Tag: time for a little talk

A Review, A Reaction, & A Chuckle over The Fourth Turning

On By Jennifer Mugrage7 Comments

The Big Idea

The gist of this book is that history moves in seasonal cycles. The authors spend a lot of time talking about how expecting seasonal cycles in history is the wisdom of the ancients, and that this has been lost to a linear conception of time that came from Christianity and got even more exaggerated during the Enlightenment. Linear time leads people to expect that things will just keep getting “more so;” that the future will look like an extrapolation of the recent past. As a result, people never expect a turn of history coming, and are always gobsmacked when it arrives.

As they urge readers to accept a cyclical view of history, the authors go slightly overboard and make it sound as if we should worship the circle. They point out circular symbolism in various myths. They say that a cycle is associated with the number four and feminine energy, whereas a line, or triangle, is associated with the number three and masculine energy. While this is not wrong, they then make it sound as if the idea of history as a line, moving in a particular direction, should be rejected and has nothing to offer us.

It’s not a big part of the book, but it is foundational and I found myself trying to integrate their view before I moved forward.

Should We Worship the Circle?

I believe that much of the symbolism they describe is correct. (Not all of it is, since the authors tend to cast a really wide net throughout history and literature, and then throw into the book anything they drag in that looks superficially similar to their thesis. But much of it is.) Seeing history as inescapably circular is an ancient, pagan way to view the world. And it does reflect something about the nature of humans and of creation. However, uncorrected, it tends to leave people fatalistic and trapped in the cycle. Exhibit A would be Hinduism. Christianity did indeed break people out of this endless treadmill by presenting a picture of history where the end is not like the beginning, where history moves in a definite arc or story from creation to fall to redemption to glorification. Of the many things that Christ did on the Cross, He broke us out of the endless cycle. That is why history fundamentally changed after His death and resurrection. You get different types of people, who think in different types of ways, and you get cultures that are Christianized developing in very different ways than any culture before them. Of course, one downstream effect of all this was that it made possible the Enlightenment, materialism, and what C.S. Lewis calls “the fatal serialism of the modern imagination.” These things aren’t good, but to put this in perspective, blaming them on Christianity is sort of like blaming your parents because you scraped your knee while you were on a trip that they took you on to Disneyworld.

Here’s how G.K. Chesterton put it:

As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but is fixed forever in size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

–Orthodoxy, p. 32

So, yeah. Although in the big picture, history is linear, cycles of development do still exist, both in human lives and in human societies, and we would do well to remember that and work within our nature.

The Seasons of a Saeculum

Briefly, they assert that history moves in cycles of just over or just under 100 years. These, they call a saeculum, following the Roman word for it. The seasons are:

  • Spring / A High: A time of building, strong families, and strong social cohesion
  • Summer / An Awakening: A time of spiritual revolution led by idealistic young people
  • Autumn / An Unraveling: A time when the values of the Awakening are applied to changing society, and things start to fragment
  • Winter / A Crisis: A time when the society is threatened by a series of shocks that often include war

(Fun fact, if you are into personality typologies, you can also make these seasons match the Four Humors: Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholic.)

Each season takes roughly 20 to 25 years. Each one causes the next.

The authors also identify four generational “personalities.” The personality of each generation is determined based upon their experiences in childhood and young adulthood. In what conditions did they grow up, and when did they come of age?

  • If you came of age during a Crisis, your generation is the Hero type: the can-do ones, prone to hubris.
  • If you came of age during a High, your generation is the Artist type: passive and conformist.
  • If you came of age during an Awakening, your generation is the Prophet type: fiery and moralistic.
  • If you came of age during an Unraveling, your generation is the Nomad type: neglected and cynical survivors.

Armed with these thought tools, you can now make applications.

The Applications

I appreciate the authors for not claiming too much for their rubric. First of all, they point out that these cycles are not precise in the time they arrive. This is an organic cycle, like the seasons. Some years, you might have a cool summer or a mild winter. Sometimes, seasons are delayed beyond what is usual. For example, the authors have a series of detailed charts in which they apply this rubric to American history. They say that during the Civil War, the Crisis came fast and didn’t last the usual 20 years. As a result, the cycle was shorter. That saeculum skipped the Hero generation. It went straight to the Artist generation of traumatized conformists.

Another helpful thing they say is that this year-like cycle in human history does not cause random events. There is still such a thing as chance, and as human will. However, a society’s reaction to events is heavily influenced by what season they are in. The United States did not immediately enter WWI after the sinking of the Lusitania, because we were in an Unraveling period. But we did immediately mobilize for war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, because we were now in a Crisis.

Finally, this cycle of history is not equally prominent in all societies. Because it has to do with changes in public attitudes, fashions, values, and child-rearing practices, in very traditional societies the cycle is muted. One generation is much like the last. When a society throws off tradition and allows its citizens a lot of social mobility and freedom to make their own choices, ironically that is when the cycle becomes a large factor in that nation’s history. It is for this reason, say the authors, that these seasons are particularly easy to spot in the United States.

It can be difficult to spot seasons of history in past societies (beyond speculation) when we know relatively little about them. Sometimes it’s pretty clear, as when we look at the cycle of idolatry-oppression by enemies-repentance-deliverance found in the book of Judges. We can also find many historic diatribes (probably written during an Unraveling) lamenting the loss of civic virtues.

O.K., so, with those caveats, if you are an American, you have probably been applying this rubric to the last hundred years in our country, which is super easy to do. Here we go:

  • Crisis: Wall Street Crash of Oct. 1929 through the end of WWII. Coming of age: the Great Generation, or what the authors call the G.I. Generation.
  • High: Late 1940s to early 1960s. Coming of age: the Silent generation. Beatniks.
  • Awakening: the “Consciousness Revolution,” late 1960s to early 1980s. Coming of age: the now-much-maligned Boomers. Hippies.
  • Unraveling: late 1980s to early 2000s. Coming of age: Generation X, or what the authors calls 13ers. Slackers.

The Great Generation are Heroes, the Silent are Artists, the Boomers are Prophets, and the Xers are Nomads. Tag yourself. I’m an Xer.

When It Doesn’t Fit Exactly

Now, how do we define a “generation”? It usually works out that once every 20 to 25 years, there is an identifiable new crop of young people. Hero and Prophet generations tend to be bigger, because of what’s going on around the time they are born. Hence, the Baby Boomers are Prophets. Artist and Nomad generations tend to be smaller, because they were born during a time when adults had other things on their minds (the Crisis or the Awakening).

Also, of course, the generations in a nation don’t necessarily fit with the generations in a given family. The authors point out that, often, it takes one big generation more than 20 to 25 years to reproduce, so that, for example, the children of Heroes are Prophets. The Prophets react against what their parents’ generation valued, but they get along better with their grandparents (also Prophets).

Here’s another example. My parents are Boomers. Now, the Boomer culture was rather anti-baby, anti-family, anti-settling down. However, my folks were not typical Boomers. They swam against the tide. They had six children, and my mom stayed home with us when we were small. They tried to raise us in a very pro-family way. So I was shielded from many of the things that my fellow Gen Xers had to deal with, growing up in an environment where kids were considered to “trap” their mothers, or with parents who divorced or went off to “find themselves.” However, I did pick up on the Gen Xer vibe of living in an unravelling society, being blamed for everything from racism to pollution to the hole in the ozone layer. When I read this line,

[O]ne student mockingly tells his friends in River’s Edge: “You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn’t even be seen in the same room as a cactus.”

-p. 195

… I laughed. The fact that I found this funny, tells me that I am a true Gen Xer.

So anyway, I am a younger Xer. But because my parents had a large family, I have younger siblings who are Millennials (supposed to be the Hero generation; more on this later). Meanwhile, my husband’s parents are Silent generation (Artists). My husband has older siblings who are Boomers, and he is an older Xer. And because we waited a while to have children, our own children are … I guess … Zoomers? Who are supposed to be Artists? Or maybe Alphas? Who … I’m not sure what they should be, because this Crisis seems to be extending. Again, more on this later.

The Predictions, Accurate and Otherwise

The Fourth Turning, published in 1997, predicted that beginning around or shortly before 2005, America would enter a Crisis. There were a variety of things they thought could happen:

  • States secede or try to secede over federal taxes, causing a Constitutional crisis
  • “A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons.”
  • A government budget crisis leads to a government shutdown and a Wall Street crash.
  • A “new communicable virus” leads to quarantine, which local areas resist, leading to martial law.
  • War with Russia and Iran.

All these are taken from pages 272 – 273 of the book.

So where are we at now? Something that takes 25 years of your life might be too big to see, but I suggest the following. America’s Crisis era started on Sept. 11, 2001, with an unprecedented kind of terrorist attack, which led to big curtailments of freedom like the Patriot Act and the creation of the TSA, and to a number of wars. Then we had a housing market crash and financial crisis in 2008. Meanwhile, there were a series of incidents that, helped by agitators, caused riots in our cities. Police departments responded by being less active, and crime soared. People started to get freaked out, which led to the election of 2016 (nations tend to turn to a “strongman” in a crisis), which caused more people to freak out. The Crisis reached its climax in 2020 – 2022, with you-know-what.

So counting from Sept. 11, 2001, we are almost exactly 25 years into this Crisis era. According to the authors’ rubric of how these seasons usually go, we should be coming out of our Crisis soon, into either a new High with regenerated values, prosperity, and social order, or else into the total destruction of our society.

Which one do you think is happening? For me, I’m not sure. I see elements of people building new values and communities, but I don’t see any national consensus on these things. Nor do I particularly see signs of the Crisis ending.

To prepare for the Fourth Turning, the authors in 1997 recommended that individuals and families do the following:

  • “Return to the classic virtues.”
  • “Do not isolate yourself from community affairs.”
  • “Build personal relationships of all kinds. Face-to-face contacts … will become newly important.”
  • “Prepare yourself and your children for teamwork.”
  • “Maintain relationships of trust with your extended family … your household will function best if it is multigenerational.”
  • “Gird for the weakening collapse of public support mechanisms.”
  • “Generalists with survival know-how will have the edge over specialists who skills are useful only in an undamaged environment.”

These are all taken from pp. 318 – 321 of The Fourth Turning.

These are steps that are being, and have been, taken by many who think of themselves as preppers. and by people who are working and hoping for a cultural renaissance. I’m most familiar with those who are doing this within Christian circles.

The only blind spot that the authors seem to have is that they incurably think of the “teamwork” and “coming together” that must take place during a Crisis, as a national affair. They say “we” while thinking primarily of the national government. In the section on “preparing your children for teamwork,” they suggest not pulling your children out of government schools “if the schools are working.” While I have seen many people doing community building throughout this crisis, one thing I have not seen is a newfound trust in, or willingness to comply with, the federal or even in most cases the local governments. People have been coming together in “teams” to found and maintain private schools and other things like that, but not to join federal programs.

O.K., now for the predictions that didn’t prove to be so prescient.

Any book that makes this many predictions (even in general terms) is going to result in some howlers. For example, here’s the authors’ prediction about how the Silent generation would handle Social Security entitlements:

… America’s rising familiarity with the Silent elder persona will erode today’s support for across-the-board senior benefits. Unlike G.I.s, the Silent will not feel entitled. Their prior public deeds will not inspire them (or others) to lobby for a vast elder reward. … [The Silent’s] sense of guilt and instinct for compromise will compel them to give in some, relax their claims on young workers, and drain the electricity out of the third rail of Social Security politics.

— ibid, pp. 220 – 221

This — how to put it?– emphatically did not happen. I have heard with my own ears Silent generation members say, “We paid into the system for a lot of years. Now we need to get out of it.” When you set up a Ponzi scheme, no one wants to be left holding even a little bit of the bag.

They make a similar prediction about Boomers:

When the market hits bottom, millions of Boomers … will immediately have to make do with steeply diminished material consumption. Many will have no choice but to live communally or with their adult children… public spending on elder benefits will necessarily decline. … Congresses will debate massive cuts. To maintain G.I.-style elder dependence on the young, Boomers would have to wage political war on their coming-of-age Millennial children. It is a war they will not wage–and would not win if they did.

ibid, p. 284

Now, the retirement age has been raised, but other than that, I have not noticed any “massive cuts.” And from my observation, Boomers as a group have been perfectly happy to wage political war on Millennials. And they have won it, by convincing Millennials that the solution to their financial woes is more taxes and entitlements, not just for older people but for everyone.

I have not noticed a trend of Boomers moving in with their adult children, either. In the first place, they, not their children, are usually the ones who own homes, a situation brought about by entitlement policy applied to housing. In the second place, their children are often alienated Xers, and relationship isn’t the greatest (present company excepted). Finally, some Boomers I know are effectively the caregivers for their grandchildren.

In short, the collapse of the Social Security/Medicare system has come about more slowly than Strauss & Howe (or, frankly, I) expected. As an Xer, I did not expect to be able to retire, and maybe I still won’t, but my husband is approaching the age when he can start withdrawals to give us some breathing room, and there has not yet been a nationwide apocalypse. Color me surprised.

One more howler:

As they break into their twenties, Millennials will already be accustomed to meeting and beating adult expectations. Basking in praise… they will seek out [their elders’] advice … Every youth domain will become more mannerly, civic-spirited, and emotionally placid. In college, Millennials will lead a renaissance in student decorum and appearance, making profanity as out of date as the backward cap. … On the job, Millennials will be seekers of order and harmony. They will delight employers with their skills, work habits, and institutional loyalties. … Millennials will respond [to economic hard times] with a cheerful patience reminiscent of Depression-era G.I.s.

ibid, pp. 293 – 294

Look, I’m not here to slam on Millennials. I actually have a lot of sympathy for your generation. But there is no way this general picture describes the way things have gone with the Millennial generation.

Strauss & Howe are predicting that the Millennials will emerge as a Hero generation, because that’s what his historical scheme calls for. But this requires a lot more strength and resilience than Millennials, as a group, entered young adulthood possessing.

The authors did not foresee that Millennials would have been intentionally weakened by a number of cultural trends which were pushed on them by earlier generations. These include behavioral meds, and overpraising/participation trophy culture combined with identity politics culture, which gave complimentary messages that, on the one hand, you are so amazing and talented and don’t need to work to improve yourself, and on the other hand, you are a victim of history and society. Each of these messages is weakening; in combination, they are devastating. There is also the horrible sexual confusion that has been foisted upon the Millennial and Zoomer generations. This draws on the power of identity politics (being a sexual minority is an easy way to obtain an oppressed identity), and on the behavioral meds culture (giving powerful new medications in response to emotional distress).

What generation could emerge from such a gauntlet unscathed? It is no exaggeration to compare all these horrors to WWI, which wiped out a generation of young people and traumatized the survivors. These are not conditions that cause young people to “meet and beat adult expectations” in the positive sense, nor to “delight their employers.”

Perhaps Millennials are a Hero Generation in a new sense. If they are functional at all, it’s because they have won through an intense spiritual war. Perhaps we should think of them as veterans. Like veterans, they certainly bear mental and physical scars. But instead of coming back from a physical war and plugging into an existing social structure, they are having to re-invent the wheel in all the most basic domains of life: schedules, self-care, family.

And quite a few Millennials are a “Hero Generation,” itching for action, in the sense that they are committed Marxists who want to see the violent overthrow of society.

Others, like my younger siblings, are more like the G.I. generation after WWII, eager to get married, raise children, contribute to their communities, and build a wholesome cultural high.

The fact that we have Millennials going in these two very different directions makes me rather uncertain about how this Crisis is going to go.

I wonder whether what we have seen is what the author predicted on page 302:

If [the Crisis] ends badly, Millennials would bear the full burden of its consequence throughout their adult lives. If they come of age traumatized, like the Progressive youths of the Civil War, Millennials will thereafter attend to the details of suffering and healing as heirs to the Artist archetype.

It seems to me that our Millennials are behaving more like a “sensitive Artist” generation than like a “hubristic Hero” generation. This would mean that, as with the Civil War, America had once again skipped the Hero generation and gone straight to Artist.

The Prophet, born in the High, seeks vision; the Nomad, born in the Awakening, seeks realism; the Hero, born in the Unraveling, seeks power; and the Artist, born in the (prior or current) Crisis, seeks empathy.

p. 322

Reader, I Read-ed It

So, that’s the outlines of the book plus a few of my thoughts on it. Obviously, there is a lot more material in there. Some of it is really interesting (the parts that apply the seasonal rubric to the past). Other parts feel dated (ironically, the parts written in the future tense). Read it if you’re curious and want to know more. Meanwhile, what do you think? What generation are you? What do you want to do in the coming High?

Ride, Sally, Ride: A Book Review

On By Jennifer Mugrage13 Comments

O.K., I’ll just say it. Douglas Wilson is a great theologian/expositional preacher, he seems to be a highly competent counselor, and he is an excellent polemical writer. He is not an excellent novelist.

He is just an okay novelist. I will explain.

Ride, Sally, Ride was published in 2020, which means it was being written in the 20-teens, pre-Covid and pre-George Floyd riots (though not pre-Ferguson and a lot of other riots). It is set in the late 2030s, in a somewhat dystopian setting.

A Little Bit of Orwell

In this setting, the United States is not officially fragmented, but almost. On the Left Coast and the East Coast, you have blue states, which is what we Americans call politically leftist states, with increasingly draconian laws outlawing hate speech and enforcing the rainbow. In the middle of the country, you have red states, which is what we Americans call politically conservative states, also known as “free states.” The free states have been able to survive economically, despite not having access to the East and West Coasts, because they have really developed their natural gas, oil, and grain production, and they still have the Mississippi River. They are able to ship their products down this and out into the Gulf of Mexico (as I still call it). So, in Ride Sally, these United States are not quite separate “states” (read: countries) yet, but they are in the middle of a slo-mo breakup.

Wilson didn’t foresee the Covid debacle, but his characters make frequent references to “the Troubles of 2024,” which seem to have been widespread unrest leading to widespread legal changes.

Most of the action in Ride Sally takes place in Colorado. It (but not Wyoming) is part of the blue, Diversity Gestapo bloc that also includes Washington, Oregon, and California. Americans will recognize this as plausible. Not only have gay marriage, polyamory, and porn been legalized and widely promoted in these states, but so has the sale of “sex bots.” You can order them online for a few thousand dollars, and they can be programmed to say whatever you want.

A Little Bit of Old Testament

Our hero, Ace (short for Asahel) is a twentysomething living with his parents while he attends university. His parents are Christians, but they are sort of cowardly and compromised, as is their church, which is the only reason they have been able to go on living in Colorado. Ace, on the other hand, has been reading Puritan theology (outlawed as hate speech) on the dark web, and has grown into a fine young man. Their last name is Hartwick.

As our story opens, the Hartwicks have a new neighbor. Their new neighbor has a wife, “Sally.” Sally is a sex bot.

The new neighbor introduces Sally as if it were a real person. The Hartwicks are maneuvered into inviting the “couple” over for dinner, at which the neighbor speaks to the bot as if it were a person and eats off its plate to make it appear that Sally has finished her meal. It’s creepy, though it could have been creepier if this were a horror story, which it’s not.

The next day, neighbor asks Ace to go “look in on Sally” while neighbor goes to pick up a package (which turns out to be another bot). He tells Ace this would be “the right thing” to do. Ace, also determined to do the right thing, but in a different way, goes over to the neighbor’s house and sees Sally posed seductively, in an obvious setup. He helpfully puts a t-shirt on the doll, takes it over to the recycling center where he works, and crushes it in the trash compactor. All of this takes place in the first chapter. The rest of the book deals with Ace being put on trial for the “murder” of the neighbor’s “wife.”

And a Little Bit of Wodehouse

The trial unfolds through a series of zany, madcap events. There are slimy lawyers. There are conniving governors. There are riots, conversions, and assassination attempts. There is a refugee from an Amish community. There are crossed wires and mixed signals galore.

Many of the plot points turn on one of the Team Sanity characters causing mayhem at strategic moments. Example: a slimy lawyer is about to hold a press conference where he will trot out a false accusation of rape against Ace from a would-be influencer who knew him slightly in high school. The press conference is totally derailed when another woman, watching in the crowd, yells out, “Then why did you molest me, Dwight?” as soon he says “believe all women.”

In short, this book, besides being a dystopia, also sort of wants to be a P.G. Wodehouse comic adventure.

So, Douglas Wilson, you have tried to combine 1984 with P.G. Wodehouse, with a little bit of Stepping Heavenward. How did it go?

This reader’s verdict is that it was mixed. The absurdity of the Diversity Gestapo laws certainly do lend themselves to Wodehouse-like hijinks on the part of Team Sanity. When the establishment has no category for objective truth, this creates a quite a few loopholes. For example, at one point Ace’s defense attorney makes a motion that the jury have at least three sex bots on it. They cannot be programmed to vote guilty or innocent, of course, as that would constitute jury tampering. This is a stroke of brilliance worthy of Jeeves near the end of one of the Jeeves and Bertie books.

However, one of the things that makes the Jeeves and Bertie books so fun is that the stakes are always so low. Will Bertie’s uncle to get to purchase the coveted antique that he’s had his eye on? Will Anatole, Bertie’s aunt’s temperamental but genius cook, quit, leaving the family without good food to eat? Will Bertie be forced to marry the soppy and naive Madeline Bassett, or will she end up with the man who really loves her, i.e. Augustus Fink-Nottle? Whenever Bertie or one of his friends are in danger of being jailed, it’s not for murder, it’s for something like “stealing a policeman’s helmet.”

The stakes are a lot higher in Ride, Sally, Ride, which makes things a little less funny. Yes, it is possible to write about life-or-death situations in a comedy, but we must not be seriously concerned that disaster will befall the protagonists. Whereas in a dystopia, we should. Furthermore, the stakes in Ride, Sally don’t only involve whether Ace will be unjustly jailed by the state of Colorado. There are quite a number of potentially heartbreaking, messed-up family situations also on the line. These are resolved, in this book, in the same way that interpersonal misunderstandings are resolved in a Bertie and Jeeves novel, which is just frankly weird. It gives the reader the feeling, as Bertie would say, “that you get when you step on the top step and it isn’t there.” If we were reading 1984, we would not expect Wilson and Julia to hash out their mutual betrayal in one heart-to-heart talk.

Douglas Wilson Can’t Write Dialogue

I’m sorry, but he just can’t. His narrative is brilliant. It’s funny, satirical, and extremely quotable. He does sometimes get a little bit lost in the satire at the expense of moving the story, which is not something that usually happens with Wodehouse. He also sometimes neglects to inform the reader, at the beginning of a scene, where this scene is taking place, or what the protagonists look like. For example, we have to wait until the end of the book to find out that the defense lawyer’s wife is a ginger with hazel eyes, tall, and with a full figure. It would have been nice to know that the first time we met her. But this is a flaw for which I have criticized many other authors.

But anyway, back to the dialogue. It stinks. All of the characters talk, to greater or lesser extents, just like the narrative voice. The only exceptions are the woke characters, when they are spouting boilerplate woke stuff. They do that pretty well. And, I’m not saying the dialogue is consistently bad. There are certainly moments when a character says something, and it sounds like a real American person talking. The last line, for example, is great. But for the most part, the characters speak in sentences that are way too complete and way too complex. They sound like they were composed, not blurted. And this is true even in moments of great emotion. When they do get off a funny, half the time it’s British sounding, like the original P.G. Wodehouse.

Look, Bertie is a British character, so he can sound British, even when he is being a dip. But if you want to write an American dip, they should sound like one. Ace’s false accuser is portrayed as being not very bright … but you wouldn’t know it from her speech patterns. Another character, Sarah, left her Amish community just about a month ago, but she says to another woman, “You, my dear, are gorgeous.” Amish people don’t say stuff like that. This is not difficult. I mean, it would not have been difficult to research just a little bit. Go talk to an Amish person, or even just a Mennonite, or even just somebody with German heritage, and take a few notes on their speech patterns.

But that wasn’t Wilson’s priority. He has a lot of irons in the fire, and my impression is that he wasn’t trying to write a book with good dialogue. He wanted to write a rip-roaring satire with a quick-paced plot, and he did. He probably wasn’t going for Great Literature. (And to be fair, P.G. Wodehouse is Great Literature, in his own special way. So maybe it’s not fair to expect Wilson to write fiction as well as Wodehouse.)

Perhaps this inconsistent-dialogue thing would not bother some readers, but in addition to writing fiction, I read a lot of it, and as for this reader, it drove me crazy. I did finish the book, but that problem nearly ruined it for me.

Characters. Should. Talk. Like. Real. People! The end.

The Stepford Wives, and some Spoilers

Brian pointed out in the comments that creepy-sexbot-as-horror-story has been much better done by the original Stepford Wives. He is right. In fact, these two pieces of literature (?) are using the same trope to critique two different things. The Stepford Wives was asserting that having a middle-class, two-parent family living in suburbia is dehumanizing to women, and Ride Sally is asserting the same thing, but about the every-kind-of-sexual-desire-is-sacred value system.

Although Ride Sally is a worse-written book, I think it makes a better case. Here are some spoilers. Near the end of the book, it turns out that Neighbor is a serial sex-bot buyer. Every few months, he finds something that his “wife” has done wrong. He then destroys her and replaces her, because she was a “bad wife.” From this point of view, it becomes clear why Neighbor set up Ace to avail himself of Neighbor’s “wife.” He was also setting up Sally. He had already ordered another “wife,” and his plan was to come home, find Sally “committing adultery,” and get rid of her.

To be honest, I find this portrayal more realistic than in Stepford, where the “wives” live with their husbands for years, just like a regular wife. Men who do not have their impulses directed to something godly, the kind of men who would buy a sexbot, are unlikely to be content with the same Sally year after year. Because what they want is not really a wife.

At one point in Wilson’s novel, a researcher reveals that the sexbot companies keep data about all the units they sell. The average bot has been used a total of only three times. I know this is fiction, but that fictional stat rings depressingly true. Because whatever users are doing with a bot, it cannot be called having sex. That requires two actual people. So users are bound be disappointed.

The psychology is solid. But the development and execution of all these different plotlines is lacking. It’s a shame. It makes me wish that someone else had written this book.

Quote: Good Intentions and All That

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Sam to Galadriel:

“If you’ll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights. You’d stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You’d make some folk pay for their dirty work.”

“I would,” she said. “That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!”

The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 382

Review: Sea of Monsters

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

Storytime.

Last year, I taught Ancient History to a group of third, fourth, and fifth graders.

One pair of brothers in my class were very knowledgeable, and very enthusiastic, about the Greek monsters, myths, and pantheon. This was great. Some of their “knowledge” was a little overly specific, however. They gave me to understand that they had learned all this from reading the Percy Jackson books, which were so good and I really ought to read them.

So, when I decided to spend a year reading Greek-mythology-inspired fiction, I added “at least one Percy Jackson book” to my reading list.

The library had a bunch of the Percy Jackson series, but curiously, not the first one. So I checked out books #2 and #3. Sea of Monsters is #2 in the series.

Having read it, I get the idea. It was enjoyable enough, but I don’t feel the need to read any more of them.

Riordan has done some nice, internally consistent worldbuilding where the ancient Greek gods, monsters, and even locations, move around the world depending upon where the center of Western Civilization is at the time. So, in the Bronze Age, they were based in the Mediterranean. Now, in modern times, they are based in and around New York City (with the ocean conveniently nearby). The titular Sea of Monsters, which used to be the entire Mediterranean, is now (spoilers) the Bermuda Triangle.

Percy (short for Perseus) Jackson is a son of Poseidon, who lives with his mother in New York City. During the summers, he attends Camp Half-Blood, a training camp for children of the gods. It is staffed by the centaur Chiron (who, in the original myths, trained Achilles — very appropriate). In this book, Chiron has been fired, and one of the camp directors is Tantalus. Tantalus spends the entire book chasing pieces of food (donuts, burgers, etc.), which flee from him so that he never gets to take a bite.

We also meet Hermes, a fit, middle-aged man in a jogging suit, whose caduceus has been transformed into a cell phone around whose antenna twine two small green snakes by the names of George and Martha.

You get the idea. The book is a lighthearted blend of ancient Greek characters with modern technology, slang, and what is supposed to be teen culture.

Like many books that are supposed to be relatable for tweens, it’s told in the first person. There is some generic slang (“Dude!” etc.), and many of the adult authority figures are clueless and/or careless about the teens’ well-being. These are the pitfalls of such books. The use of technology and slang runs the risk that the books will not age well. The portrayal of the adults, while it might facilitate the requisite adventure, does not encourage respect. Surely, there could be ways for the author to show teachers that actually care about their students, and still get Percy away from the camp and off on his own.

As a teacher, I’m also concerned about the portrayal of bullies in Percy’s private school in New York City. The idea that there is a vicious hierarchy in middle- and high- school is definitely a Hollywood trope. I’m sure this is true in some places, but in the schools I’ve been in (both as a student and teacher), the successful, “popular” kids were mostly very kind. Kids who are less socially adept (like I was) tend to be fearful and envious, and project their feelings of inferiority onto the “popular” kids. Stories like this are not helping them gain social confidence or believe the best about others’ intentions, as we are told to do in I Corinthians 13.

This book had some poignant moments, especially near the end, but the author kept it mostly lighthearted. The series is clearly building towards some big showdown, having to do with a plot by Kronos. If I didn’t have such a long reading list, I might finish it.

Les Mis, and Jacobines Don’t Know How

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

This past Spring, my son’s school put on a production of Les Miserables (School Version). For a bunch of high schoolers, they did a very very good job. My sons had never heard or watched Les Mis before, so naturally, we had to go to the school musical multiple times and then check out DVDs of more professional productions of Les Mis from the library.

The power of the story cannot be denied. Depending upon where you are in your stages of life, different parts of it hit differently. For me, this time, the part that made me bawl was when Fantine, the dying prostitute, hallucinates that she is taking care of her daughter Cosette. “Cosette, it’s turned so cold.” (Because Fantine is dying, and her body temperature is dropping.) “Cosette, it’s past your bedtime. You’ve played the day away, and soon it will be night.” All that Fantine wants is to be living with her daughter, watching her play, doing a bedtime routine with her and so on, like I was privileged to do with my kids when they were small. As a mom, this really hit me. When I was a teenager, it did not hit me so hard. I was more take by the love triangle later in the play. More later about how different things become salient when you are younger or older.

So, let’s talk about the young people. The way the play is written, it’s impossible not to identify with the students, who want to lead a revolution in the wake of the death of General Le Marc. Their songs (“Red and Black” and “Do You Hear the People Sing”) are certainly stirring. Now that I’m the age of the students’ mothers, one of the many emotions stirred by these songs was trepidation. I wanted to ask Enjolras, “Honey, what is your plan to bring about a better world?”

As far as I can tell, the students’ plan is as follows:

  1. Build a barricade in the street
  2. Fight police
  3. ?
  4. Utopia

Much as I sympathize with these young people’s feelings, I worry that this plan is not going to be workable.

Actually, the students did have an additional step in their plan.

  1. Build a barricade in the street
  2. The people rise
  3. Students and the people fight police together
  4. ?
  5. Utopia

Now, as it happened, “the people” (the lower classes of Paris) did not “rise.” The result was that nearly all the students got killed. However, the people’s failure to rise is not the only weak point in this plan. I have a feeling that, if the people had joined the students in the streets, the result would have been that the people and the students who were fighting got killed. The people had this feeling too, which was why they stayed in their houses.

Either way, you need something in between “fight with the police” and “utopia” in order to build a better society.

You would think the characters in Les Mis would understand this. After all, France had had a bloody revolution just one generation before, when their parents were young.

As street urchin Gavroche sings in this clip, “This is the land that fought for liberty/Now when we fight, we fight for bread./Here is the thing about equality/everyone’s equal when they’re dead.”

The students are telling the people that a violent revolution will solve the problem of their being desperately poor. However, the end result of war (including revolutionary war) is more and worse poverty. When you destroy everything, what you find the next day is that everything is destroyed.

This is what James Lindsay means when he says “Communism doesn’t know how.” The “plan” that Marx presents in his “science of history” is exactly like the students’ plan:

  1. Destroy everything, and kill a bunch of people
  2. ?
  3. Utopia

This is a child’s view of how to solve problems.

Mind you, it’s quite understandable. As portrayed in Les Mis, a great mass of people in France at the time were living under horrible poverty and unjust laws that made it virtually impossible to get out of a bad situation once you had got into it. (Fantine, being abandoned by the father of her child; Valjean, being convicted of a minor crime that turned into a lifetime of parole.) So this desire to fight is not so much a political philosophy, let alone a plan, as it is an instinct. Freeze, flight, or fight.

Now wait a moment, you say. Aren’t the students in the right, here? After all, Valjean, the hero of the story and the representation of Mercy, joins them on the barricade. Doesn’t that prove that a good person would be involved in the revolution?

Not quite. Valjean joined the students on the barricade and even took some shots at the soldiers. But he did not do this because he expected the students’ “plan” to work. He went there to rescue Marius. Valjean had found out that the young student, Marius, was interested in his adopted daughter Cosette, and he was eager to get Cosette safely married to this young man, because he, Valjean, would not be able to take care of her forever. Even having just met Marius, Valjean had paternal feelings towards him, as he sings in the song “Bring Him Home.” (Another theme of Les Mis is how vulnerable a woman is when she does not have a man who is willing to marry her, as we see mostly clearly in Fantine’s dramatic fall into hell-on-earth.)

Valjean, as an older person, has spent his entire life trying to alleviate human suffering … first his own, and then, that of others. The way he has done this is to dedicate himself to God, and to save and protect individuals (especially women) whenever it is in his power to do so. Although willing, in principle, to turn himself in to the law, he eludes Javert for ten years in order to rescue and raise Cosette. This is actually how a better world is built. Men marrying women and raising children with them. Adults making sure that children, like Cosette, have steady, faithful parents to care for them. This is building. It’s the opposite of tearing everything down.

This is how Valjean fights back against the poverty and injustice in France. As an older person, he knows full well that the students, and especially the people, have a legitimate complaint. By his quiet presence in the story, he can show them a better way. He helps people one at a time, as far as his sphere of influence extends. He’s not willing to kill, or even demonize, Javert, representative of the often unjust law. “I have nothing against you. You have only done your duty.” This is very different from the Jacobin spirit of hating and wishing to kill the entire middle class.

Perhaps, if you were a student, you would be unsatisfied with Valjean’s approach to saving the world because it is too modest. Valjean, after all, only saved the child of one dying prostitute. He didn’t stamp out the sex trade in France. He didn’t even put a stop to the nefarious Thenardiers. He didn’t do a big, dramatic deed that brought about Utopia. Furthermore, all of this took him a good ten years to do. He had to strive and suffer all kinds of things in order to give one young couple a good life.

I am sorry, young Jacobines, but that is the way it is. Contrary to dozens of American movies, there is almost never a big, dramatic deed that you can do which will save the world in one fell swoop. I say almost. There is never such a deed. No almost about it.

What if I told you that being quietly faithful over many years and building a stable home for your children is literally the most that any one person can do, to bring about Utopia?

Kind of disappointing, huh?

This is wisdom from an older person. This is the wisdom that Jean Valjean has to offer the students who don’t have a plan, though Valjean himself might not even realize it. And it appears, at the end of the play, that Marius has accepted Valjean’s wisdom. He marries Cosette. Marrying her, instead of abandoning her as Cosette’s father abandoned her mother, is one solid step towards building a better world.

Why We Can’t Just Give Peace a Chance

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Storytime.

When I was a kid, I attended a no-nukes protest.

It’s true. My dad was a Protestant pastor, and also sort of hippie about some things. No drug use or sleeping around, but he liked to live “simply” (for example, keeping his old coffee percolator), and around the time I was a baby, he had become a convinced pacifist. That is, he had become convinced based upon the Sermon on the Mount (mostly) that for Christians nowadays, it is never permissible to resist violence with violence. And this went for nations too. For him, principled pacisfism was part of following Jesus.

So here it was, the mid 1980s, late in the Cold War (though we did not know it was late at the time). A no-nukes protest had been planned in a downtown plaza in our large Midwestern city. I believe it was organized by the city’s churches, because among other people, my dad had been asked to sit in a panel onstage.

I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I was excited to go along. It seemed like a good thing. It was pretty clear to me that us, or anybody else, getting killed by nukes was a bad thing, something that we would not want to have happen. I had heard gruesome stories about people’s eyeballs being turned into jelly when the bomb was dropped (by us!) on Hiroshima. This was in a book that we had at home called Peace Be With You.

As the family artist, I made the sign for our protest. I tried to draw the symbol from the cover of Peace Be With You, a dove holding a branch in its beak. I had never drawn a dove before, and I got the beak wrong, so it came out looking more like a parrot.

I don’t remember all the content of the rally, but two things stand out. There was a play about a couple who survive a nuclear holocaust and live in a tent city, only to get radiation sickness. And, I remember the final song.

With the panel of pastors still seated on the stage, a lady came up to give a moving musical number. The first verse was about the Statue of Liberty and how she represents to many people that they have arrived in a place that is free from oppression. The second verse was about the cross of Christ, and how, to the Christian, it means liberty from sin, death, and hell. The refrain was “the Cross is my Statue of Liberty.”

Horribly blasphemous, of course. It was trying to compliment the greater by comparing it to the lesser, which actually reverses the roles of greater and lesser, unintentionally offering a huge insult to Christ.

As soon as he realized where the song was going, my dad abruptly got up from his seat on the stage behind the singer, stalked off the stage in a huff, and marched me and my brother out of there before the rally ended. I’m still proud of him for this. As someone said (I can’t find the reference, but I think it was Spurgeon), “Even a dog barks when its master is attacked.” Referring to himself defending the honor of Christ, however inarticulately.

I think what the organizers were trying to convey with that song was, “We are Christians, and don’t worry, even though we are against nukes we still definitely love our country.” But it was ill chosen.

Although I now think the whole event was incredibly naive, I commend my dad for attending it and for bringing his kids. Kids need to have experiences where they go fight for the right alongside their parents, even if the cause later turns out to have been somewhat misguided. This sends the message, “We have certain values as a family, these are important enough to do something about, my parents are good people” and, above all, “I and my parents are on the same side.” Please, give your kids many experiences like this before they become teenagers!

So, why naive? Well, I can’t blame myself for not noticing this as a kid, but why in the world did we think we were the only people who objected to the idea of a nuclear holocaust? Surely that is something that everyone recognizes is bad? (Except, perhaps, the mullahs, I digress.)

And given that we were not uniquely intelligent or good such that we were the only ones who didn’t like the idea of people being annihilated by a nuclear bomb, it would make sense to connect the next pair of dots (#s 2 and 3) and ask ourselves, since 99% of people don’t like nukes, how is it that they still exist? Could it be that, once you have a nuclear standoff, getting rid of nukes is more complicated than just “getting rid of them”? Perhaps there are people who also don’t want an apocalypse, but whose options are limited?

By the same token, perhaps there are more obstacles standing between humanity and the cessation of wars in general than just a dearth of people saying, “We don’t like war.” After all, most people don’t like wars, including most people who fight them.

But we, the anti-war protestors of the Cold War era, honestly, naively, conceitedly thought we were the only people in our country who saw a moral problem with human suffering. And we thought it would somehow stop if only we were to stand up and heroically say, “We are against this.”

It didn’t work. And not because not enough people were against it. It turns out, just saying that doesn’t do anything.

I’m sure my dad’s generation would say that these antiwar protests were ineffective because “our leaders didn’t listen.” “Listening,” in this context, would mean disarming our nukes and other WMDs, and perhaps completely disbanding our military. After all, if every country did this, peace would flow into the empty space where the weapons used to be. And someone has to go first! So it might as well be us! Someone has to give peace a chance.

This made sense to me at 10, especially when it was coming from respected authority figures. Once we grow up, however, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves what could possibly go wrong with this scenario. And the answer is: a lot. Everything.

War is, unfortunately, the default state of human beings. When we are not at war, it is because a lot of people are working very hard to maintain a precarious balance where things don’t tip into war. Fortunate are we who live in a country or empire large enough, or strong enough, that all that work has paid off and we get to go about our daily lives, assuming that peace is the natural state of things. But it isn’t. It is not the case that wars don’t happen unless some “war monger” goes out and “starts one.” That would be nice, but it’s not what we have here.

There are multiple reasons for this. Until recently, I thought it was sufficiently explained by human beings being sinful, and full of fears, lusts, and cravings. All of that is certainly a huge factor. We usually see wars explained as being caused by “fighting over scarce resources,” but I think that materialistic explanation is far from sufficient. Wars have not become less common as the worldwide standard of living has increased. I have also seen wars attributed to “religion.” There are a number of logical problems with this as well. To test this theory, you’d need a control group of humans who had either no religion, or no war. Since both war and religion are things that humans universally do, such a control group does not exist. To say that because both are universal, means one causes the other, is the post hoc fallacy.

So in general, I think the stubborn persistence of war is adequately explained by the Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Greed, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger, and Pride. Especially Pride and Envy.

Say somebody hates you and wants to go to war with you because they are prideful and think their way of life is better, but also, at the same time, they envy some things about, tacitly acknowledging that in those respects, you are better than they are. Is such a person going to put down their weapons because you fold your hands and say, “Look. None of us like war. Let’s all mind our own business and disarm”? No, unfortunately, your enemy may not like war, but they hate you a lot more than they hate war. If they even recognize that you are taking the moral high ground, that is only going to exacerbate the wounded-pride-and-envy problem.

This is why fifty years of “anti-war” protests have done nothing but make the protestors look silly.

But it recently came to my attention that there may be an additional cause besides human sin that keeps stirring up wars in the world.

We need to expand our understanding of spiritual warfare to include the larger social and political structures of our world. Why does war bring ruin to the world? Why do we feel constantly on the verge of a new world war? … Why is peace, specifically the peace the permeates through the spread of the gospel, such a threat to world powers? The answer to these questions falls under the larger context of the unseen battle, a battle that has in mind the final unification of the nations of the world under the banner of Christ.

–Joel Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, p. 120

Muddamalle is suggesting that the gods of the nations, who would prefer to go on ruling them, feel threatened by the spread of the Gospel and use geopolitical instability as one of their tools to slow this spread. (For more about these entities, see my review of Michael Heiser’s book.)

The idea is that human beings, while plenty fight-y on our own, would sometimes like to rest. But these spiritual entities will not let their people rest. They are hard at work, with demonic delight, stirring up, prolonging, and accelerating generations-long conflicts, to keep the Gospel of Christ out and also perhaps, as a side benefit, because they enjoy human suffering.

This certainly matches the picture of “the gods” that we get in, say, Greek mythology. People are bad enough on their own, but even when you have a majority of people who want to do the right thing, you will see that Fate, or the gods, or whatever, intervene so that exactly the wrong thing happens at exactly the wrong moment. The result: ten years of war.

Peace, it turns out, is not a passive, waterlike thing that flows in wherever a space is opened for it. It has to be established, like a fortress. It is the result of someone coming in, taking names, and routing the false gods. That someone is the Lord Jesus.

Sunshine Blogger Again

On By Jennifer Mugrage19 Comments

Just as the sun must come up every day, rain or shine, so I am cursed to plod forever through an endless treadmill of answering questions. The questions are ever the same, but on the plus side, my answers keep changing.

I wasn’t exactly “awarded” this tag, but I did see it on the blog of one Bookstooge, who closed his post with “You aren’t hardcore enough!”

I am so hardcore. But, as usual, Bookstooge, thanks for doing everything exactly like Puddleglum. Or Trumpkin.

Here’s the participation rules

  1. Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog
  2. Thank the person who nominated you
  3. Provide a link to your nominator’s blog
  4. Answer your nominator’s questions
  5. Nominate up to eleven bloggers
  6. Ask your nominees eleven questions
  7. Notify your nominees by commenting on their blogs

What’s your favorite book and why?

The Bible, because so many reasons, but among others, it’s got some really wild ancient history that you won’t find anywhere else. At least, you can find stuff elsewhere that’s sort of similar, but you won’t know which parts of it are true.

Can you share some obscure/unusual words you like to use when writing?

I like “interlocutor.” It means whoever the person in focus is speaking to. I also like “salient” and “equivocation.” But obviously, which fancy words are the most salient changes depending on the context of the writing.

When I’m writing narrative, I prefer to describe the action and people’s thoughts as simply as possible and let the actual events deliver the emotional impact.

Do you have pets (if yes, photos!)

Not anymore, sadly. Our last remaining rabbit passed just a few weeks ago. We (my son and I) hope to get another batch of chickens this summer, but standing between us and them is a large run-and-coop building project that, to me at the moment anyway, seems as intimidating as the Tower of Babel.

What brings you joy?

Beauty.

Landscapes, especially if I can paint them; beautiful folk clothing from around the world; beautiful items knitted or crocheted by myself or others; the simple, unforced beauty when your favorite mug is sitting on your favorite coaster and they match. The beauty of a plant: hens & chicks filling a planter, a Boston fern spilling towards the floor. Sunshine on my dining room walls. I love beautiful music, even though I’m not very gifted at it, which is no doubt a trial to the people around me.

I also love things that are beautiful even though they are ugly. “Brutalist” jewelry, that looks weathered, like it came through the apocalypse. Things that are painted, knitted, or sewn in unexpected colors, like browns and greys, or colors that you’d think would clash but then don’t. Stuff that looks worn or pieced together, like an old farm quilt. Well-told tragedies, like the recently reviewed story of Jason and Medea.

Here’s an example of a “brutalist” ring.

“All things counter, original, spare, strange;/Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)/With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;/He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change/Praise Him.”

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

If there’s anything that can make you look forward to tomorrow, what would that be?

My husband and children.

Best vacation destination from your experience?

I have a whole bucket list of ancient sites I want to see, but that’s not what you’re asking about.

I have fond memories of a little cabin hut bungalow on a small island called Gili Air, off the coast of Lombok. Go out and snorkel in the morning, come back in the afternoon and sit on the porch and read. Look across the bay at sunset, and see the mountains of Bali looming out of the sea. Beach is not even my favorite setting, but boy that was one relaxing vacation.

Do you count steps?

What?

Favorite meal?

Fish and chips and coleslaw.

The last song you listened on repeat?

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.

I realize you all have been aware of this song for years, but I just heard it in its entirety a few months ago. Like probably every listener, I found it to be a stunning work of art and also kind of a puzzle, and I listened to it a couple of times in a row for several days until I felt I understood it. I’ll spare you my analysis, as I think volumes have already been written.

How many blogs do you have?

Just this one. I used to have a recipe blog and a book review blog, both on Blogger. I haven’t checked them in years and am not even sure if I could find them anymore.

But don’t forget to buy my books! And for goodness’ sake, please don’t return them. My publisher charges me when you do that. If you buy a hard copy and hate it, just burn it or send it to Goodwill or something.

What’s your favorite quote?

There are so many good ones, I can’t really pick a favorite. It goes in seasons with me. But for today, I’ll leave you with this one:

This is what the LORD says:
"Cursed is the one who trusts in man,/who depends on flesh for his strength/and whose heart turns away from the LORD./He will be like a bush in the wastelands;/he will not see prosperity when it comes./He will dwell in the parched places of the desert,/in a salt land where no one lives.
"But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,/whose confidence is in Him./He will be like a tree planted by the water/that sends out its roots by the stream./It does not fear when heat comes;/its leaves are always green./It has no worries in a year of drought/and never fails to bear fruit."
The heart is deceitful above all things/and beyond cure./Who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:5 - 9

Now, my questions for you, Gentle Reader. These are inspired by our experience in grade school, where you were sure that you had to have a quick, permanent answer about your favorite color, animal, and favorite everything else ready to go. This is important! You never know when you might need to know this stuff! Answer with your first instinct and no cheating!

  1. What is your favorite brand of tractor?
  2. What is your favorite kind of cow?
  3. What is your favorite kind of chicken?
  4. Country or city?
  5. Ford or VW?
  6. Pickup truck or motor scooter?
  7. Star Wars or Star Trek?
  8. Beach or mountains?
  9. Sweet or savory?
  10. Sci-fi or fantasy?
  11. Favorite animal, domestic or wild, in your region or any other.

No Friend to This House is A Great Title

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Like anybody who has ever encountered it, I have “issues” with the story of Jason and Medea.

In case you missed it, he sails off on the Argo to get the Golden Fleece. She is a witch, daughter of the king of Colchis, descendent of Helios, the sun god. Struck by Eros with an inordinate crush on Jason, she helps him accomplish all the tasks necessary to get the fleece and escape alive. He takes her with him on the Argo, and they crash around Greece, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Eventually, he throws her over for a younger model, a native Greek gal who is daughter of the king of Corinth. Medea takes a bloody and spectacular revenge, which I won’t spoil (look it up).

I first heard all this from my ninth-grade Lit teacher. She presented it in a very feminist way, but to be fair, this particular story sort of begs for that. I remember, in university, arguing rather incoherently with a male classmate about who was the real villain in this story. Later, when I was home schooling and read a simplified version of the legend to my kids, we decided we didn’t like the story, and we didn’t like Jason or Medea either, and they were both horrible people and they deserved each other.

So, hopefully, this book will be the nadir of my year of reading Greco-fiction: facing the story of Jason and Medea square on, by reading an entire novel about them.

The reason I liked the title of this novel is that it sounded like a phrase taken directly from the Greek — and so it was. The author, Natalie Haynes, has really done her homework.

Euripides’ Medea was the first Greek tragedy I saw performed, and it was the first or second play I read in Greek. … I wrote my dissertation on the heroics of infanticide in Euripides (I don’t have children, before you think about composing your sternly worded letter). … I’ve been reading and thinking about this play for the best part of thirty years, and I have probably seen it performed twenty-five times … I decided that the thing I needed to do [before writing the novel] was translate the Euripides, longhand. This is–in case you are wondering–weapons-grade procrastination. It took me a few weeks …

Haynes, in the Afterword, pp. 359 – 360

Haynes’ treatment of this story has been called feminist. And O.K. … sort of? But it’s not “feminist” in the sense of someone who understands the literature poorly who then reacts against the ancient heroic-age value system and sets out to undermine it. It is, rather, the work of someone who has marinated themselves in the ancient heroic-age mileu, which inherently presented a very broken relationship between men and women (especially husbands and wives). This story, and also the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, bring a lot of tension with them and almost demand that you take what might be called a “feminist” perspective, at least in part, unless you want to take a very simplified view of the whole thing and not really analyze it much at all.

It’s not just me saying this. Apparently, everyone has been arguing about Medea for … well, ever since she came to their attention.

Diodorious Siculus says that the reason we have so many contradictory versions of her story is because tragic poets are drawn to talking about marvels. It’s also worth mentioning that any character who prompts different versions of their story is one who was popular in antiquity. If you want to read more about Medea, I spent many happy hours with “Medea,” a collection of essays edited by James J. Clauss …

ibid, pp. 365 – 366

Apparently, my and my children’s feeling that the whole story is regrettable is echoed by the Nurse of Jason and Medea’s two sons. Here is her opening monologue to the play (translated by Haynes):

If only the Argos had sunk to the bottom of the sea rather than winging its way towards the land of Colchis … For then my mistress Medea would not have sailed to the towers of Iolcus, stricken with love for Jason … and she wouldn’t live here, in Corinth, with her husband and children, pleasing the citizens to whose land she came in flight, helping Jason in everything. That is the greatest help: whenever a wife doesn’t disagree with her husband. But now, everything is hostile .. For Jason–betraying his own children and my mistress–is sharing his bed with royalty … Medea is wretched, dishonored like this. She cries out about the oaths he swore to her .. I’m afraid she is planning something. She’s a strange woman. No one starts a fight with her and takes an easy victory.

ibid, pp. 272 – 273

Successive phrases from this speech are used as chapter headings for the first 3/4 of the book.

I give this book 3 out of 4 stars. (Or 4 out of 5, take your pick.) The research, storytelling and psychology are spectacular. It gets tenser and more tragic towards the end. It is, of course, very hard to read, because this is a tragedy. The hardest parts to read, for me, were the parts where the Nurse speaks to the children. Even though it’s set in the ancient world, this is fundamentally a story about a home that gets broken when the children are very small. That’s hard to bear.

The one missing star? I needed more description.

This book consists almost entirely in monologues by the different characters (except for Jason), punctuated occasionally by dialogue. I guess that makes sense for a novel that is a re-telling of a play. But if I’m going to read a book set in the ancient Mediterranean, which includes a tour of the cities of Iolcus, Colchis, Aeaea (Circe’s island), and Corinth, not to mention the Aegean, Adriatic, and Black Seas, I want more than little hints and scraps about what these places look, sound, and smell like. I want to see the terrain, the buildings, and the clothes people wear. Haynes gives us almost none of that. We only get a little bit of description when it is directly relevant to a plot point, like the Symplegades (giant clashing rocks), or the golden dress that Medea gifts to Glauke. This is where Haynes falls short of Renault, who describes buildings, clothing, and artifacts in detail.

Also, there is almost zero description of how the people look. That’s important to me.

As for Jason, we are only told that he is “good-looking” until he meets Medea, when we find out that he has dark, curly hair and golden skin. This means that we have to go through the Argo’s entire outbound journey making up our own mental image of Jason, and then modify it when we find out what is canon in the novel. In the case of Jason, that may be intentional. Part of his characterization is that he is a chameleon, able to be the figure that people want in order to get what he wants; or, as Haynes puts it, “a blank space where a man ought to be.”

But there are plenty of other characters that Haynes could describe when we first meet them, and she doesn’t. What do the Colchians look like? They are “not Greek.” Do they look Asian? Or is Medea made of gold, like the children of Helios in the novel Circe? What do the different Argonauts look like? The Tutor? The Nurse? Haynes does a better job describing the various goddesses, women, nymphs, and the golden ram whose lives are also busted up by this story … but still, I could use more.

Gentle reader, you have survived the harrowing journey of the Argo with me. What horrible ancient Greek story should we read about next?

Misanthropic Quote: Appreciation or Appropriation?

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

We must lay it to the credit side of Rome that some of its generals could understand Polycleitus and Pheidias, Scopas and Praxiteles, even if they carried their appreciation to the point of robbery. Of all the spoils that Aemilius Paulus brought back from his victories over Perseus, he kept for himself only the library of the King, as a heritage for his children.

–Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, p. 96

In other words, he didn’t just pick up on ideas, he literally stole the physical books.