my review of The Penitent by C. David Belt, posted on GoodReads on July 31
I’ve been enjoying these Mormon vampire stories by C. David Belt. This one is the second in the trilogy. In the first book, The Unwilling, a Mormon man named Carl accidentally became a vampire while investigating what he believed was a cult that had seduced his sister. He took the vows you need to take to become a vampire, but didn’t mean them or think they were real. Hence, he is the first “unwilling” vampire in history. Whether or not you think that taking vows while holding mental reservations about them actually lets a person off the hook, for the purposes of this series, it does. The first book is written in the first person, present tense, from Carl’s point of view.
This second book is written in the first person, present tense, from the point of view of Carl’s vampire wife, Moira. (How that came about is a long story, told in the first book.) Moira is a Scottish lass who, more than two hundred years ago, became a vampire intentionally in order to get revenge on the British. But she has since repented and has managed to spend her life without killing any mortals. Hence, she is “The Penitent.” Through a long and convoluted chain of events, Carl and Moira are both somehow vampires and also faithful Mormons who were married in the Temple in Salt Lake City, and who call people to repent and turn to Christ whenever they get a chance.
The worldbuilding in these books is detailed and consistent, in terms of scientific explanations for why vampires are freakishly strong, why they can fly, what can and cannot kill them, and so forth. Oh, and how they can be Christians. The main antagonist is Lilith, “Mother of Night.” The lore around Lilith seems to be a little different in the Mormon world than elsewhere. I had heard that the legend was that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, created before Eve, but in one passage, the characters in this book refer to her as being “three generations down from Adam.”
The theology behind this book is Mormon, which is to say it sounds about 90% Christian, but isn’t quite there. For example, in one scene, Moira is telling a wretched, extremely bitter woman that instead of self-terminating, she should repent and turn to Christ. So far so good. But then Moira tells her that she can be saved if she “turns to Christ and lives a righteous life.” Meanwhile, this poor woman is obviously totally unable to live a righteous life. That’s her whole problem. Mormon theology doesn’t have a really deep grasp of sin nature. I really like the author of this series, C. David Belt, and I sincerely hope that he soon comes to grips with this problem and realizes that people are truly helpless sinners who need something more than what moralism can offer.
The language in this book is pretty good. I don’t personally prefer books written in the present tense, but Belt’s books include a lot of action and also vision/dream sequences that lend themselves to the present tense. Moira tells her story in a slightly Scottish dialect (for example, she consistently uses “nae” instead of “not”), and it’s fun to hear Carl, a former fighter pilot, revert to “pilot speak” when the vampires are flying on a military-like mission.
Based on the plot, worldbuilding, and language, I give this book 5 out of 5 stars for the genre, and in fact it may be the only series of its kind in this genre.
me and C. David Belt at a RenFaire a few years ago. I was dressed as a cartoon cave woman, and he was dressed as a medieval Scot.
This is a view of my neighbor’s house on a smokey afternoon late last summer. It’s also part of the internal landscape of my mind.
Farmlands are one of my favorite biomes. (Yes, they are a biome. I will die on this hill. They are a part of Naure. They are what nature looks like when people live in it.)
Farms and I go way back. I didn’t grow up on one, but I grew up around farms and farmers.
My early years were spent in eastern Pennsylvania, which is a country of rolling green hills and low mountains. My dad was the pastor of a small country church, and most of its members were dairy farmers. Whenever we visited anybody, which was often, we would first be taken into the cow barn. These were black-and-white milk cows. As soon as you stepped into the barn, your senses would be filled with cow sensations: the chorus of moos, the smell. To this day, when I smell a cattle lot, it doesn’t smell bad to me, just like a clean farm smell.
And even cleaner farm smell was the “milk room,” a little brick building with a large stainless-steel tank of milk in the center, and a drain in the middle of the wet floor. It smelled like coolness, milk, and water.
These are memories from when I was very small. That same family that I have in mind, although they had indoor plumbing, also still had a working outhouse in their back yard. There were bees, and the smell wasn’t so nice, but it was raised up on several steps, not just thrown together but definitely constructed. My brother and I would torment this family’s chickens by pulling backwards on their tails so that they flapped. (Not recommended.) We would sit in corrugated buckets filled with water to cool down in the summer, and drink from the garden hose. This family had Dobermans, and I can remember a black bear hanging up in their barn after the father shot it while hunting. Later, it was stuffed in a scary pose and placed in their study.
The dairy farmers in our church also had fields of crops. Our own house had a yard of about an acre and a half. At the back of this yard was a line of poplar trees, and right beyond them, fields rolling away towards the creek. Beyond that, you could see a mountain. They must have rotated the crops in these fields, but I know that at least one year, they were soybeans. We were allowed to pick the pods, open them, and eat the tiny, hard beans out from inside. There was a lot of milkweed, which was fun to pull open and let the tufty parachutes out when it was ripe. There was a lot of ragweed, which my brother turned out to be allergic to, and one year a plague of tent caterpillars turned the mountainside brown.
My dad had a somewhat free schedule, and he would take my brother and me (and later, our sister) on walks in the countryside. These were probably short walks, given that we were little kids, but I remember them lasting hours. We could walk along the borders of the fields and find new fields, or the creek. This habit set “walking between farm fields” permanently in my mind as a normal thing to do. If it was nighttime during this walk, my dad would sing “Walking at Night,” which, in retrospect, is probably a German hiking song.
When I was eight, we moved to western Michigan. Worse, we moved to a city. I complained hard about this. It was the first remotely tragic thing that had ever happened to me, and I was determined to milk it. By this time, my crush on American Indians was well-developed, and I was keenly aware that it was tragic to be driven off your land.
However, despite that we technically lived in a city, our tiny church there was still about half farmers. There were still many opportunities, on prayer meeting and picnic and potluck nights, to run on vast grassy lawns while the adults sat and talked, to climb trees, walk between fields, and hide in the hay lofts and corn cribs.
The countryside in Michigan was flatter and dryer than it had been in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, my small denomination (the “Michiana Mennonites”) straddled the border between Michigan and its neighbor to the south, Indiana, which is really flat. The summer camp we went to served kids from both states, and we often found ourselves crossing the border for pulpit exchanges and things like that. I have attended church in what was literally a tiny, plain white chapel perched at the edge of a sea of fields with no other building nearby. I have tramped over Indiana farms, again with my brother and usually another farm boy, while the adults sat in the house and talked. And these Indiana farms are truly the farmland biome, because there is nothing there but farms, not even a hill to break up the monotony.
The farmland biome combines the best features of wilderness and human habitation. You can walk for as long as you like in solitude. There is wind, there is the changing sky, there are wildflowers, and flora and fauna on the windrows. You can get lost if you want, and if it’s winter, you can get cold and miserable too. But as the sun goes down, you can see in the distance the lights of houses. Coming back from the walk to the warmly glowing farmhouse provides all the romance that a kid with a big imagination and a copy of The Lord of the Rings could desire.
Farms have always been with us, and, though technology has changed somewhat, the logistics of having fields surrounding clusters of buildings mean that farmlands in every place and time look essentially the same. You have the wide horizon, the walls, canals or windrows carving the space up and giving some sense of distance, and the lights low to the ground. Perhaps one reason I like fantasy, as a genre, is that it naturally includes farms surrounding the town and castle.
Some of my favorite fantasy series start with, and often return to, the humble but honest farming community. O.K., actually I can only think of two, but they are good ones. The Belgariad starts off with Garion growing up on Faldor’s farm in Sendaria. Actually, it starts in one of my favorite parts of the farm, the kitchen. And, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is not really a farmer, he’s more of a country squire, but the Shire is definitely a farming countryside. The four hobbits’ journey starts out hiking through the fields, as every journey should. Their first encounter with one of the Nine takes place on an otherwise ordinary country road. Farmer Maggot, a wholesome character, takes the four friends in, feeds them, and gets them safely to the river crossing in his wagon. And, when the journey is over, the four hobbits must come back and rescue from collectivization the ordinary, boring farms that they sacrificed to save. What would we do without ordinary, boring farms, after all? We’d starve, that’s what. And we would go insane, because the farming life, though hard, represents a very basic pattern for the way people were designed to live.
I am sorry. I am sorry that I left your book, Pompeii, moldering on my bedside bookshelf for … I don’t know … several years after I got it … I don’t know … from my husband’s trucker friend, from the library sale shelf, somewhere like that. I should have picked it up and read it immediately. I thought it was going to be demanding and … you know … educational. I didn’t know it was going to be educational. Or gripping. Or The Perfect Historical Novel.
Spoiler: Vesuvius Blows
I don’t know, reader, whether you would pick up a novel about Pompeii. Perhaps you would worry that the tension would be somewhat lacking, given how everyone knows that the mountain explodes and buries the town. It would be, you might think, sort of like reading a novel called John Dies at the End.
Harris, of course, uses the volcanic eruption’s very fame to his advantage. The people in Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and in the other towns around the bay of Neapolis, don’t know what is about to happen to them. This gives the opportunity for an infinite number of ironic quotes and thematic moments, such as the line, “I ought to die and come back to life more often,” when a narrow escape from death causes a character to be met with newfound respect. You spend much of the book wondering which, if any, of these people are going to survive.
The Historical Background
No, I am not going to sketch all the historical background here. I’ll just tell you that an awful lot is known about Roman society of this period, both general things about the culture, diet, and technology, and specific things about individuals like Pliny the Elder. (And Nero. Nero had a favorite moray eel, did you know that?) Harris makes excellent use of all this research to build a story that grows organically out of the who the characters are and what they value.
At the beginning of the book is a nice clear map of the Bay of Neapolis and surrounding regions, which is critical to visualizing the action of the book. Special attention is given to the Aqua Agusta, an aqueduct which runs from the Apenine Mountains, past all the towns in the region, with spurs providing water to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and so on, until it terminates at the naval base of Misenum, in a reservoir called the Piscina Mirabilis, “Miracle Pool.” When you see how close the Aqua Agusta runs to Vesuvius, you can see that an imminent eruption might well cause problems for the region’s water system.
The Hero
Marcus Attilius, the “aquarius,” comes from a family of men who build and maintain the empire’s aqueducts (which, by the way, like the Aqua Agusta, are often not elevated but rather are underground pipes). He was sent from Rome to Misenum two weeks ago after his predecessor, Exomnius, mysteriously disappeared. When the water running into Misenum first turns sulfurous and then starts to lose pressure, everyone is ready to blame Attilius for not having foreseen or prevented this.
Attilius, realizing the gravity of the situation, orders the city’s water supply to be shut off. There is enough in the Piscina Mirabilis to last Misenum two days with rationing. Attilius, based on which towns have lost water and which haven’t, thinks he knows approximately where the break in the aqueduct is. By pressing very hard, he hopes in two days to sail to Pompeii, send a team inland to find the exact source of the leak, send another team to re-direct the water farther upstream, buy supplies, and work through the night with a team of slaves to fix the blockage. In this way, he hopes to prevent riots and death in the towns without water. The reader knows that Attilius is also racing against time to find the reason the aqueduct broke.
We learn a lot about the Romans’ amazing aqueduct system. All the cities had, essentially, free water as a gift from the Empire. The underground pipe was six feet in diameter, with a three-foot thickness on either side made of the famous Roman cement, made with seawater, which could dry underwater and which got harder with time. There are maintenance manholes at regular intervals, and water sinks along the route which allow the water to drop rocks and silt it’s been carrying. These are then used for gravel.
The great Roman roads went crashing through nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards–any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant–they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view.
page 181
The Villain
Ampliatus is a former slave. His master, who used him as a toy (yes, the Romans were horrible people), set him free in his will at the age of twenty. Ampliatus, by this time a ruthless social climber, began to amass wealth by buying real estate around Pompeii. Several years before the book opens, the city suffered an earthquake. Most of the aristocrats fled, but Ampliatus is unendingly proud of himself because he stayed, bought up a bunch of buildings on the cheap, fixed them up, and became the nouveau riche. By the time the book opens, he has bought his former master’s estate. His bedroom is the one where he used to be molested. He has gotten his former master’s son in debt to him, and is persuading him to marry Ampliatus’s daughter. He is building an ambitious bathhouse in the middle of the city. As Ampliatus says to the aquarius when he’s trying to corrupt him, water is key to civilization.
As a former slave, Ampliatus outdoes the aristocrats he imitates in both cruelty and ostentatiousness. There is a memorable scene of a feast Ampliatus gives, of the kind that historians would probably call sumptuous. It’s held in Ampliatus’ triclinium (dining room) on a swelteringly hot August night, and no one but Ampliatus wants to be there.
And the food! Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes … then had come lobster, sea urchins, and, finally, mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds. … Sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow’s vulva served as a side dish … Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open … Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingoes (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot. Then a stew of nightingales’ livers …
pp. 146 – 147
Reader, I have spared you the most disgusting parts of this dinner.
Ampliatus has commissioned a positive prophecy about the city of Pompeii from a sybil–an older female seer–and is keeping it in readiness for the next time he needs to get the people all excited … probably in order to ensure the election to public office of an aristocrat he has in his pocket. And here is what the sybil has said: Pompeii is going to be famous all over the world. Long after the Caesars’ power has faded, people from all over the world will walk Pompeii’s streets and marvel at its buildings. Ampliatus takes this as a very good sign.
The Scholar
Pliny the Elder, an actual historical person, makes an appearance as a prominent side character. Pliny was stationed as a peacetime admiral at Misenum. When Vesuvius started erupting, it was clearly visible across the bay. Pliny, who had written a whole encyclopedia about the natural world, received a message from an older female aristocrat in Herculaneum, begging him to come and save her library. (In Pompeii, this message is delivered by Attilius.) Pliny launched the navy without imperial permission, intending to save the library and also evacuate the towns near the eruption. But pumice falling from the sky, floating on the water, and clogging the bay prevented the ships from approaching the coast. Pliny and his crew were forced to take refuge belowdecks, and their ship was driven across the bay to Stabiae, where they took refuge overnight. Eventually, they had to evacuate on foot, but Pliny, who was fat and was perhaps suffering from congestive heart failure, chose to stay, and ended up dying in the gaseous cloud that swept along the coast.
The remarkable thing is that during this entire time, Pliny had his scribe with him, and he was dictating his observations about the “manifestation.” His notes were saved. It occurs to me that the stereotype of the British absentminded professor who is never rattled by anything, and always keeps his cool and approaches everything with perfect manners and scientific curiosity (and is an incurable snob), may have roots deeper than England itself.
Go read this book right now!
Despite the large amount of detail in this review, I assure you that I have merely scratched the surface and that this review contains very few spoilers for the novel. I really can’t say anything better about it than that it is, in my estimation, the perfect historical novel. Please go read it if you have any interest at all in the genre.
The book is called Everything Has a Shape. This particular book is book-shaped. It is a proof copy of a draft written by my brother-in-law, Andrew McKeeth. It’s nicely formatted and readable, but still needs an editor. The main remaining issue is malapropisms and homophones.
Everything Has a Shape is similar to Alice in Wonderland, except that it makes a lot more sense. Alice falls into a world of nonsense, whereas the protagonist of this book, Prism, the daughter of a geometer, is invited into a world where everything makes its own kind of sense.
Everything Has a Shape also reminded me of The Phantom Tollbooth. If you were a kid who loved to read, you probably stumbled across The Phantom Tollbooth and loved it. In that book, Milo travels through a world where everything is a physical manifestation of language. For example, you can see a huge crowd of adjectives thundering over a hill.
Everything Has a Shape is sort of the mirror image of The Phantom Tollbooth, because in the world Prism must navigate, the primary mental unit is not words, but shapes. In fact, the denizens of this new place tell Prism that they did not have language at all until humans started coming into their world.
And what is it called, this strange place that Prism visits? It’s called Place.
“We come from Place. Oh, sorry. Of course this probably doesn’t make any sense either. The place where I live is called Place. It really is a terrible name, I know, but it fit so well that nobody had the heart to change it. It used to be all Space before we called it Place. Anyway, we want to ask you about Nothing. You see in Place, where I come from, there is always something. You humans, however, do believe in Nothing. You think that there is such a thing as void and vacuum. In Place everything has a shape. Even Space, which might seem empty, is really just an undefined shape.”
“If there isn’t Nothing in Place,” [asked Prism], “why are you coming to ask about it?”
“Well, as far as we know there has never been Nothing in Place, but we are beginning to think that there might be a little bit of Nothing now. What is Nothing? Can you measure Nothing? I mean, if there is Nothing, how could you know it?”
Everything Has a Shape, p. 15
The book is full of conversations like this, and they only get worse, which is to say, more confusing but ultimately more insightful as well. I will post quotes from this book in a few weeks, because they are so thought-provoking.
Place, once Prism gets there, is understandably hard to describe, but the author does a fair job of it. It is a world folded over on itself, with a parallel ground above it, called Oversky. Think of it as looking like the center of the earth. Place is populated with strange creatures and paradoxical landscapes that look like an M.C. Escher drawing. There is also a population of humans whose ancestors got into Place years ago and have been living there ever since. Prism’s journey will, of course, take her all throughout this world. She often has to use mental tricks in order to be able to navigate Place’s physical reality. These are similar to the mental tricks we might have to use here on earth, such as occupying ourselves to make time go faster, or closing our eyes to navigate an illusion room, but Prism’s experience in Place is more intense.
Prism ultimately has to face The Twister, an entity that is introducing chaos into Place by convincing the creatures to deform their own shapes. The Twister makes a strong argument that nobody has an inherent shape of their own, that having an unchangeable shape is a kind of prison, and that by helping creatures to destroy their shapes, he is setting them free. Creatures who have encountered the Twister leave broken.
Prism’s time in the Twister’s tower is confusing and poignant, especially when she encounters the Likeness, a girl who looks exactly like Prism but claims to be a better version.
“Did you used to have a shape of your own?” Prism asked.
“You mean before I became a Likeness? Yes, I used to believe that lie, but then I realized the truth that there is no shape. It is better this way. I can be whatever I like. You can only be you.”
“As I said before,” Prism said, “if I could be everything, I would stop being anything. It’s true that I am stuck with my shape, but I’m the only one who can be me.”
“You’re wrong. I am you right now.”
“You’re a copy. You are ‘like’ me, true. You can be like anything you want but you can never be yourself.”
“You don’t know what you’re passing up.”
“I would rather be me than be nobody.”
The Likeness grew angry and the real Prism wondered if she really looked that way when she got mad.
ibid, p. 166
As you can see, Everything Has a Shape is an insightful and compelling read. I hope it can be published someday so it can be enjoyed by more people. Furthermore, I would love to see an illustrated version. The scenes in this book would lend themselves to some amazing surrealist art. At the very least, it needs a beautifully done cover.
What do you think? Would you read Everything Has a Shape if it were available?
The following review was recently posted by me on GoodReads:
So, it looks as if the “In Death” series by J.D. Robb is yet another very long-running series that I was unaware of. They are police procedurals set in the 2060s. This future world differs from our own about as much as you’d expect. Things are recognizable, and the terms, trends, and technologies that look different seem like reasonable extrapolations from what we have now. Obviously, this isn’t the only way the world could go, but it’s a plausible one. For example, people live slightly longer in this future world, so that one character casually mentions he’s going upstate for his parents’ 75th wedding anniversary.
The world and characters are introduced masterfully in a way that’s very much showing, not telling … so much so that I almost felt lost during the first few chapters. I don’t know whether this is because of an extreme leaning towards showing, or whether because this particular book comes very late in the series. The one thing I wished for more of was a physical description of Eve and of her husband, Roarke. Perhaps these were given in earlier books.
Forgotten also contains easter eggs. Eve’s husband, Roarke, and another family, the Singers, are both in the construction industry in New York City. Sound familiar? When I first started this book, I wondered whether it was going to be a re-telling of The Fountainhead. It wasn’t. There is also an allusion to The Cask of Amontillado. There are probably other literary allusions that I didn’t pick up on. These allusions take this book to a whole new level beyond its genre.
Realistic speech in books is important to me, and Forgotten excels in this area. The characters all speak differently from one another, whether they are a tough cop, a bubbly teenager, or a Russian gangster. I should also note that, although this book is gritty and deals with horrible domestic abuse and crime, it does not portray the world cynically. There are many characters who are genuinely good people, including main and side characters. I didn’t feel I was being sold a vision of the world where everything is class war or patriarchy or whatever.
Though long, this book covers only about three days of investigation. We follow the detective, Eve, through every minute of her day and night. Like many hard-boiled detectives, she and her team are very driven. She works late into the night. She forgets to eat unless someone makes her. She sleeps for … I don’t know. It looks like five or six hours maybe. I don’t enjoy this aspect of detective fiction, because it makes me tired. However, I know it’s part of the genre.
Personal Addenda because this is a blog:
I got this book from my husband’s trucker friend. After reading it, I checked on FictionDB, and oh my goodness! Forgotten is #53 of a 62-book series! And that series includes some books that are, say, number 11.5 as well. This friend of my husband’s is really expanding my horizons.
One other possible reason that I felt disoriented as I began this book was chronic pain. For the entire time reading it, I’ve been suffering nerve pain in my left arm. On and off, but mostly on. Update: it’s now about 7 weeks later, and the arm no longer painful, just pins and needles.
Next to come to mind was my original literary agent delivering her verdict on my first novel. Don’t want to show it to anyone, she said. Why not? It’s a bad book. Have to think of your reputation as well as mine. Why bad? It falls between the stools, halfway betwixt mainstream and mystery. No way to promote it. And where does the bookseller shelve it? Stick to nonfiction, said my agent. I can sell that for you. How about me rewriting it? Well, if you do, get rid of the Indian stuff.
Tony Hillerman, acclaimed author of the Navajo mysteries, in his memoir, p. 5
A review of noir writer Andrew Klavan’s The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. I have already posted this review on Amazon and Goodreads.
This is a very readable book that fleshes out Andrew Klavan’s thesis:
The opposite of murder is creation–creation, which is the telos of love. And because art, true art, is an act of creation, it always transforms its subject into itself, even if the subject is murder. An act of darkness is not the same thing as a work of art about an act of darkness. The murders in Shakespeare’s Macbeth are horrific, but they are part of a beautiful play.
page 17
In other words, Klavan is wrestling with the problem of evil. Based on his decades of thinking about this, he has concluded that in this life, there is no theological answer that can redeem evil for those who have suffered it. Theological answers there may be, but those are not what redeem it for us. The only answer to suffering is not an answer, exactly; it is beauty. The example he frequently re-visits is the Pieta, “the most beautiful statue in the world,” a statue of Mary cradling her maimed and innocent, dead son.
I think Klavan’s thesis is a very strong one. I think of the book of Job. Job suffers horribly, and apparently undeservedly, and to add to his suffering, he is told that it must be his fault. He asks God why. Now, as it happens, there is an explanation for everything that is happening to Job. But God doesn’t give it. He just starts talking to Job about the wild animals and their habits. This is beauty, it is wonder, and it is far beyond Job’s experience. But ultimately, God answers Job with Himself, with His presence. He answers Job out of the whirlwind. He mentions just a few of His mighty, mysterious works in creation. And this is a good answer. It is enough. It is a much better answer than if God had said, “Well, it all started when I got into this argument with Satan …”
Kingdom of Cain is a hard book to read because of the real-life crimes described in it. Klavan tries not to get too graphic unless he has to, but this is a book about murders after all, including copycat murders. The blurb says it examines the impact of three murders on our culture, but there are a lot more than that, both fictional and–this is the hard to read part–real. The hardest one for me was the kidnap, rape, and murder of a 14-year-old boy by a pair of older teenagers who were later lionized in fiction.
This book is very insightful. Perhaps if I had never heard Klavan make these points before, I’d have given it five stars. But I have been following him for years, and he has been working on this concept for years, so the idea was not new to me. Especially in the later chapters, it felt a little belaboring. Hence, four stars.
I agreed with onlinebookclub.org to make TSL Book of the Day on June 14, but only on the condition that it was free on Kindle. As of drafting this post, I’m still communicating with my publisher to make the durn thing free. As John Piper might say, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. I’m certainly not. But, with plenty of prayer, I trust that TSL will be free on this Saturday and will of course, with plenty of prayer, rocket into the stratosphere due to large numbers of positive reviews.
Edit: 99 cents was the best I could do. I have made arrangements with onlinebookclub. It will be 99 cents.
The Strange Land is a family saga that takes place in Beringia, the vast plain that used to exist where the Bering Strait now is, in approximately 10,000 B.C. Please go out and get it, if that’s just what you were looking for in your summer reading! Thanks in advance.
We continue our journey through darkest Jen’s TBR Pile with this book, which I picked up in an Idaho Falls thrift store several years ago and has been waiting patiently, like a pyramid under jungle cover but more durable, to be excavated.
One week ago, Max Murphy’s biggest problem was deciding which pizza to order. Now he’s lost in the perilous rainforest and running for his life with Lola, a modern Maya girl. Their terrifying journey will take them into the heart of an ancient evil and awaken powers that have slept for a thousand years. For fate has delivered an epic challenge to this pampered city boy. From now on, only one thing is for sure: Max Murphy won’t be eating pizza again any time soon.
from the dust cover
This book is the perfect YA Maya adventure. It starts with Max in Boston. His parents are archaeologists. They have to be gone a lot for their work. Max believes they “care more about the Maya than about him,” and he has learned to leverage this guilt into all the video games and snacks, and other luxuries his heart desires. This beginning is presumably there to ease the book’s target audience (American teens) into the Mayan context without a steep learning curve. They aren’t just thrown in; they find out things as Max does.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you’re bossy?” said Max.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you’re lazy?” said Lola.
“Yes,” said Max proudly, “all the time.”
“In the rainforest, lazy boys get eaten by jaguars.”
p. 150
But the book doesn’t stay in boring Boston for long. By Chapter 2, Max is in the fictional country of San Xavier (based on Belize). There is an excellent description of a nightmarish 3rd-world backcountry bus ride, a chapter or two at Max’s estranged uncle’s mansion, and then, he’s off into the jungle.
Behold this perfect author photo. Apparently, Jon grew up in Central America. Note also that the endpapers have a map of San Xavier. The map includes the Monkey River, Villa Isabella (Max’s uncle’s estate), and the five pyramids of Maya cosmology. If a place appears on this map, be sure we will visit it, either in this book or in a sequel.
Middleworld is an excellent introduction to the Maya cosmology, which is incorporated into a very lively adventure. As Max and Lola visit the different pyramids, they discover the purposes of the still-preserved machines within them: controlling the weather, time, etc., and even opening portals to Xibalba, the Maya underworld, into which Max’s parents have disappeared when they jumped into a cenote.
The overall adventure story is a good blend of actual Maya mythology and fictional or fictionalized characters. Lord Six Rabbit, who comes into the story, is a fictional ancient Maya king. The gods and demons we encounter are taken from actual Maya myths. Friar Diego DeLanda, an actual historical person who burned the majority of the Maya codices, makes an appearance. And because the intricate Maya calendar played such a large role in their cosmology, so it does in the events of this book. An Appendix contains an explanation of the interlocking calendar cycles and of how to read Mayan date glyphs, which are quite complex. Other appendices show a diagram of the Mayan cosmos; how to read Mayan numbers; and a glossary of characters and terms which appear in the book. By the time a reader gets to the end of the book, he or she might be interested enough to actually read this material.
It’s clear that the authors love Mayan culture, but they don’t shy away from the fact that many things about it were horrifying. Most of the rituals described call for blood, but the archaeologists have figured out that the blood doesn’t necessarily have to be from a human sacrifice — or even, necessarily, human:
[The archaeologist] Hermanjilio sighed. “Give me a break, will you? I don’t think there’s a precise science to these rituals. As I understand it, they’re more about showing swagger and confidence than following any particular steps. The Maya gods are like children. They like costumes, special effects, and plenty of action. We just have to put on a good show.”
“So you’re going to bluff it?” said Max.
“In a manner of speaking.”
pp. 244 – 245
For example, here is an entry from the glossary:
LORDS OF DEATH: The Maya underworld, Xibalba, is ruled by the twelve Lords of Death. According to the POPOL VUH … their names are One Death, Seven Death, Scab Stripper, Blood Gatherer, Wing, Demon of Pus, Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter, Skull Scepter, Demon of Filth, Demon of Woe, and Packstrap [???]. They are usually depicted as skeletons or bloated corpses. It’s their job to inflict sickness, pain, starvation, fear, destitution, and death … Luckily for us, they’re usually far too busy gambling and playing childish pranks on each other to get much work done.
p. 371
Given that everything in the Maya cosmos is simultaneously gross, horrifying, and (at least in this book) funny, it’s not surprising that Max and Lola are able to convince the Lord Six Rabbit and his mother that their chicken is a fearsome beast much more dangerous than its size would predict.
“Now tell them the bad news,” sighed Lady Coco. “Tell them what we heard!”
“What? What was it?” asked the others anxiously.
“The Chee Ken of Death,” said Lord Six-Rabbit. “We did not see it, but we heard its infernal crowing. It seemed to come from behind the cooking hut. I doubt my sleeping draught will work on that scaly devil.”
“Don’t worry, Lord Six-Rabbit,” said Hermanjilio. “I believe I am more than a match for this Chee Ken.”
This book, apparently the first in a series, strikes a good balance between a satisfying end to the adventure, and leaving some significant unfinished business open for later books. Near the end, Max strikes a deal with the Lords of Death in exchange for “a small favor” that they will ask of him in the future. That can’t be good.
My only complaint with this book is that there’s very little publication information on it. I can’t find the year it was published or the titles of the other books in the series. I guess I’ll have to go online to find out more. I will definitely seek to acquire the other Jaguar Stones books if the opportunity arises.
Edit: According to FictionDB, there are four books in the series:
Quick! Who do we know who’s a linguist, a former missionary, a gifted writer, and wants to capture in novel form the human condition and God’s grace to us in it?
Who is awkward, reserved, and can come off as rude and abrupt, but actually has passionate emotions, a deep love for others, and a rich inner life?
Who loves nature? Crosses cultures happily, but doesn’t fit in so well in the American evangelical context? Who has a secret desire to be admired, but also suffers from poor judgement about the opposite sex?
Why, Elisabeth Elliot, of course!
Me and Elisabeth Elliot
When I was college and just discovering the things I ranted about last Friday, like the fact that we as a culture could use some guidelines about the how the sexes ought to relate to each other, I came across Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion and Purity. I devoured it.
This book was exactly suited for me at the time. I was just starting to grow in Christ. I really wanted to do God’s will. I also, unbeknownst to me, had a lot in the common with the author of Passion and Purity: socially awkward, ascetic tendencies, perfectionistic, a longing for old-fashioned values. This book is basically about the lessons Betty, as she was called at that time, learned during her five years (!) of waiting for Jim Elliot to make up his mind that God had given him the go-ahead to marry her. Their courtship story strikes many Christian young people as really spiritual upon first hearing, and then on a second look, it starts to look as if he didn’t treat her very well possibly. But I bought into it fully.
Anyway. Full of missionary zeal to win other young people over to the idea of an extremely awkward, chaste, long courtship, I gave this book to a friend. She read it, and her reaction was, “There are the Elisabeth Elliots of this world, but I am not one of them.”
That annoyed me at the time (someone had rejected my idealistic ideal!), but from my perspective now, that friend of mine didn’t know how right she was. In fact, not even Elisabeth Elliot herself was one of the Elisabeth Elliots of the world, at least not in the sense of having perfect wisdom and self-control. At the time she was writing this (early 1980s), Elisabeth was enduring an extremely controlling marriage with a man she married because she didn’t want to be lonely. She stayed with him for the rest of her life, despite an intervention by her family. It’s chilling to realize that the woman who wrote Passion and Purity could make such a foolish decision.
Before Passion and Purity, I remember as kid seeing black-and-white photos of Elisabeth toting her small daughter Valerie into the jungle to serve the Waorani people (then called the Auca), a few years after her husband Jim was killed by them. These were the photos taken by Hungarian photographer Cornell Capa. They, and the books Elisabeth wrote about the Waorani, had made her and her martyred husband Jim famous throughout the evangelical world.
Both greater and lesser than I thought
When you think you know a story, you expect it to be boring. I put off for some time reading this duology by Ellen Vaughn, until it finally floated to the top of my reading list. Once I opened the books, I found that I couldn’t put them down. Vaughn is an excellent researcher and a vivid and sympathetic writer, and though I had read a number of books by and about the Elliots, I certainly didn’t know as much of their story as I thought.
Vaughn, aware that she is telling a story the outlines of which are familiar to readers, moves skillfully back and forth through time, as in a novel (though in rough outline, the first book deals with Betty’s early life and the second book with her post-Ecuador years). Vaughn doesn’t try to tell every story–there are too many, many of which have been told elsewhere, and others of which are apparently too private and will stay hidden forever in Elisabeth’s prolific journals. In fact, as I read these books, I felt I was getting to know two fellow woman writers: Elliot and Vaughn.
When you are a former missionary, it’s difficult to read other missionaries’ stories without comparing them to your own. Usually, this means you are reading about people who were far ahead of you in dedication, selflessness, toughness, and in what they suffered. This is certainly true of the Elliots. At the same time, so much of their personalities and stories seemed shockingly familiar. For example, young Jim Elliot was, besides being a great guy, an insufferable holier-than-thou know-it-all, of the “I’m going to go read my Bible” type. Betty, as Elisabeth was then called, was quiet and reserved and often didn’t realize that she was coming off as standoffish. Jim’s family verbally eviscerated her after her first visit to their home in Portland, and foolish young Jim passed all these criticisms on to Betty in a letter. She was devasted, but thought and prayed over the things they had said, and then concluded that none of them were things she could actually change. Later, Jim couldn’t believe he had shared his family’s words with Betty. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon. What an imBAYsill.”
They were just people, you see. Not angels. Which means that “just people” can always serve God.
Jim Elliot, you beautiful dunce.
The things they suffered also rang poignantly familiar. They suffered setbacks that lost them a year of their work–for her, language work; for him, building a mission station. Neat and tidy Elisabeth at some points had to live in squalor, and felt guilty for the fact that it bothered her. Fellow missionaries (not all) and Waorani Christians alike (not all) proved manipulative and controlling. In fact, it was relationship difficulties that caused Elisabeth eventually to leave the Waorani, after spending only a few years with them. This was not Elisbeth’s fault: person after person found it impossible to work with Rachel Saint, her fellow translator. But she took on as much of the responsibility for it as she possibly could, agonizing before God in her journals, because that was the kind of person she was.
Elisabeth the Novelist
Now we are getting into events of the second book, Being Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth knew that she had a gift of writing. She had made so much money from her books Through Gates of Splendor and The Shadow of the Almighty that she was able to build a house for herself and her daughter near the White Mountains of New Hampshire (talk about living the dream!) and settled down to become a writer. She really wanted to write great literature, the kind that would elevate people’s hearts and give them fresh eyes to see the great work of God all around them in the world.
If I were writing a novel about Elisabeth Elliot, I would end it there, and let her have a period of rest, in the beautiful mountains, with her daughter, writing her books, for the rest of her days. I wish that was how it had gone. I kept hoping, as I read this duology, for there to come a point when Vaughn could write, “And then, she rested.” Alas, that moment never came.
Elliot was indeed a really good writer. Sometime in the twenty-teens, when I was a young mom who had come back from the mission field hanging my head over my many failures, and had unpacked my books and settled into a rented house to minister to my small children, I found on an upstairs shelf a slim volume that looked as if it had been published in the 1960s or 70s, called No Graven Image. This was the novel that Elliot wrote when she first settled down in New Hampshire. She wished, through fiction, to give her readers a more powerful, truer picture of missionary life than her biographies had done.
This is not the cover my copy of the book had, though it also had an image of a condor.
No Graven Image was not well received when it came out. It was the old problem of marketing. To what audience do you market a genre-bending book? The people who liked to read tragic, worldly novels were not interested in a so-called “novel” about a young missionary woman, probably expecting that it would be preachy. The Christians who liked to read missionary stories were shocked and dismayed by a novel in which the protagonist flounders around, makes mistakes, and ultimately, accidently kills her language informant when he has a bad reaction to a shot of penicillin. And then decides that her desire to have a successful language project had been a form of idolatry.
Some readers appreciated the novel (particularly overseas missionaries), but most found it shocking, even blasphemous. They wanted a triumphant novel, not the story of Job. They wondered whether Elisabeth had lost her faith.
When I picked it up, in the twenty-teens, it made me feel extremely understood.
One thing that killed me as I read of Elisabeth’s later years is that this was the only novel she wrote. She very much wanted to write others, and she got as far as making notes for another novel. But life (read: men) intervened, and she was in demand for speaking and for writing nonfiction books such as Passion and Purity. She wasn’t able ever again to get the extended periods of time to concentrate that it would have taken to gestate a novel. She convinced herself that she just didn’t have what it took to write actual good fiction (and perhaps, that it was selfish to try). I am so sad to watch this dream die. I believe that she would have been a good novelist. I don’t know whether her publisher would have kept publishing her books if she had turned to fiction, or whether she would have had trouble finding another publisher. Spiritual non-fiction was what she had already become known for. She probably would have made less money, perhaps found it difficult to support herself. But still … you know … it’s hard to watch. So many things about the second volume of her biography are hard to watch. At the same time, because of Vaugh’s amazing research and writing, it’s hard not to sit back and just stare at this major accomplishment.
Out of Babel Books 