Written by With Christmas Day just four weeks away, this is the time of year when people buy books or tokens to give for Christmas gifts. And to help us choose what to buy, magazines and newspapers are choosing their Books of the Year as chosen by their critics.
One book published recently that has caught my attention is Do Not Resuscitate by Maurice Saatchi. Its basic premise is his asking if he deserves to go to heaven in order to be with his late wife, the writer and novelist Josephine Hart.
With his brother, Charles, Maurice Saatchi founded the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in 1970. They became best known for the political campaigns they created that helped to bring Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979. Their most well-known advertisement and, possibly, one of the most effective in British political history, was: “Labour isn’t working”. Labour, under Harold Wilson and then Jim Callaghan, had been in government for several years but it was a time of high unemployment and spiralling inflation. The poster’s design was a picture of a snaking dole queue outside an unemployment office. Above it was the slogan “Labour isn’t working” with the phrase “Britain’s better off with the Conservatives” in a smaller text below. A year later the electorate voted in a new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher.
In Do Not Resuscitate, Saatchi imagines that he has died and arrived at the gates of Heaven, now turned into a border control and immigration centre. (Are you listening, Suella?) Arrivals there face a series of tests to determine whether they can enter or be dispatched to Hell. However, he is told that “There are, unfortunately, too many fraudulent claims intended to frustrate proper removal and we face a backlog of hopeless applicants who threaten to overwhelm our border.”
A grading system is used to determine whether each applicant has tried to make the world a better place in their time on earth. So a “comprehensive examination” is undertaken of all the publicly available information on each of them, from tax investigations to text messages, in order to work out their fitness for heaven. When the process is completed, applicants are split into two groups to be for ever kept apart one entering heaven and the other going to hell.
However, instead of being processed like everybody else, Saatchi must undergo a show trial. The jury, which will decide if he deserves a reunion with his wife, is made up of “a representative cross-section” of people, including, surprisingly, some well-known personalities such as Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Mahatma Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Albert Einstein and Mao Tso Tsung. Amongst these he also includes his late wife who, apparently, once described him as “a selfish, self-centred, egocentric narcissist”. (If your own wife says that …)
I’ve not read the book, just two reviews of it, and what I’m sharing with you about it is from the Sunday Times review by Rosamund Urwin. She has written that Saatchi does not come out of the trial all that well and that amongst the lists of tasks he has never carried out in life include going to the supermarket, cooking and making the bed. We will have to read the book to see if Saatchi’s good points and his love for Josephine – they wrote each other 1,628 love letters – softens a potential harsh judgement of him by the court of heaven.
The “coming of the Son of Man” that Jesus foretells in this Sunday’s Gospel is a technical expression that refers to the day when he comes to judge us, that he, as we say in the Creed, “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead”. So he asks us to be ready for that moment when we face this final judgement. He compares it to the great Biblical Flood which swept away every living thing except those who found safety in Noah’s ark. Don’t be caught out like them, Jesus says: be ready, otherwise Christ’s arrival and judgement might be painful.
The four-week season of Advent, that begins today, gives us an opportunity to think about our end of life and how we might be better prepared for it. We live in the hope that when it comes our good deeds, as Saatchi hopes, will outweigh the bad, and that the court of heaven will treat us mercifully. For Saatchi, the greatest pain would be to be forever parted from his beloved wife. What would be the greatest pain for you?
In his book, Maurice Saatchi chooses the likes of Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Mahatma Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Albert Einstein and Mao Tso Tsung to be part of the heavenly court judging him. Who would you choose to stand alongside Jesus in your jury?
Michael Campion
Holy Name, Jesmond
29/30 November 2022
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 