If you must read something filthy 'The Glorious Heresies' by LisaMcInerney (John Murray) R285A DYNAMIC young writer, McInerney was the author of an award-winning, witheringly funny blog about working life in Galway called Arse End of Ireland. This, her debut novel, is more of the same: a messy homicide plays havoc with five rather desperate characters on the fringes of post-crash Cork society - a 15-year-old drug dealer, a sex worker, a failed family man, a gangster and, this being a Catholic country, an unrepentant penitent. Savage, moving and darkly hilarious, this is a wild ride exploring shame and salvation and the legacy of the church's attitudes to sex and family. Not for the faint-hearted, though, and those easily offended.THE ISSUEThe vandalism of public statues continues and it appears as if the unlearned bullies are winning the day. While Heritage Western Cape is to decide where to locate Marion Walgate's statue of Cecil John Rhodes, removed from the UCT campus last week, I've been considering rereading Ann Harries' witty novel Manly Pursuits. Published in 1999, it tells the story of an eccentric ornithologist from Oxford who has brought 200 English birds to Cape Town at the behest of a dying Rhodes, who believed his life could be saved if he heard them singing once more.Would the real Rhodes have resorted to such desperation, I wonder? In the introduction to his short biography, Cecil Rhodes, the poet William Plomer claims that the "more we learn of him the nearer we come to the end of all knowledge, which is a sense of overwhelming wonder and of utter ignorance". Plomer's valuable little book, published in 1933, suggests that the novelist Olive Schreiner "may well be regarded as [Rhodes's] greatest South African contemporary".Rhodes would probably have taken issue with that. He once said that he had only met "two creators" in South Africa - himself and James Douglas Logan, the subject of a fascinating new political and social history by Dean Allen, Empire, War & Cricket in South Africa: Logan of Matjiesfontein (Zebra). It explores in detail how Logan, a Scot, not only developed the Karoo town into a renowned health resort but how he was instrumental in developing cricket in South Africa at a time his close friend Rhodes's policies were steering the country to war with the British empire.THE BOTTOM LINE"[But] given Jesus' love for children, his support for physicians and his belief that a God who abhors suffering and comforts the afflicted would never give children diseases as a test of faith, how did we come to a place where parents, in the name of Jesus, are willing to ignore the screams of meningitis, the breathlessness of pneumonia and the disfiguring erosion of cancer when life-saving therapies are at hand?" - Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Paul A Offit (Basic Books)..