On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff, reviewed by Rosemary Goring

Picador, £16.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

One of Canada’s leading public intellectuals, Michael Ignatieff takes on a subject that touches us all, whether we like it or not. Everyone at some point must do a reckoning of life; its purpose and meaning, or apparent lack thereof. The current pandemic, which frames this absorbing work, is only one example of a situation in which we discover our limitations, and are shaken by our vulnerability and inadequacy.

Considering Covid’s echoes of plagues in previous centuries, Ignatieff reflects: “Instead of running forward, time seemed to be running backward to a past we thought was irrevocably behind us ... We had so much less control of history than we supposed, so much less control of illness than we imagined. The speed with which our society was brought to a standstill acted to humble us all and put into question every secular faith.”

On Consolation is a book about faith and belief, not all of it religious. Written for a secular age, its starting point was a lecture Ignatieff was asked to give about justice and politics in the Book of Psalms. Although he is not religious, the depth of comfort he found in this poetic collection of ideas and exhortations enticed him to explore the history of consolation. The result is an account, necessarily concise and incomplete, of some of the most enduring words, concepts, images and music that have sustained previous generations, as well as our own.

Author Michael Ignatieff

A novelist, writer, academic and former leading politician, Ignatieff brings all his talents to bear on the subject. Recalling the deaths of his parents 30 years ago, his sorrow remains tangible. This might explain his awareness that “consolation may be the work of a lifetime”.

By taking the Books of Job and the Psalms as a starting point he confirms that, for millennia, people have yearned to make sense of their afflictions. Even rock-solid assurance in the divine cannot entirely quash the doubts assailing those who face illness, torment, loss, or their own imminent death. The reason these two particular texts retain their power, he suggests, “is their extraordinary capacity to give words to our own doubts, our maddening sense of the inscrutability of the world, the absence of justice, the cruelty of fate, and our longing for a world where our experience finds validation and meaning”.

The authors of these books will never be known, but Ignatieff soon turns to some of the most influential writers who left their reflections on coping with the hand life deals us. Almost inevitably, most are male until the last century, although not mentioning the deathbed revelations of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich – “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” – feels like an oversight.

There is Cicero, a Stoic figurehead and political giant whose daughter’s death in childbirth temporarily unmanned him in the eyes of his peers; there is the emperor Marcus Aurelius who, stranded among Barbarians on the frontier of the Roman Empire, pitilessly confronted his own mortality: “an empty pageant, a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a tussle of spearmen; a bone flung among a pack of curs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and labouring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings – that is life.” Less lofty, but equally despairing is Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy, written while he awaited execution in the sixth century, includes the haunting perception that: “In all adversity of fortune ... the most wretched kind is once to have been happy.”

The thinkers, rebels and artists who fill these pages create a chorus, each voice attempting to understand the world around – and possibly beyond – them. Not until philosopher David Hume, however, is God, and the salve of Paradise, consigned to history. Air and honesty enter the picture with Hume, who rebelled against the “false comforts” of religion, and went to his death with a tranquillity of spirit that infuriated and baffled his doctrinal foes.

Hume’s insistence on the importance of society, work and friendship is the hinge on which modern conceptions of solace swing. Harsher political creeds have since tried to sweep away all existential comfort, with philosophers such as Karl Marx and Max Weber certain, for differing reasons, that they lived in a post-consolation age. Nevertheless, their blinkered idealism or bleakness has been confounded by poets and writers, including Primo Levi and Anna Akhmatova, who have acted almost as recording angels, capturing the depths of human cruelty for future generations.

Perhaps most persuasive of all is the role music plays in sustaining those who are sorrowing and afraid. Describing Beethoven’s instinctual response to a mother’s grief, and Mahler’s songs, composed in memory of his eight siblings who died in childhood – he could never directly write about his young daughter’s death from scarlet fever – Ignatieff writes: “Mahler shared Wagner’s conviction that music should attempt nothing less than to provide meaning for men and women living after the death of the gods. … As in Kindertotenlieder, as in the final bars of his ninth symphony, Mahler brings the listener and the music to the very edge of silence, as if to mark the place where music’s consoling work has to end, and the listener must go on to find a meaning of his own.”

From Cicero to Albert Camus to the physician Cicely Saunders, whose London hospice helped thousands to experience the richness of “a good death”, Ignatieff teases out the distinction between those who leaned on the prospect of an afterlife and others who have navigated by means of political ideologies or artistic vision. Or, in the case of Saunders, in easing the way for others to confront the finality of life.

As this probing and personal work approaches its terminus, it becomes clear that Ignatieff’s purpose has been not only to synthesise centuries of soul-searching, but to make his own contribution. After reading the thoughts of those on the brink of death, or in deepest despair, he finds his own definition of consolation: “What do we learn that we can use in these times of darkness? Something very simple, we are not alone, and we never have been.”