My faithful fellow blogger, Bookstooge, is doing a readalong of a book someone, possibly as a prank, recommended to him: Love Saves the Day by Barbara Cartland. I went so far as to order this book from Amazon in order to participate. I don’t usually read in the romance genre, but I have read a few, and I don’t despise the genre or its readers or anything like that.
I waited to post this until after Bookstooge’s first reaction post went up on Friday, but I am composing my reaction before I see his.
First, let’s talk about this cover, eh? The word “terrifying” comes to mind. The guy looks more like Dracula – or a 60-year-old uncle- than like a romantic hero. Note that he is grasping the heroine by the upper arms. She, for her part, appears to be very concerned and trying to get away. I don’t mind the fact that this is impressionistically rendered – I don’t even completely mind that her hair is not, as it is described in the book, curly — but the emotional tone of this cover does not match the promised content.
I am, as of this posting, almost all the way through Chapter 4 because I mistakenly remembered that Bookstooge was going to be writing about chapters 1 – 6 in his first post. My impression so far: the plot is a very capable romance plot. The heroine is young, brave, idealistic; the hero is a little older, world-weary, etc.; there’s a rival romantic hero in the picture who is young, blond, and charming; financial circumstances are forcing the couple into co-operation they wouldn’t otherwise undertake. There’s even a bitter, scheming housekeeper a la Rebecca. I can’t see any big holes in the plot.
My first impression of the wordsmithing is that this is a first draft.
There are a ton of comma splices. There is head-hopping. (Though that may be intentional; sometimes it’s hard to tell head-hopping from an omniscient narrator. I omnish, myself.) The tone of the dialog is slightly inconsistent. It’s as if Cartland wants this to be an Edwardian-era novel, like Austen, or even earlier, but it’s set in 1903, and sometimes it comes off as if the characters are pretending to be from an earlier era. I can’t tell whether clothes, technology, and so forth, contain any anachronisms. The clothes are fairly generically described, but there are “omnibuses.” (Edit: I just looked it up, and oops! Edwardian is 1901 – 1910. So, spot on. So, the language sounds like it’s going for … Victorian? But obviously I’m not very savvy about this, so perhaps her language is also period accurate.)
Anyway, after noticing that this read like a first draft, I then went back to the introduction (which, like a good fiction reader, I had skipped), and, lo and behold …. it is a first draft.
Dame Barbara Cartland[‘s] most amazing literary feat was to double her output from 10 books a year to over 20 books a year when she was 77 to meet the huge demand.
She went on writing continuously at this rate for 20 years and wrote her very last book at the age of 97, thus completing an incredible 400 books between the ages of 77 and 97.
Her publishers finally could not keep up with this phenomenal output, so at her death in 2000 she left behind an amazing 160 unpublished manuscripts, something that no other author has ever achieved.
Barbara’s son, Ian McCorquodale, together with his daughter Iona, felt that it was their sacred duty to publish all these titles for Barbara’s millions of admirers all over the world who so love her wonderful romances.
So in 2004 they started publishing the 160 brand new Barbara Cartlands as the The Barbara Cartland Pink Collection, as Barbara’s favourite colour was always pink — and yet more pink!
The Barbara Cartland Pink collection is published monthly exclusively by Barbaracartland.com and the books are numbered in sequence from 1 to 160.
–the introduction
Barbara Cartland was cranking out about one novel every two weeks for twenty years. I’m not even mad, I’m impressed. And I am now a little bit jealous of her. Imagine having such high demand for your books that you can just dash off all your ideas and the publisher will publish them as fast as they can.
Also, I’m tickled. That selection above gets funnier every time I read it. I mean, it sounds made-up, like something from a Bertie Wooster novel. Even the names of Barbara’s son and granddaughter sound like characters from her books. And the fact that they are calling it the pink collection because that was her favorite color … the fact that she loved pink so much … the fact that her author photo looks like this:
Now that I think about, the section above might be my favorite part of the book. The romance between Tiana and Richard is going to have to get awfully good in order to compete with Cartland herself.
This book was recommended to me by The Geeky Jock, who has since dropped off my feed.
The author is a wilderness writer, and like many wilderness writers, he can write lyrically about the Canadian forests, giving you a sense of eerie beauty, and then he can turn around and be funny with the hardships that he and his hiking partner have to go through. In this book, he’s on the hunt for “the Traverspine demon,” a mysterious creature that, according to historical records, terrorized a remote outpost in Labrador. It sounds like a Sasquatch (which Shoalts, oversimplifying merrily, says is only attested in the Pacific region), but it leaves cloven footprints.
Shoalts and his friend push on through conditions that would have made this Bigfoot buff turn back, such as days of impassable brush. They don’t find the creature, but they do find a theory. Shoalts, a materialist, decides it was probably a combination of sightings of a wolverine, and moose tracks (both animals were rare in the region at the time). His theory is pretty convincing. He undermines his case a bit by dismissing the Greek centaurs as people’s first sighting of a man on a horse, while ignoring all the other, harder-to-dismiss chimeras that populate Greek legend.
Jack Reacher, drifting through town as is his wont, stops to help out a random guy who’s being bullied, and once again ends up stopping an international plot basically single handedly. He then has a gratuitous affair (not graphically described) with a female character he will never meet again, before leaving town.
Also, Nazis. (Not very creative, guys. Do better.)
One thing I like about the Reacher books is that I’m never worried about him. No matter how outnumbered or apparently outgunned he is, I know Reacher is smarter, quicker, and has more martial arts and military skills than his opponents. But, at the same time, he consistently gets into situations where any sane person would be worried, and I know I should be scared for him. In that way, these books strike a good balance. I’m neither terrified nor bored.
Heartbreaking novel about an American ex-cop who has recently moved to rural Ireland. Super well-written. Very evocative of the landscape, the weather, and the people, including the way they use the English language. For example, they say things like, “He’s after leaving for work” instead of “He just left for work.”
Felix Francis has carried on the beloved institution of “racing thrillers” written by his jockey father, Dick Francis. All novels by Francis (pater and fils) take place in “the racing world.” Sometimes the main character is a jockey, sometimes a trainer or an owner, and sometimes the connection to racing is looser. All are written in the first person.
In this novel, the main character, Chester, very profitably runs a “syndicate.” He buys racehorses and sells shares of them to wealthy people who want to participate in the lifestyle. So each horse has multiple owners, but Chester is the main owner, and the one who liases with the trainers and jockeys to plan out the horses’ careers. Chester is less of a tough-guy character than the typical Francis protagonist. He’s also older and more established than Franics main characters usually are. His children are grown (just), and his wife is aging and losing interest in their marriage.
Syndicate had less action than previous Francis books I’ve read, and considerably less violence (though Francis books do vary a lot in this regard). It is not as tense as the cover makes it appear. I also wasn’t too impressed with some of Chester’s choices. All in all, this wasn’t the strongest Francis novel I’ve read, though it was on-brand. Three stars.
An indispensable reference book. Neither easy nor fun to read. I’ll be reviewing this in greater detail later.
“Here are five pages about the financial trouble our supplies broker got us into. This is greatly abridged.
“Here are a few paragraphs about the time we had to break up a commune, but they were so drunk that we were able to just walk up to them and physically take their rifles.”
I got this tag from Snapdragon Alcove. I hope it’s OK that I’m posting it after Halloween (life is busy!). Because of the relatively narrow range of my horror consumption, I’m freely mixing movies and books.
Pick your favorite example of a …
Zombie apocalypse
The Book of Eli (a movie)
Not exactly zombies, but as I recall, there is an older couple that seems normal, but then you find out they have some sort of neurological disease from having eaten human flesh to survive. Creepy.
Also, I love the characters Denzel Washington usually plays, and this is no exception. I like my apocalyptic movies to be somewhat uplifting, and this fits the bill.
Vampire
The Unwilling, by C. David Belt (a book). Cheating a little, ‘cause I recently reviewed it here. This one made me cry, because there is a child vampire who wants to be “a real boy.”
Haunted house
I guess I don’t read many haunted house books, because Monster House is the only one I can think of. It is just as sad as ghost stories usually are.
Psychological thriller
Fractured and Shutter Island (both movies). I was very angry with both of these movies, but Fractured probably made me angrier.
Creepy doll
The Collision series, by Rich Colburn. So far, it has only two volumes: The Resolve of Immortal Flesh and The Formulacrum. But The Formulacrum ended on a literal cliffhanger, so that means Colburn owes us another one.
Neither of these books is exclusively about creepy dolls, but one very memorable creepy doll is featured … and that’s just about the only book I have ever read with a creepy doll.
Monster
Beowulf, duh.
And, in case you are not up to speed on this, Grendel is a t-rex. But there are plenty of other monsters in this how-to-defeat-monsters book, including the sea monsters Beowulf encounters while swimming in the North Sea, and Grendel’s mother, who appears to be some sort of octopus.
Comedy-horror
The Tremors franchise. It is the best. Extreme gross-outs, but also extreme humor. Survivalist Ed really steals the show.
Teen Horror
Stranger Things. I will die on this hill.
The series starts out where the kids are about twelve and it more resembles E.T. or The Goonies, but the events cover several years and we see the kids discovering the opposite sex, feeling left out as they grow up at different rates, dealing with problems with their parents and problems involving finding a career and their place in the world. Their lives have all the teen challenges, plus the ghosts and demonic creatures and stuff to deal with. And yes, there are a few make-out scenes that it would be nice if we could skip. I will also say that the series seems to be equally sensitive to the experiences of teen boys and girls.
Some people think the episodes are too long and detailed, but that’s the point. They work in a lot of human drama in addition to the scary stuff, and I am here for it.
Demonic possession
Perelandra and That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis both feature possession that gets more terrifying the longer you think about it.
In Perelandra, the possessed man gets to come out and speak instead of the demon once in a while, and this gives a more evocative glimpse into his mind than we might prefer.
In That Hideous Strength, the people that are serving the demons get dehumanized to an even greater extent, and we see the beginning of this dehumanization process happen to one of the main characters. There is also a memorable scene where one of the villains, who up until now has been the most formidable because of his intelligence, wants to put a stop to something, but “he could not think of any words.” This moment of aphasia shows us how close his mind is to total disintegration.
Science fiction
Science fiction reliably pulls towards horror, for obvious reasons. Human nature doesn’t mix well with dimensional portals … or genetic engineering … or time travel.
That second image is from a movie called Paradox. It turns out there are quite a few of those, but this one involves time travel being exploited by a bitter coworker to go postal, and even though the team has an awful lot of information, they can’t figure out what is happening quickly enough.
Being nineteen didn’t sit right with Cal. He thought it did at the time, when he was running wild in Chicago, giddy on freedom, working as a bouncer at skeevy clubs and playing house with Donna in a fourth-floor walkup with no air-conditioning. It was only a few years later, when they found out Alyssa was on the way, that he realized running wild never had suited him. It had been a lot of fun, but deep down, so deep that he’d never spotted it there, Cal yearned after getting his feet on the ground and doing right by someone.
You may notice that I have a large tag in my tag cloud called Native Americana. I’ve always been a sucker for American Indians. The second two books in my trilogy are a speculative exploration of what their distant ancestor’s lives might have been like.
This subject comes up every year because of the efforts to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I’m not in favor of this, but I do love all things American Indian. (Traditional things, that is. I’m not a fan of the cultural disintegration brought about by enforced socialism on the rez. For more on this, see the book review below.) Anyway, this is the time of year when I find myself annoyed yet again by Matt Walsh.
Walsh has done yeoman’s work fighting the forces of evil in our culture, but he just doesn’t know very much about American Indians. He’ll portray pre-conquest America as an extremely backwards place, full of “stone-age” people, who “hadn’t even invented the wheel.” This annoys me. There actually had been civilizations in the Americas (howbeit, without wheels), including astronomically aligned earthworks and pyramids, even in North America. The Americas suffered a population collapse about a hundred years before Columbus arrived, as documented by Nathaniel Jeansen of Answers in Genesis and in his book Traced. So, what the Europeans found were the scattered remains of civilizations. (Except Cortez. He found the real thing, and it was terrible to behold.)
Now granted, the American civilizations had not yet been Christianized, so they resembled Ancient Near Eastern pagan theo-states rather than European medieval kingdoms. It was probably this, in fact, that gave the Europeans the intellectual edge and enabled them to conquer the continents. Other things being equal, paganism tends to make people more passive. Fatalism, you know.
So Walsh is right that the Europeans conquered the Americans fair and square, as it were. Just like everywhere else throughout history. Now, the conquerors celebrating and romanticizing those they have conquered is a tradition that goes way back. See Homer writing sympathetically about the Trojans. See the beautiful Roman statue, The Dying Gaul. See the Romans commemorating the abduction of the Sabine women, but also celebrating Romulus and Remus, whose story is enough to curl you hair. So I am all for celebrating indigenous peoples (because I love ’em), but also Columbus (because there is no call to demonize your own culture).
That said, let’s not let sympathy turn into damaging infantilization. That’s what the United States government has done with the American Indians, as documented in the book below.
Book Review: The New Trail of Tears by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Life is very bad on our American Indian reservations.
People on the reservations experience rates of corruption, unemployment, depression, drug addiction, sexual assault and child abuse that are as high or higher than any other place in the nation.
But why?
Those with overly simplistic views of American Indians tend to oversimplify in one of two ways: your average American Indian is seen either as Wise Noble Victim, or Worthless Lazy Drunk. My instincts have always put me in the Wise Noble Victim camp, but I recognize that neither of these oversimplifications explains conditions on the rez. American Indians are people, which means they are sinful but not worthless. As Schaefer Riley puts it, “Indians, just like all people, respond to the economic incentives and political conditions around them” (page 178).
I have occasionally spoken with people who seem to resent all that American Indians receive from the government. Tribal governments are “sovereign.” Tribes have the right to operate casinos on their land (in most states no one else can), and in many cases, tribal governments or even individuals receive direct payments of federal dollars. None of this is false, but what has been the effect of it? It has not led to a cushy life for tribe members; quite the opposite.
The Incentives
Here’s my quick summary of the “economic incentives and political conditions” created by the way the federal government has handled the tribes:
Law enforcement on the rez is a nightmare. Since Indians are not considered as being under the jurisdiction of the state in which they live, if there is a serious crime, it is considered a federal crime, and you could have three or four agencies involved. “He became especially concerned ‘with the lack of coordination between the tribal police and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI and the Justice Department.'” (page 164) Often, other law enforcement agencies defer to the tribal police, who often, because of nepotism, don’t prosecute. This creates a lawless situation on the rez, with high crime. It gives victims the impression that nothing will be done.
It is difficult for Indians to own land; or, if they happen to own some, to develop or sell it. Most land is not individually owned, but belongs to the tribe. A combination of tribal politics, environmental concerns, and federal red tape tends to block any attempts at development. This means that it is very hard to create or find jobs on the reservation … except jobs in tribal government.
While casinos provide some jobs, the linking of the casinos with tribal membership has introduced all kinds of corruption. Some tribal governments run their casinos essentially as cartels. The effect is that tribal membership is “commodified.” A common political move against a rival would be to get them declared no longer a member of the tribe.
Schools on the rez tend to be as bad as the worst inner-city schools. Schaefer Riley profiles a few schools that have bucked this trend, at least for a few years. One is a Catholic school. There are also Teach for American volunteers who are very motivated to give Indian kids a better education. But these people are usually met with mistrust and actively undermined or driven out because they are outsiders and because of the bad experiences that the older generation had with residential schools trying to forcibly assimilate them.
While it is important for Indian kids to learn about their traditional language and culture, “this is not a good first step.” Schaefer Riley points out that those tribes that have done the most to preserve their language and culture are those that have done the best economically. When no longer just struggling to survive, they use the money and the energy they now have to create museums and cultural centers.
In short, massive amounts of government money and regulations have had the same effects on the Indian reservations that they always have elsewhere. The red tape is at least tripled compared to the red tape faced by other Americans, which pretty much brings any kind of enterprise to a grinding halt. The infusion of government money through the tribal government incentivizes corruption. The lack of private property and actual employment makes people depressed. The white guilt (and the red tape) have made a lost cause of law enforcement.
Possible Solutions
Schaefer Riley ends with a call for American Indians to be treated like all other American citizens. She points out that American Indians have had very high rates of serving in the military.
Indeed, despite centuries of broken promises from the federal government, despite the bitterness that often pervades Indian communities, and despite years of being told by their own leaders and by Washington’s that they must remain a people apart, American Indians largely see themselves as Americans.
pp. 175 – 176
There has to be a way to ensure that Indian crime victims have the same rights under law as other crime victims … that Indians can own land and start businesses as individuals, not just as members of the tribe … that Indian families have access to a choice of schools that will prepare their kids to succeed. It has been suggested that the larger reservations be made into their own states. Then the people who live there would be considered full citizens who happen to reside in that state. This might not be feasible politically (although I think it would be really cool), but there are a few bands in Canada who are trying to get their tribal lands incorporated as cities. This would allow them to do development that they can’t do now, and the tribal leaders would be like city governments. Failing all this, a good step would be to drastically reform (or, ideally, eliminate) the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is known for being the one of the most corrupt and inefficient government agencies in a field where the competition is stiff.
I sincerely hope that Schaefer Riley’s book catalyzes a move in this direction. It should, of course, be read by anyone with the slightest interest in American Indians’ living conditions in these modern times. But it should also be read by anyone who is concerned about the effect of government micromanaging of citizens’ lives.
A Cautionary Tale
I see at least three ways in which the federal government’s treatment of Indians serves as a sample of what it would like to do with all citizens:
It’s coming from good – or at least utopian – intentions. In the case of the Indians, many people feel that the government owes them lots and lots of money and special rights because of the ways that same government mistreated them in the past. (Turns out, the money and “rights” are a new kind of mistreatment.) There is also an assumption that less development is better, because we don’t want to impact the environment at all. In the same way, there is a strong movement to put all citizens in the same position: “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Putting the most charitable interpretation on it, the idealists believe that this would bring about a utopia in which everyone has a high (but more importantly, “equal”) standard of living … there is no family loyalty or private property to cause conflicts … and everyone’s lifestyle is perfectly “green.”
It features forced assimilation. Schaefer Riley points out that Indians are in fact assimilating culturally to the United States, but forced assimilation is a very different story. A few generations ago, Indian children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their own language. This idea that, if the parents don’t share the government’s value system, the government has a right to separate children from their parents and re-educate them, has not died away. The idealists have not yet gained enough power to practice forced assimilation on all American children, but they are trying.
It is collectivist. The degree to which Indians have been denied private property and individual initiative is the exact degree to which they have been brought to poverty and despair. In their case, this has been brought about partly from a sort of Rousseauian “noble-savage” myth about the way the Indians lived before Columbus (spoiler: they weren’t collectivists then either). In the case of other Americans, there has been an attempt to demonize private property, small business, and intact families as the problem with humanity. In fact, these things are key to human flourishing. Sin certainly shows up in them, but that is because it is present in human nature and shows up in whatever humans do.
Actually, that calls for a lot of explanation, doesn’t it?
The Setup
Carl is a faithful Mormon who is grieving his family. His wife, Sharon, and their three small children were killed by a drunk driver who ploughed over them on the sidewalk. But, Carl knows that if he remains faithful, he will be reunited with his family in the Celestial Kingdom. Per the Mormon promises, they’ll be together forever.
Then, Carl’s sister, who has had a troubled history, is killed by a mysterious woman in an alley. Carl becomes obsessed with finding the killer (the police seem to have given up). He tracks her to what appears to be a sex cult with gothic trappings. Thinking he is just going undercover to collect evidence, Carl takes an oath he doesn’t mean and finds himself becoming a vampire.
He doesn’t finish the ceremony, though. As soon as it becomes clear that he is supposed to drink the blood of an innocent girl, Carl instead breaks free and takes her to the nearest hospital. There, he collapses, and is rescued by Moira. Moira is another well-intentioned vampire (a “Penitent”), who works at the hospital so that she can work nights and have access to blood without having to attack people. Moira shows Carl the ways of surviving as a vampire without doing evil. Incredibly, it later turns out that she too is Mormon. She actually became a Mormon after she was already a vampire, thanks to two very persistent missionaries. For about fifty years, one Mormon bishop after another has handed down to his successor a letter explaining Moira’s special “condition.”
Like I said … Mormon vampires.
Pros and Cons, and Why I Was Crying in Public
(P.S. This section turned out kind of long. Sorry about that.)
C. David Belt (shown here with me at the recent Fantasy Faire) is a fantastic horror writer because he pairs the horror writer’s instincts and penchant for research with a uniquely right-side-up view of the world.
Take, for example, his take on vampires. I don’t usually read vampire books because the vampires are usually presented as like mortals, but better: they don’t age, they’re beautiful, they’re sexy. Mortals who don’t want their blood sucked are prudes and bigots and super intolerant. Not so with Belt. In his books, vampires are actually, you know, evil. Vampirism is actually a horror, like it would be if you encountered it in real life. That’s what I mean by a right-side-up view of the world.
Now, this strong sense of the wholesome can shade into a bit of naivete about the human heart. The whole premise of this series is based upon the idea that Carl took the vampire oath and even allowed his own blood to be drunk … “innocently.” Because he “didn’t mean it” and “didn’t think it was real,” he is blameless. He is, in all of history, the only Unwilling vampire.
This raises two questions. Now, perhaps these will be raised by the author himself later in the series, but I’m taking The Unwilling on its own terms. So here we go.
First, is it really possible to take an oath and not be responsible for it because “you don’t mean it”? That would be an extremely convenient thing, if so. Picture this: you are a follower of the One True God. But you live in a pagan environment, and you’re being pressured to take an oath of loyalty to Kukulkan, or Zeus, or the divine Caesar, or Big Brother is requiring you to “just say” there is no God but Big Brother. I think you see where I’m going with this. Now, granted, in The Unwilling Carl was not clinging to secret reservations just to get out of martyrdom when he took the oath to be loyal to Lilith. We know this because he fled the ceremony room, endangering himself, as soon as he realized what he was really being asked to do. So there are degrees of culpability, and of self-awareness. However, the principle that “I didn’t really mean it” or “I thought it was a game” is a dangerous one to introduce. As G.K. Chesterton has pointed out in The Everlasting Man, there is an element of game to much of pagan worship. It’s not always 100% clear how seriously the pagan followers themselves take all their superstitions. However, God still tells Israel in no uncertain terms not to pour out libations to any foreign god or take up their names in oath. So, “it was a game” or “it was maybe partly a game” is not going to cut it.
This leads directly to the second question. How is it possible that, in all of history, Carl is the first person to take the vampire oath without realizing it is real? Wouldn’t we expect that to be true of almost every person that gets inducted into the vampire cult? Or true of at least 50%? In modern times, most people do not really believe that vampires are an actual thing. Surely, the majority of the people that join this “empowering” gothic sex cult think of it as a sort of cosplay.
After all, this is how people join cults: there are concentric circles. There are the hangers-on or wannabes, then the neophytes, then the journeymen, and so on. Typically only the people in the inner circle know what the cult is really about. By the time someone gets that far in, however, they have so much trauma bonding, Stockholm syndrome, sunk cost fallacy, mental confusion and spiritual deception that they tend not to be repelled by even the most bizarre and obviously evil beliefs.
The only way I can square this circle is to figure that, if there were any other Converted who didn’t take the vampire element seriously, then when it came time to commit the ritual murder, unlike Carl they didn’t balk, but rather went ahead. And this because, we can assume, they were not as strong-minded as Carl, or not as pure of heart and motive.
One downside of having a right-side-up view of the world, where you recognize that good and evil actually exist and that people can choose to do good or evil, is that there’s a tendency to think as though the world consists of some good people and some bad ones. Belt falls prey to this, to a certain degree. I don’t want to overstate this flaw, because on the whole he is quite insightful about human psychology, as any good novelist has to be. But here are some examples of what I mean.
Vampires, it appears, can “smell” when a person is truly depraved, truly far gone in their evil. Such a person’s blood “calls” to the vampire, creating an almost irresistible urge to kill. In this book, occasionally Carl will encounter such a person. One is a crooked cop, who is also molesting his stepdaughter. Another is a random mother we encounter at the Mormon church service. The precise nature of her evil is never revealed, but as Carl puts it when he warns the bishop about this woman, “something is very wrong” in that house.
So far so complex, right? I actually love the scene where Carl and Moira have to restrain themselves from attacking this apparently pious Mormon woman. My beef with this phenomenon is that there are far too few of these people who call to Carl with their rotten/sweet-smelling blood.
Technically, on an orthodox Christain view of the world, the taint is in everybody. “There is none righteous, no, not one. All have turned aside; they have together become corrupt.” But let’s grant that this does not mean (as indeed the doctrine of total depravity doesn’t) that everyone is as bad as they could possibly be. Nevertheless, part of a mature Christain world view is realizing more and more uncomforable truths like the following:
Given the intervening steps, anyone is capable of anything.
I am far weaker and more sinful than I ever realized, but the grace of God is far deeper and stronger than I ever realized.
“I know that in myself lives no good thing.”
“Cheer up! You are worse than you think.”
“Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.”
So, to modify our illustration, if The Unwilling had been written by an orthodox Christian, it would show a world where every single person had this taint in their blood, but some of them were in remission. Nevertheless, the proportion of people who had gone far down the road towards “capable of anything” would be quite large – large enough that Carl would be certain to be distracted by their intoxicating scent every time he went out in public.
But Belt is a Mormon, so although his worldview is basically right-side-up, it doesn’t include total depravity. His picture of the world is basically a bunch of lost, but essentially wholesome and well-meaning people, and a few stinkers. Furthermore, in the Mormon cosmology, salvation is not for the stinkers. It is for the well-meaning people who do their best to save themselves and trust God for the rest.
Take this scene, where Carl and Moira are trying to convince a mortal-turned-vampire to repent of his sins. Things start out well enough:
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” I ask him.
He laughs bitterly. “Lapsed.”
“Go to your priest,” I say. “Or go to a Mormon bishop. Only God can help you now.”
So far so good. Carl continues,
“Stop killing. Go to your priest or to a Mormon bishop. Pray. Lean on God. I believe you can find your way back. Atone for your sins as best you can. Put your trust in the Savior to take care of the rest. It’s the only way you can ever find redemption.”
And there we have the difference between Mormonism and orthodox Christianity. Ephesians 2:8 – 9 says, “For by grace you are saved, through faith, and this [faith] is not of yourselves, not of works, lest any man should boast.” The Mormons have a similar verse, but it runs like this: “We are saved by grace, through faith, after we have done all we can.” What this misses is that, if we are “doing all we can,” then one of two things is going on. If we are truly repenting and making restitution, then that itself is a gift and is a sign that the Holy Spirit is already revivifying our heart. Which means that He started this good work in us before we were repentant. The other possibility is that we are “doing all we can” in a cynical way, as a work of our own righteousness, so as to put God in a position where He “has to” forgive us. This is a grievous sin against God, probably far worse than the original bad things we did.
To an orthodox Christian, “Atone for your sins as best you can. Put your trust in the Savior to take care of the rest” is a HUGE insult to the Savior. Did He really suffer torture and the wrath of God to take care of our leftovers? Doesn’t it seem that we could have done a little more and spared Him all that? Or, if there was a portion of our sins that called for torture and death on His part, then doesn’t that suggest that the rest of them were equally bad and probably can’t be dealt with by “doing the best we can”?
These are the things that crossed my mind as I read this book. The psychology is good, and somewhat deep, but it’s not the deepest of the deep. That is reserved for writers like Dostoyevsky and St. Paul.
Finally, I won’t give the background of this because you really should read the book, but there was a certain character whose story had me in tears in the doctor’s office. I had brought this book with me to my son’s doctor appointment, to read in the waiting room, as one does. And – well, it was a really hard to put down part, and so it was that the doctor came in to see us just at the moment when my heart got broke. And I had to knuckle a tear away and say, “Sorry, we are fine. This book made me cry.” Good job, Mr. Belt, good job.
