off on several career paths, experiencing varying degrees of failure with respect to all of them.  She also suffered several years of misdiagnosis and, therefore, ineffective treatment for what was ultimately (and easily, by the right physician) determined to be a form of epilepsy.  Anyone with any interest at all in spiritual autobiography or the difficult emergence of women as respected professionals in the 1960s and 1970s will find this a hard one to put down.

The last chapter of the book, in which she attempts to summarize what she has imbibed from her studies of the three major monotheistic religions over the past decade, is superficial and unsuccessful.  She alludes to the criticism, sometimes quite personal and disturbing, aimed her direction as a result of her attempts to elucidate Islam for a western audience, but does not address her critics in any substantive way.  Having heard her speak several times and having read much of her writing in recent years, I know that her critics make legitimate points and that she is capable of great depth in response.  I can only guess that her publisher asked her to address these issues but to "keep it short."

The ending notwithstanding, the book is a great read and Karen Armstrong remains one of my personal heroes.