The best thing about this book may be its cover. That is not meant as a putdown; it's just difficult to imagine a more perfectly evocative image for a book about the Catholic sensibility of the artist known as Sting. Taken during a recording session at Montserrat the day of his mother's death and used as the back cover of his album Nothing Like the Sun, the photograph shows him standing next to a statue of the Virgin Mary, her hands clasped in prayer. Sting looks as though his thoughts are a million miles away.
Sting and Religion is not part of the Religion Around book series, which now includes volumes on Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Virginia Woolf, Billie Holiday, and Bono. But it easily could be. Marienberg's argument is that Sting's songwriting was profoundly shaped by the religious heritage of his family and community. Born in 1951 and christened Gordon Matthew Sumner, he grew up at a pivotal moment for Roman Catholics. He was entering puberty when Vatican II commenced, significantly altering the experience of worship for Catholics worldwide. Sumner was just seventeen, finishing grammar school, when Pope Paul VI released the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which prohibited all methods of contraception except for the “rhythm method.” The decade also witnessed stirrings of the ecumenical impulse that slowly lowered the barriers between the Church of England and Catholics.
The book juxtaposes long chapters describing and analyzing lyrics from Sting's forty-five-year career with chapters on the religion around him as he grew up working-class in Wallsend, a small town in northeast England. We get a sense of the dynamics of Catholic parish life in a majority Protestant nation whose history included centuries of persecution and discrimination against Catholics; the complications of “mixed marriage” between an Anglican mother and a Catholic father; and the choices mixed families faced in raising their children, in this case opting for a Catholic upbringing. Marienberg reconstructs the teachings and practices Sumner experienced as a child and a student at the family's parish school, St. Columba's, followed by the regional Catholic grammar school some distance away in Newcastle. He recounts Sumner's early encounters with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and how certain doctrines and customs, namely corporal punishment, led Sumner (and likely a large segment of fellow baby boomers) to grow up ambivalent and drift away from the church. We learn something, too, about the community of Wallsend, drenched in history back to the Roman fortress and wall that still runs through the town, particularly the economic travails it faced during Sumner's years there, when the shipbuilding that anchored the community went into steep postindustrial decline.
Not all the spiritual influence on Sting flowed from Catholicism. After leaving Wallsend, Sting was also impacted by the Jewish writer Arthur Koestler and by G. I. Gurdjieff. He has long practiced yoga and partaken of the hallucinogenic ayahuasca, which he called “the only genuine religious experience I have ever had” (192).
Marienberg has done impressive research for this book. More than the average academic, to his credit, he draws on numerous interviews he conducted. He was able to interview Sting, along with a number of old friends, bandmates, and acquaintances from childhood on. Of course, he seems to be well acquainted with Sting's recordings and song lyrics, going back to 1975, when he made his first cassette recordings in London with his band, No Exit, and finds numerous explicit and implicit religious themes in them. His research is thorough and well presented.
He is also a cautious scholar. Marienberg developed a careful coding system for preserving the anonymity of his interview subjects. When he cites a published interview not conducted by himself, he is careful to include caveats: Sting was reported to have said, or, If the interview was transcribed accurately. Sometimes he is overly fastidious. Do readers need to know that the official name of Highway 61 from the famous Dylan song is actually “US Route 61”? (79 n.16). Caution occasionally produces convoluted prose: “Personal prayer however is, or was, not unknown to him,” he explains. “I do not have proof that Gordon ever participated in non-obligatory events such as those that took place at school, but he admits liking, very much in fact, the Rosary, as a youngster.” (128–129) Regarding the book's architecture, I longed for more structure within the long chapters, which can read like a chronological march through Sting's milieu and corpus. A few signposts in the form of subchapters would have helped.
At the end of his introduction, Marienberg makes a curious statement. After citing Andrew Greeley's assertion that “Troubadours always have more impact than theologians or bishops,” he writes, “I have no opinion on the matter” (xv). This signals that the monograph will not be concerned with audience reception, how listeners receive the music, or even with the complex social work of “musicking” that is always integral to the production and meaning of music. Fair enough. To include those perspectives would result in a much larger book. But to have no opinion on such an important question seems odd.
The largest lacuna in Sting and Religion is its lack of attention to the sonic as opposed to lyrical content of Sting's music. Were there any musical influences from the Catholic hymns that Sting was so fond of? What might Sting have learned from other kinds of religious music, say African American music, in the musical features of his songs, or in the grain of the voice he fashioned? To include those perspectives would have produced a different and longer book, and a reviewer shouldn't criticize an author for writing a different book than the one they did. But these gaps leave room for future scholars to contribute to our understanding of this historically important musician.
