If you’re looking for something for yourself or to give your nineteen-year-old to read, Siobhan Nash-Marshall’s “George” is for you. Yes, this St. George does indeed face a dragon—rather, the Dragon—but only after undergoing a discovery of faith that is simultaneously a discovery of the philosophical lies and half-truths that have wreathed the world in a spiritual smoke.

George by Siobhan Nash-Marshall (129 pages, Crossroad, 2022)

A word of caution to those who might see Imaginative Conservative contributor and philosophy professor Siobhan Nash-Marshall’s new novel with its drawing of a beautiful reddish dragon emitting a wreath of blue smoke over a black-and-white New York skyline: this modern-day telling of St. George is not going to be the kind of thing to read to your nine-year-old. For that, I would recommend Michael Lotti’s St. George and the Dragon (CreateSpace, 2014), which depicts George as a Roman military officer who discovers Christian faith on leave from the Legion and fights a supernatural but very flesh-and-blood dragon.

If you’re looking for something for yourself or to give your nineteen-year-old to read—and I could see this short tale being used successfully in a high school or college philosophy class—George is for you. Like Lotti’s St. George, this one does indeed face a dragon—rather, the Dragon—but only after undergoing a discovery of faith that is simultaneously a discovery of the philosophical lies and half-truths that have wreathed the world in a spiritual smoke.

Set in the spring of 2020, this tale begins with the eponymous character, an adult, living in a house with some of his siblings and parents for the time being. A dragon is on the loose and the authorities have commanded that people stay inside and receive food that is delivered to their homes by people in hazmat suits while being lulled into a catatonic state by the smoke that emanates from their television sets. Along with the smoke coming from the screens are words coming from the mouths of news anchors and actors, words that tell of the necessity of offering sacrifice to the Dragon for “the common good” and getting used to “the new normal.”

Though the rest of his family has succumbed to this new normal, George is aware of the smoke—and wears a mask only when in the vicinity of the screen. He feels the deadening power of the messages from the screen. And he knows that in order to avoid becoming like his loved ones, he must continue simply to “move,” indeed to get outdoors. And so, despite the risk of the police being called, he leaves and wanders out on the upstate New York property of his childhood, headed toward the winery that his grandfather had started and his uncle had later taken over.

As he approaches, he hears music. Not just any music, but Bach’s Partita Number 3. Upon arriving, this miraculous violinist offers him a meal of real food—lamb, nothing like the packaged containers from the hazmat suits. This violinist knows George and also knows that George has a destiny that involves conflict with the Dragon. More importantly, the violinist knows what the true war with the Dragon is about: “It is as old as time. It is the war of what is versus what I want.”

The mysterious violinist disappears, but in the morning George discovers that the winery has been the site of a life that has avoided the world of the lockdowns and the screens—it went by the old ways and ignored the new. The reader discovers that George’s return to his family property had followed his own journey off to New York City for a career navigating the worlds of high finance, business, NGOs, and governments that have played so much a part in modernity. In the language of British demographer David Goodheart, George is one of the Anywheres, while his family, who had hunkered down at the winery, were Somewheres. He had prospered in our modern sense while they had born children and borne fruit.

George now hunkers down with them and begins to learn again lessons he might once have known at some level about the world but had forgotten as he rose to the commanding heights. He had played “the game” and won. The price for winning, however, was that he had had to accept the modern divisions of life into distinct “worlds,” each with their own rules. The price of being an Anywhere with power is that one has no sense of home and no integrity. For integrity, either personally or morally, depends on their being a oneness to life. What George discovers in the winery is that these Somewheres without the power of the world have, because of their integrity, a power from outside the world that had been invisible to him as long as he flitted from cosmopolis to cosmopolis with his series of statistical tricks and hacks by which those who deal in the modern political economic reality “fix” things, “maximize profit,” and “control the market” while focusing on “quantity.”

What George is discovering in the interactions with the children of his cousins and especially with his cousin’s wife, Beth, is that there is a way to live with integrity, even if he can’t figure it out. He knows, however, that it has something to do with the realities at the heart of his family’s practice of Catholic Christian faith. And so between playing with children and helping them with homework, he pores over the beginning chapters of Luke’s Gospel, discovering a world in which faith comes before reason lest reason become a devouring agent, never capable of finding a firm foundation. What he finds in Luke are those who think not merely about what they want but about “righteousness” and “walking in the commandments.”

While George wants to turn the words of the Gospels into yet another life-hacking set of metarules for life, Beth, a mother of a multitude, becomes his interlocutor, showing him how to go about his task and explaining to him that his attempt to treat the Gospels as yet further material for breaking down information and mastering the universe is mistaken. “The real problem,” she tells him, is not spelling out the logical entailments of Luke’s world, as you call it…. The real problem is accepting Luke’s world: knowing it, living in it. Luke’s world is a tough pill to swallow, especially for us, Descartes’s orphans, who think of everything as a game. We have to learn to accept reality.”

The war between what is and the dominating impulse to bend reality to what “I want” is what George needs to enter in order to fight the Dragon. And fight the Dragon he does, though not in the way a nine-year-old will appreciate nor in the way our modern keyboard warriors will. Those who have lived a bit and have perceived that the Dragon’s work is in the big city but also operating on the dividing line in every human heart and mind will find themselves thinking about the true nature of success, desire, and the true foundation of a life of integrity.

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