A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence.

Sometimes when I pick up a book I find I have already formed an arbitrary notion of what it is about. When this notion proves incorrect I suffer from an irritated disappointment which gets between me and the author's real intentions and achievements. A History of Heaven had this effect on me, and my irritation was not entirely arbitrary; the book has the wrong title. Call a book something bold, and at the same time as profoundly paradoxical as A History of Heaven (since one thing that eternity simply cannot have is a history), and I think that any reader is doomed to frustration on discovering that the book ends in the early fourteenth century and (apart from a background nod in the direction of Judaism and Islam) deals only with Christian concepts. The book is not a history of heaven, it is a background study to the third book of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Russell sort of acknowledges the problem by saying in his preface that he sees A History of Heaven as a "prolegomenon to a detailed, multivolume study of heaven"; and by slipping a justification for his premature ending to his survey into the opening of chapter 13: "The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is the most sublime portrait of heaven from the Book of Revelation to the present. I conclude this history of heaven with Dante, because beyond Dante no merely human word has gone."

I've labored this point a bit because I think it is important. The expectations which the title sets up put particular demands on the reader - for instance, anticipating a far longer sweep, the opening half of the book feels awkwardly paced and over-detailed.

All this is a particular pity because what Russell has done is quite remarkable: He has produced a detailed, scholarly work which is alive with passion and poetry. This is a book about joy. It is also a book grounded in the particular, and in a clear acceptance of the mystery at the heart of Russell's research enterprise. "Heaven itself," he writes, "cannot be described, but the human concept of heaven can be." Russell clearly believes in heaven and is unashamed of saying so. This sort of commitment, strong enough to dance on the page, is rare among academics (and particularly, I have to say, theologians) and delightful.

Once I had disciplined myself to accept that my expectations were not going to be met, I had a wonderful time reading this book. Russell, it seems to me, is particularly good at explaining mindsets radically different from our own, and in creating a functional vocabulary to address this material. The earlier traditional Jewish and Christian understanding of "literal" and "metaphorical" truths is different from ours. Russell's decision (and explanation of his decision) to avoid the word "literal" and replace it with "overt" and his development of the expression "metaphorical ontology" is helpful not just in reading his book but in understanding and decoding lots of pre-Enlightenment writing, particularly poetry and mystical texts.

It is impossible not to feel that Russell brings such care and clarity to his subject because he comes to it more as lover than as teacher; he is singing the delights of heaven. Like any engaged lover he wants to tell us all about it, and if sometimes this means a certain excess of detail at the expense of pace and analysis, one is carried along by the creativity of the writing and the underlying sense of the author's own enthusiastic delight.

Of course it is rather tricky to write a whole book demonstrating that it is impossible to say anything actual about your subject! But Russell's sense of paradox and tension helps him through. A careful balancing of a chronologically developing cultural history against the apophatic tradition (the spiritual approach which says we can know and say nothing whatever about the essential nature of God), rather wonderfully reflects what appears to be his personal conviction - we can't know and we must tell everything we do know.

I have not left much space, nor do I have the academic competence, to critique Russell's readings of the various theologians whose ideas he presents, but at this level the book carries an air of authority which enables even a lay reader like me to feel a reposed confidence in the guide. I did enormously enjoy and also learned a lot from this book. I just wish that either he had pushed on to more modern concepts of heaven, or had chosen a more accurate title. This would have allowed me easier access to the delights that Russell so joyously presents.

Sara Maitland's most recent book is Angel Maker: The Collected Short Stories (Henry Holt).