The Book Fair ends today. Has it improved on previous occasions?

People who have memories of either of the two clashes in both of which former Archbishop Michael Gonzi was a protagonist will surely find food for thought- Fr Peter Serracino Inglott

The display is much better than last year’s although one still has the feel-ing of attending a bazaar, rather than what book fairs are usually like in capital cities abroad. However, both the quantity and the quality of locally produced books are encouraging.

I myself was on the panel of two books that were launched during the fair. The one closest to my heart was evidently Cesare Catania’s Strickland, Britain and the Vatican published by Agius and Agius.

The author had produced a first draft of the book as his thesis for the doctorate in Political Science at the Universita Cattolica of Milan but as archives began to become accessible, Cesare kept revising and enlarging his account of the three eventful years,1929 to 1932 of the Church-State turbulence in Lord Strickland’s time.

He paid particular attention to the ways in which the happenings in Malta put into question the very existence of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the UK.

In fact, possibly the part of the book with most new information is the Appendix, since it removes the puzzle which still subsisted as to the contents of the report by Mgr Robinson, the Apostolic Delegate.

The published report was notoriously very negative with regard to Lord Strickland, and this had led to many believing that there had been some censorship, given that Mgr Robinson had expressed much criticism of the Church in conversations during his stay in Malta.

Catania shows that in fact Robinson had written two reports. Besides the published document, another longer piece mainly devoted to his assessment of such matters as the education and daily life of the clergy was consulted by the author just in these last years.

Catania unexpectedly died just when the book was nearing publication. He had striven hard to keep his narrative as objective and balanced as possible. He had actually been surprised at how negative the Colonial Office as well as the Foreign Office of the UK were towards the champion of the Empire that Lord Strickland undoubtedly was.

As Cesare had most probably taken up the subject because of its similarity to the Church-state turbulence that he himself had painfully lived through in the Sixties and which he has narrated in a partly autobiographical novel called It-Tarf, he was concerned lest if he allowed just the documents to speak, the result would have been unfair on Strickland.

Consequently, Catania would have been greatly intrigued, had he lived, by the fact that Labour Party apologists like Mario Vella should have recently conducted a press campaign apparently aimed to rally any surviving Stricklandians to join Joseph Muscat who is striving to attract progressives and moderates.

The new publication, written in the manner of a historian, is bound to provide fascinating companion reading to the novel It-Tarf. People who have memories of either of the two clashes in both of which former Archbishop Michael Gonzi was a protagonist but with very different opponents, Strickland and Dom Mintoff, will surely find food for thought on the significance of the Strickland-Labour Compact, and on its result, electorally disastrous, for the Labour Party.

Those who knew Cesare personally will be able to hear his voice precisely echoing in the texture of his prose, with its somewhat paradoxical combination of the erudition accumulated in decades of archival research and of an almost childlike purity of outlook with which he surveys the often obscure manoeuvres of politicians.

The others who were born after both episodes will surely feel puzzled and at the same time entranced by the two accounts which will seem to them to relate to our world like those of Tolkien or C. S. Lewis fiction.

Which other book launch did you take part in?

Edward Clemmer’s Gospel (on the Road to) Emmaus. It belongs to an unusual literary genre. In it, there is an intertwining of the life of Jesus Christ as told in the Gospel with hints of the author’s own spiritual autobiography.

The author, an American, was a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Malta for four years.

This quadrennium proved to be for him the site of a journey like that of the Disciples of Emmaus on the afternoon and evening of the day of the Resurrection.

It begins in sadness with the experience of a loving relationship that breaks down, leaving behind it the dark night of solitude. But the climate is transformed into the joy and peace of the discovery of a new loving relationship.

The same experience of meeting the Lord in the breaking of bread at Emmaus can be lived in different ways, as Caravaggio so clearly showed with his two versions of the scene.

In the first, there is a table full of various kinds of food and drink and the disciples react melodramatically; in the second, there is only bread and wine on the table and the atmosphere is no longer so much theatrical as it is liturgical and religious. The book induces a similar experience in the reader.

What other books at the fair caught your attention?

There are just too many to mention. To some of them, we might return when I have actually had time to read them.

Meanwhile, as I went in to speak at the two book launches, I could not help being struck by Adrian Busietta’s presence at the stall at which his autobiography was displayed.

As I flicked through its pages, my eye was caught by his account of the still perturbing saga that led to the birth of the Bank of Valletta. Such parts of our not-too-distant past should not be allowedto slip into oblivion as if they never happened.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.