Accidental Historian

Repeating the Last Century, Part 2

[Note: I changed the name of this series, as the first name I came up with was awful.  This one isn't all that much better, but it doesn't make me cringe.  So, hey!]

There’s a reason I decided to start my exploration of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 with a comparison to Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory.  Well, there are two.  The first is that the whole 1421 is fairly well-tread ground ‘round these here parts and John Darwin also brought China up since, y’know, it was kind of important in Eurasian history.  The second is because I truly enjoy mocking Gavin Menzies and his 1421 theory.  John Darwin actually took down both the 1421 theory and one of the main supports upon which the subsequent 1434 theory was built in the space of about three paragraphs.  This was done unintentionally, though, as Darwin’s book doesn’t mention Gavin Menzies at all.

For those who happened to stumble onto this blog recently and have no idea what the 1421 theory is, I suppose I should offer an explanation.  Basically, a retired British naval officer with no formal training in history got it into his head that the Chinese discovered America in 1421.  This theory was based on some pretty specious evidence and then supported by a great deal of research that depended on the theory being true.  At its core, though, the 1421 theory was based on one absolutely accurate bit of historical truth: in the early 1400s the Chinese emperor sent magnificent treasure fleets all the fuck over the place under a eunuch named Cheng-ho.

I mentioned in the first post on this topic that there are basically two incorrect ways of looking at the history of the last couple centuries.  The first is one of inevitable Western supremacy over the globe.  The second is to look at the West as a rapacious horde that set upon well-developed or even superior cultures in other parts of the world and attempted to destroy them.  The former type of history tends to make incorrect assertions about the quality of Western civilization.  The latter type of history tends to go too far in the opposite direction and make untenable claims about the superiority of the colonized over the colonizers in everything except technology and military might.

Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory and its follow-on theory that China actually started the Renaissance in 1434 are near-perfect examples of fantastical histories that make untenable claims to support and anti-colonial stance.  The claims themselves are unsupportable without making the most generous possible assumptions about other, seemingly related discoveries.  They also completely ignore the standard scholarship about how the history of China, Europe, and the New World played out.  More importantly, at least as far as the 1421 theory is concerned, the claims are so much vapor.  We know that Europeans made it to the New World and began to exploit its resources from 1492 on.  Even if the Chinese did discover the New World in 1421 they did nothing with it.  Even if Cheng-ho did discover the west coast of North America this would not put him on the same level as Christopher Columbus or John Cabot.  It would put him on the level of the Vikings who planted an unsuccessful colony on Nova Scotia a couple centuries before Columbus.  It would, in short, be an interesting historical footnote.

The whole idea, though, doesn’t actually do anything to help with Menzies’ central theory that China was better than Europe.  Rather, the idea mocks that notion, since it operates under the implicit assumption that the Western notion of progress and success is the correct framing.  Ergo, Menzies makes the assumption that since the 15th Century was the Age of Exploration in Western history then China must have been exploring even more, even better, and even earlier.  Anything else, according to this formulation, is an implicit admission that Chinese culture was inferior to European culture.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Chinese Empire at the time of Menzies’ supposed 1421 voyage was undergoing a drastic change that was well within the scope of what China had been for most of the previous millennia and would be well within the scope of what China would be for the next four centuries.

Let’s let John Darwin offer the explanation:

The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctly Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan.  The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested.  They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism.  They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts.  In 1420 Peking was reestablished as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley.  In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911.  Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.[1]

That’s a lot of stuff for the emperors to be working on at the same time they were supposedly sending fleets to discover the Americas and then destroying all of the records.  This also highlights the strength of the Chinese system.  China, at its core, was a stable, self-sufficient empire.  With the exception of the occasional worries over Korea, Japan, or Vietnam, China was rarely overly threatened by a neighboring external force.  The Mongols were the only conquerors that China knew for well over a millennia.

Consider the geography of China.  Once the borders of the Chinese empire were defined they were pretty much the same as what we think of today when we think of China.  On the eastern edge was the ocean.  On the southern edge was the jungle and small, not particularly threatening kingdoms of Indochina.  On the southwestern edge and the west there were formidable geographical barriers keeping China separated from the next great basin of civilization in India.  To the north was Mongolia and the doorstep to the vast, nearly empty steppes.  There was, in short, nowhere for China to go if it wanted to expand.  Since almost the whole of the known hospitable lands were already under the control of the imperial power there was also no struggle of small kingdoms to ignite the desires of would-be world conquerors.  China instead created their bureaucratic civil service and set out to make themselves into the most stable and long-running civilization in world history.  Only ancient Egypt could compete.

Western history has traditionally interpreted Chinese stability as a form of cultural stagnancy.  This could not be further from the truth, as the other Asian cultures looked to China with both envy and awe and often attempted to duplicate Chinese systems and successes in their own lands.  European travelers to China in the period before Western colonization began in earnest were similarly overawed by the greatness that was China.

Still, there was the bit about the Mongol conquest to consider.  It’s important to realize, though, that China changed the Mongols far more than the Mongols changed China.  Such was the strength of Chinese culture that the interlude under the Mongol thumb was more of an aberration and slight readjustment of society.  As such, when the Ming came to power in 1368 their goal was not to prove their awesomeness by conquering the world, but to reassert the old Chinese way of doing things.  In fact, let’s see what Darwin has to say about it.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.  In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward.  Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended.[2]

China, in short, was primarily inward looking during the period of the early 1400s.  That still doesn’t explain the fact that there were, in fact, voyages of vast treasure fleets under one of the Ming emperors.  Again I shall let Darwin offer an explanation.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability.  From the point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the eunuch Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.[3]

I shall pause here and point out a few things.  First, we know that there were treasure fleets under Yung-lo.  We also know that they were only really dispatched around the Indian Ocean.  Those voyages are all the records we have.  Menzies took those voyages and offered a fanciful notion that they managed to make it all around the globe and discovered the Americas over half a century before Columbus’ voyage.

Menzies’ theory makes little sense, however.  China was not an easttward-looking empire in the early 1400s.  They were looking west, south, and north.  The Ming Dynasty was still relatively fresh and looking to reassert itself.  Exploration and adventurism wasn’t the sort of thing that would cement their power in the agrarian, inward-looking Chinese system.

Darwin’s bit about Tamerlane, in fact, offers the most plausible explanation for why the Chinese treasure fleets might have existed at all and why they would necessarily focus on the Indian Ocean.  Remember that the Ming had just thrown off the Yuan.  The Yuan were alien monarchs put in place by foreign conquest under the Mongols.  The Timurids under Tamerlane appeared to be the true heirs to the Mongol legacy of Gengis and Kublai Khan would have been just as terrifying a specter to the new Chinese emperors as they were to the Middle Eastern and European rulers who had just barely beaten back the Mongol hordes.  These fears would play out in the Indian subcontinent, where Tamerlane's heirs created the Mughal Empire, which would last in one form or another for over three centuries.

It’s also important to consider the exact nature of the particular emperor who sent the treasure fleets out.  Further, we must consider the aftermath.  Again we look to John Darwin.

Yung-lo, the “second founder”, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch.  His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China’s primacy throughout East Asia.  But the strain was too great.  His successors adopted a drastic alternative.  The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned.  Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden.  And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall.[4]

This doesn’t completely negate the 1421 theory, but it does call the notion itself into question.  It certainly puts the kibosh on the notion of the subsequent 1434 theory, though.

As such, consider this a branching off.  I will be working on two separate sets of posts.  The former will stay in the 1400s in China so I can mock Gavin Menzies and his 1434 theory some more.  The latter will jump forward some four and a half centuries so that we can look with John Darwin into how the world we live in today is simply walking back across the same ground as the world of a century ago.

Why?  Because it’s been a while since I’ve written about history.  It’s also been a while since I’ve decided to undertake a series of posts that there’s no freaking way I could possibly complete.  Let’s see if this is any different…

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[1]John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 87.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid., 88.

[4]Ibid.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 1

History is a complicated subject.  There’s really no way to get around that fact.  The problem, though, is that most people think that history is really, really simple.  Everyone took history in school, after all.  The history they took was just a collection of names and dates and places and all anyone had to do was remember who did what on which day.  Simple, right?

Names and dates and places and important battles are easy to remember and put into a multiple choice test.  Knowing names and dates and places, however, isn’t what history is about.  The point of the study of history is to figure out why a particular person was in a particular place to fight a particular battle or make a certain discovery or whatever.  That particular bit of understanding tends to be rather involved and it’s why there are a lot of people out there who can write books extending to several hundred pages about things most people can’t be arsed to read even an article abstract on.

We know a great deal about history, though, because of all of those historians who spend their days writing about crap that most people don’t care to know or understand.  The simple truth is, in fact, that although we don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about history, there’s very little out there that can completely re-write the history books.  This is why when some kook comes out with a new book about how so-and-so did such-and-such and there’s been a gigantic cover-up real historians shrug and then go on with their business.  It’s self-evident to actual historians that such a thing isn’t possible, so they tend to ignore it.

It is, in fact, trivially easy to disprove the kooks in most cases.  The problem is, though, that it requires an assertion of historical knowledge that most historians have or will readily accept but that isn’t exactly common knowledge amongst non-historians.  It’s much easier, really, to say, “Yeah, that’s not how that worked,” than it is to actually explain why it is that it didn’t work that way.  The difference in effort, too, explains part of the reason why trained historians don’t spend a lot of time debunking the kooky theory.  They just go back to their real interest, which is incrementally changing the history books to incorporate new knowledge and remove outdated theories based on our understanding of the world before that knowledge came to light.

There is one way that historians end up rewriting history books, however.  It’s not about pulling new information out of the ether.  It’s not about making some mind blowing discovery that negates everything we thought we knew before.  It’s about taking what we already knew and looking at it from a different perspective.  Historians do that all the time.

One of the most magnificent examples of re-writing our understanding of history came out in 2008.  English historian John Darwin published a massive tome called After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  I actually picked up a copy of the book back in the summer or fall of 2008 because the book looked fascinating.  His goal, as the subtitle suggests, was to break down the history of global empire for the previous six centuries.  He did so in just over five hundred pages, which means that the book is both densely packed with information and argument and shallow in how deeply it deals with the background information behind any single idea or argument.  In short, it’s the sort of book that only a historian can truly appreciate, since it requires a deep underlying understanding of many things.

I first read the book shortly after I bought it and I remembered appreciating it but not getting too much out of it beyond an appreciation for what Darwin’s arguments were.  I pulled it out again well over a month ago and started re-reading it, this time much more slowly than in the past.  The second time around I think I managed to appreciate just how truly magnificent and breathtaking the book is in its breadth and scope.

Darwin’s argument, basically, is that traditional western interpretations of history are wrong in that they’re written with a certain air of inevitability and cultural superiority.  This is truly important, since we’re sitting on the back end of the legacy of European colonialism and we’re still dealing with the fallout of that legacy.  More importantly, though, we’re still dealing with the ingrained cultural notions that are the inevitable outcome of that colonial ideal.  Europeans and Americans still function under the misapprehension that there’s something inherently superior in Caucasian culture and genetic makeup when compared to non-Caucasian culture and genetics.

Darwin’s work also butts up against the most common non-Western notions of history.  Since Westerners had an understandable tendency to attempt to erase the history and culture of their colonial possessions and replace it with their own, supposedly superior, culture and history, we do have pretty wide gaps in the historical records of the people colonized by Westerners.  Those gaps have been subsequently filled in by partisans who have tried to play up their culture and downplay or outright villainize the involvement of Europeans.  Interestingly enough, though, in many cases these histories either implicitly accept Western framing of the notion of history or attempt to completely obliterate Western history in an attempt to de-legitimatize Western historians.  Both approaches are highly flawed and lead to conclusions that are far from accurate.

This time around I was most fascinated by Darwin’s treatment of world history from 1880 or so through the early days of the Cold War.  I realized while rereading the book that we seem to be basically replaying large parts of world history in the years leading up the World War I.[1]  His arguments brought the world of today into greater focus.

As such, consider this the introduction of a series on John Darwin’s magnificent work and what it means to genuinely overturn standard notions of history.  Before I get to the 1800s, however, I feel it’s a good idea to make a baseline comparison between Darwin and someone else who thought he’d overturn all of history as we know it.  That’s right, we’re going to go look at Gavin Menzies.

Hooray!

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[1]Up to a certain point.  The geopolitical realities of the world in 2012 are far, far different from those of 1912.  The United States has no military or economic peer and there is no uneasy détente between equally balanced European powers who have their claws dug into colonies all over the world.  I do not, in short, expect that we’ll end up plunging into World War III at any point in the near future.  That said, it’s fascinating to see how people talk about the world today and compare it to how they talked about the world a century in the past.

Sometimes the Universe is All, "Hey, look at this!"

Once again, Scalzi, ladies and gentlemen...

This gives me a really idea.  I've had an idea kicking around in the back of my head for something in the neighborhood of 10 years.  It started as a novel, but I realized that there wasn't really a plot thread long enough to sustain an entire book.  There were, however, a whole lot of small moments that could sustain a collection of, shall we say, episodic short stories that filled out an entire narrative arc.

I seem to recall talking about releasing some stuff as eBooks last spring before I moved back to Chicago and blew all of that instead.

I've even got a two-page treatment of the initial "episode" that I used for a writing assignment floating around on some preserved hard-drive space.

Hmmm...

Weird Summer's Comin' On, Yes it's Comin' On

Things I'm looking forward to, summer 2012 edition:

Redshirts, Scalzi's new one that looks like it's back to his style for The Android's Dream, a/k/a Christopher Moore decides to try his hand at true sci-fi.

Caliban's War, by James S.A. Corey, the follow-up to Leviathan's Wake, which was total awesome sauce.  If you like Arthur C. Clarke-style high concept sci-fi mixed mil sf, a monster story, and a detective noir-style personal journey, Leviathan's Wake is totally your thing.  If you don't want that, I don't want to be friends with you.  Anyway, yeah, Caliban's War, looking forward to it.

Blackout, by Mira Grant.  I can't tell you how much I loved Feed and Deadline.  I've talked about them before, though.  Anyway, Deadline ended on one hell of a cliffhanger.  Wait, no, two hells of a cliffhanger.  Three, maybe, if you count the overall story behind the two cliffhangers.[1]

Meanwhile, between now and then, there's a prequel-ish short story to Leviathan Wakes and a prequel novella to Feed. I'm actually planning on re-reading the books during the month of May, too, which is pretty unprecedented for me.[2]

Also, too, there's new Lost Immigrants on the way.  And the new Scott Lucas & the Married Men stuff is set for June 5.

RCPM are doing their Wisconsin swing at the end of June.  That means Madison, Milwaukee, New Glaurus beer, and Fuzzy's Tacos for this guy.  Hell, yeah.

Oh, and did I mention I bought a house?  I'm hoping it will be move-in ready in three weeks.  So that'll be nice.  The stuff I thought would take a long time is way ahead of schedule.  The stuff I didn't realize was a problem, though, is going to delay things just a bit.

Oy vey.

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[1]I'm still a not-fan of the whole zombie apocalypse thing.  I enjoyed Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead because they were hilarious.  As for the main trope, meh.  But I still can't get enough of Mira Grant's stuff.  I also strongly recommend Colson Whitehead's Zone One.  Both are post-zombie apocalypse and both use the idea in the standard sci-fi "meditation on life as we know it in a very different world" concept.  Grant goes for a systemic look at how we build society and disseminate information.  Whitehead uses a stream-of-consciousness approach and uses the zombie apocalypse as a metaphor for how we create walls around ourselves and settle for mediocrity.  Whitehead actually gets really low marks on Goodreads, but the stuff he gets marked down for is exactly the stuff that I think he does really well: it's a more-or-less emotionless, stream-of-consciousness meditation on life as we know it set in a zombie apocalypse.  If you want Left 4 Dead, this isn't for you.  If you want something with substance and a totally immersive setting, this is an amazing book, especially since there's one totally crazy reveal at the end that doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of the book but is a kind of, "Holy shit," moment that wouldn't exist if the book was written any other way.

[2]I think we're hitting a critical mass for books in the same way we hit a critical mass for music about five to ten years ago.  The eBook platform is allowing authors to release a lot of interesting background material in the form of short stories and novellas directly to people who can then get it immediately and without, say, having to find it in a random copy of a magazine somewhere.  That, plus the ability to self-publish and actually get the material out to a wide audience, is going to rock the publishing industry in the same way that the internet, mp3 players, and iTunes/Amazon have brought the traditional recording industry to its knees.  Long-term I think it will be good.  Short-term it's going to hurt a lot of people but bring success to a lot of people who were otherwise kept out of the game.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 4

[Warning: Spoiler-ish-like content ahead.]

It’s been a while since I managed to write my last entry in this series.  As in, I just looked and it’s been a month.  A month!  I thought it was two weeks, tops.  Apparently that’s how my life has been going this fall.  So let’s take stock of just how much the world has changed since then.

Um.  Well, since the last time we were here I thought I would be buying a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton.  Then I found out I wasn’t buying a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton.  But now I’m under contract to buy a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton, pending bank approval of the short sale.  And the craziest thing about that: it’s the same goddamn townhouse.  Also a whole bunch of other stuff happened that kinda made me want to tear my hair out and go back to renting.  Or living in a cardboard box.  But I hear that gets cold in the winter.

The last time we were here I was awaiting the release of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds with something approaching breathless anticipation.  I’m currently sitting on a train listening to Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.  There will be a review.  Oh, yes, there will be a review.  Mostly because I think it’s about time everyone learns the two key factors that separate good music from great music in my (somewhat diseased and/or blighted) mind.

Numero three-o, the last time we were here I was single and utterly convinced I’d never meet anyone with whom I could have a relationship.  That…um, that hasn’t actually changed.  So, y’know, it’s nice to know that some things in the universe remain constant.  I think we all need a little consistency in our lives, after all.

Also, too, I saw Mike Doughty at the House of Blues Chicago and didn’t walk away hating the House of Blues Chicago.  So that gives me hope that I’ll have an enjoyable time seeing the Lovehammers at the House of Blues Chicago in March.  And I saw Reckless Kelly at Joe’s on Weed Street.

Oh, and they’re setting up the Kriskindlmarket in Daley Plaza.  Christmastime in Chicago kicks massive amounts of ass.  Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Anyway, I’m sure that you’ve figured out by now that I’m just trying to waste time.  I’m like a student trying to pad out an essay because I waited until the night before the paper was due to actually start researching and I discovered the library isn’t actually open at 2 am and also isn’t a bar.  I wish someone would have told me they wouldn’t have Lagavulin 16 at the library, dammit.  How am I supposed to work in these conditions?

Wait.  Where was I?  Oh, yeah, Night of the Living Dead Christian.  I believe we’ve covered what I hate about the book.  I believe we’ve covered my own preconceptions of the Christian publishing industry.  And Matt Mikalatos himself has showed up in the comments to defend himself, explain himself, or try to point out that I’m an idiot who doesn’t know nothin’ or something.  Hopefully he’ll show up again, assuming he hasn’t died of old age in the interim.[1]

And so but anyway, let’s talk about why I was actually pleasantly surprised by the book.  Before I hated the book.  And then briefly right after I hated the book.  What it boils down to is this: while I had many preconceptions of Christian fiction and Night of the Living Dead Christian did, actually, conform to several of them, it didn’t actually play to (stereo)type and it was possible to see a good book poking out around the edges of even the worst of the narrative.

Actually, bracket that off for a moment.  Let’s have a talk about expectation.  It is the issue of expectation that caused me to briefly want to throw my Nook across the train car, thereby undoubtedly braining some poor morning commuter, causing some sort of lawsuit, and – worst of all – breaking my Nook.  See, I went in to the actual reading process knowing from whence Night of the Living Dead Christian came.  If the book had simply conformed to my Christian-fiction-publishing-based expectations from word one I wouldn’t have hated it.  I know I wouldn’t have liked it, but I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested.  The very fact that I was able to develop an emotional reaction to the book is, in and of itself, something to which I credit the book and its author.[2]  Basically my hatred was based entirely on a thought process of, “Screw you, Matt Mikalatos.  Screw you for seeming to break out of the standard Christian fiction crap, then throwing it right in my face.”

So, y’know, the book’s got that goin’ for it.

Now, there are also some things that I just have to accept in the book.  I find Luther’s conversion scene to be a bit far-fetched, mostly because Jesus hisownself shows up.  You would think that I could just, y’know, leave that one be.  I’m already willing to accept the premise that actual people turn in to actual werewolves, zombies, vampires, and other things.  So, hey, why not Jesus?  Mostly because I actually personally know people who believe that Jesus shows up and, like, has conversations with them, but those same people (probably) don’t believe that people actually turn in to werewolves.  So while I was willing to accept monsters – due to the fact that they’re simply a part of the premise of the book – I wasn’t willing to accept Jesus actually showing up in a book about Jesus.

Oddly, it’s not because Jesus doesn’t belong.  It’s because I totally worry about that mentally-unhinged-actually-thinks-they-talk-to-Jesus segment of the population.  So in worrying about how they’d receive that part, I actually took myself out of the narrative.

Well, that and the fact that we had a character who was struggling with his own journey of faith or acceptance or whatever.  Then Jesus showed up and made it (mostly) all better.  Again, I know people who think that exact thing happens and, again, I worry about them.  But this is definitely one of those, “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” moments, since I came away from two-plus decades in evangelical circles getting all that, “Jesus gonna come save you!” stuff and not actually seeing it happen.  What I did see a lot of was people filling in the blanks and engaging in wishful thinking.  But this is actually something of a nitpick, since I’m basically saying, “The problem I have here is that Mikalatos didn’t write the book that I would have written.”

The appropriate response to that is, “No shit, dude.”[3]

So let me toss a few things out that I thought he did well.

First, I already mentioned that he went to great lengths to have a character point out the Hitler wasn’t an atheist and that it’s entirely possible for Lutherans and Catholics to also be Christians, too.  This is a weird one, since it’s a lot of, “Yeah, duh.”  But for the specific intended audience of a Tyndale House Christian fiction book, that’s kind of a point that needs to be made.  It’s also the sort of point that could end up getting a brick thrown through Mr. Mikalatos’ window.  Or, at least, a series of blog posts from some overly serious Bible College dropout entitled, “Matt Mikalatos is not a Real True Christian.”[4]  It’s an act of moral courage in some circles to say things which are obvious to most of us.  This, for the record, is sad.  It also might not have been something Matt actually thought about.

Second, right up until the moment I decided that Lara was simply a cipher to allow us to feel sorry for Luther, I actually rather liked Lara and thought that she was a good addition to the whole thing.  I didn’t actually change my opinion of Lara after that happened.  I more decided that the author was being a dick for taking the time to create a good female character in a genre that lacks good female characters and then just throw her away for the benefit of the male character.

Third, everything wasn’t magically fixed by judicious application of Jesus.  This is a point that needs to be surgically inserted in to the skull of pretty much every Evangelical Christian I’ve ever run in to who doesn’t host a blog called Slacktivist.  Luther gets the magic-Jesus-healing-action[5] for the main issue he has.  But all that stuff that he fucked up until that point?  Yeah, it’s still fucked up.  Even if I hated every single word on every single page leading up to the (admittedly cliché) baptism sequence, I would absolutely appreciate that Luther was still in a bad place in re: his relationship with his wife and that everyone was okay with that because, holy shit, Luther was a wife beater.

This actually deserves a bit more discussion, I think.

One of the big problems with books in general is the way they tend to neatly tie up all the narrative threads.  There’s a reason for this: it’s far more satisfying.[6]  Some threads, however, need to be left untied.  In some cases it’s because some things need to be open-ended.  In some cases it’s because at the end of the day there are still several threads that can’t be tied to anything, but for the love of crap, that doesn’t mean they need to be tied to each other.  Still, it’s tempting to try to tie them together for the sake of completeness.  That particular compulsion is probably much greater when talking about Jesus-y things, since Jesus is supposed to make it all better.

The fact is that Matt seemed to do that, at least with Lara and Robert’s threads.  But he didn’t do that with Luther’s thread.  Since Luther’s was the central conversion story, leaving him alone, vulnerable, and occasionally longing for the past was actually a really, really good thing.  Why?  Because Jesus isn’t actually a magical fix-all.  It’s nice to see a Christian book where Jesus isn’t actually a magic cure for everything.

Fourth, I liked what Matt did with the relationship between Luther and his father.  Having a father who was wrong, didn’t know what to do, and then made things worse and was heart-broken about it was nice, especially since the father was a pastor and the correct pastor to solve the problem.  So having the father admit that he’d been helpless rather than having to just have Luther admit he was wrong about everything was actually unexpected.

So, yeah, that’s a sort of broad set of ideas, and I suppose it’s probably underwhelming as praise compared to the vitriol I used in previous posts on the subject.  But these are the four main threads that caused me to like the book enough to get mad.  So they’re actually kind of a big deal.

Also, too, there’s probably a Part 5 in here somewhere.  Although I doubt I’ll end up with as many posts on the subject as Michael Mock.

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[1]And if he has, I hope his last words were, “I’ll see you in Hell.  From Heaven!” and they were directed at me.  Really, who wouldn’t want to know someone died like that?

[2]I’m currently fighting a powerful urge to write about five pages on an issue that’s near and dear to my heart: expectation management.  I’ll hold that for my next The Single Life post, I think…

[3]We have two tropes at play here: “Death of the Author” and “Intent is not Magic.”  “Death of the Author” basically says that the artist’s intent doesn’t matter, all that matters is what the consumer gets out of it.  That’s absolute bullshit, as art is message, so the intent of the messenger matters.  On the other hand, there’s “Intent is not Magic,” which isn’t technically a trope.  I’m actually re-purposing a bit of internet rhetoric that pops up whenever someone who is blind to their own privilege explains how the world works to people who are trying to illuminate unexamined privilege.  However, it also works here.

Basically, I made a series of assumptions about who Matt Mikalatos is and what he was attempting to get across when I picked up the book.  Matt Mikalatos, meanwhile, wrote a book based on a series of assumptions of his own.  Posts two and three in this series were about my assumptions about him and his book.  The comments contain an awful lot about his intent.

This is where it gets tricky: as best I can tell neither one of us is actually in the wrong.  I genuinely believe that he has been explaining himself and his intentions in good faith.  I can totally see what he’s going for, too, and I get the impressions from his comments that he’s willing to concede that he didn’t always get his point across in the way he intended and/or didn’t always see the possible other ways to take the things he wrote.  I’m willing to walk back some of my stronger reactions based on subsequent information, but I haven’t really seen any reason to walk back my overall assessment of the book.

That’s, ultimately, why this is interesting.  Because everyone can learn something from this.  By the same token, I suspect that if Matt were to take everything I’ve said to heart and go back to re-write the book from scratch he would decide to change a few things based on what I’ve said that he agrees with and he would keep other things exactly the same because he’d say, “Nah, that dude was totally wrong about this.”  And I’d be totally willing to accept that, because I didn’t write this book.

Hell, we all know what happened when I wrote a Jesus-themed zombie story…

[4]True story: I searched Teh Google for that and came up with nothing.  I believe that I am now contractually obligated to write that post.  And incorporate porn of some sort.  Some days I hate the internet.  I mean, seriously, this post about Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is not going to write itself.

[5]With kung-fu grip!

[6]I am about to nerd out on all a y’alls, here.  I read every single BattleTech novel back in the day.  Then FASA went under and BattleTech all but disappeared, only to be resurrected by Wizards of the Coast or something.  They released a whole new set of novels called Mechwarrior: Dark Age set seventy or so years after the end of the previous ones in a universe that was kinda the same but had a few drastic and noticeable changes.  I ignored them.

Right after I got my Nook I decided, “Ah, hell, I need some easy train reading,” and I started getting the ebooks.  I ended up really liking the series because it was a lot tighter than the previous BattleTech books and it was a lot more, shall we say, adult.  There was basically no sex or swearing in the older books and it focused mostly on people high up in the halls of power, most of whom were nobles, basically.  So other than a few characters there wasn’t much in the way of grittiness.  Mechwarrior: Dark Age was all grit.  Characters had issues, bad shit happened, and that was just kind of how things went.  There were a few characters who pretty much had me thinking, “Holy shit, they allowed THIS?”

That’s all well and good, but I have one huge nitpick with the series: it just freaking ended.  I’m guessing that it wasn’t supposed to just end at book thirty, but holy crap, it just ended at book thirty with the Free Worlds League half rebuilt, the Republic still in Fortress Republic mode, the Lyrans and Wolves probably about to go to war with each other over the scraps of the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth, and holy-shit-what-about-Julian-Davion-and-the-whole-Caleb-Davion-is-a-paranoid-schizophrenic-thing?  They just left the Federated Suns behind at book 15.  And the Draconis Combine was just flapping in the breeze.  And there was the whole bit where Malvina Hazen blew up the friggin’ Jade Falcons by crashing a space battleship in to a planet but it just got dropped because, y’know, that book ended and none of the subsequent books went back to the JFOZ.

So, basically, what I’m saying is that tying up threads neatly, or at least TYING UP YOUR GODDAMN THREADS PERIOD is actually a good thing.  I like being satisfied that the time I’ve invested in something has paid off.  Now I’m angry.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 3

[I don’t actually think there will be spoilers here.  But who the hell knows?  Be prepared, kiddos.  Actually, upon further consideration, yes, there are spoilers.  But y’know what?  While I find that I’m not overly fond of the book itself, I’ve developed a great deal of respect for its author over the course of the day.  So, um, as weird as this might sound, I think you should seriously consider buying the book anyway, even if you don’t end up reading it.  Even if you end up giving money to Tyndale House, you’d also be voting with your dollars to tell them to support authors who are thoughtful, willing to respectfully engage people who have taken it upon themselves to say some rather unkind things about their books and who are trying to not be the Christian fiction authors of ten years ago when I was surrounded by the wasteland of Christian publishing.  Also, that may well be the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever given anyone.]

Back at the old digs I had a series on the book Wild at Heart.  The posts are still around, but for some reason when I tried (unsuccessfully, natch) to port all the old posts over to Typepad the posts there got messed up.  So you can go try and read them, but they’re kinda wall-o-text-ish these days.

Anyway, for those who don’t know, Wild at Heart is a book about reclaiming Biblical manhood by John Eldredge.  I loved the book, back in the day.  I was actually surprised, then, when I mentioned to Her[1] that it was one of my favorite book and she was shocked.  She told me (paraphrased), “All the guys I know who say that they like that book don’t actually know how to treat women.”

I found that fascinating and went back and re-read the book, trying to understand why.   What I realized was that there was an awful lot in that book that could easily be taken as support of the standard patriarchal system with women as lesser beings.  Moreover, there was a general attitude that men were the ones who went off to adventure and the prime position of a woman was in the background, supporting and cheering her man on.

I’d missed that the first couple times around because I didn’t believe that was the role of women.  I didn’t much care what the Bible said about such things, I saw women as equal and, in some cases, more-than-equal.  It kinda depended on the woman in question, really.

As I moved completely away from Christianity I went back to Wild at Heart and found that the book was a very different book than I’d thought.  All of the subtle misogyny I’d glossed over leapt off the page and forced me to pay attention.  That was why I wrote the Wild at Heart posts on the old blog.  I pulled from other sources, I challenged that book I’d once loved.  I found it wanting or lacking in just about every way.

There’s another thread that anyone who has been following this blog for a few years would also know.  When I left the church I discovered storytelling.  I traded sermons for stories, as I’ve said in the past.  The story was, when I discovered it, an instrument of freedom that left the audience free to discover their own meaning and morals and lessons.

I realized, though, that there is a danger to the story.  For every story comes with an intended lesson.  Without that lesson the story really doesn’t have any reason to exist, after all.  But every story is a product of its background.  With the old tales this is obvious, since the past is a foreign country, wherein they do things differently.

One of the things I realized was that in a lot of the old stories there was a very dangerous secondary lesson in re: women.  Think through the old stereotypes.  There’s the knight in shining armor who rescues the damsel in distress.  Whatever the main moral of the story, the secondary lesson is that it’s the man’s role to rescue and the woman’s role to be rescued.

The descriptions, too, are often telling.  The male hero is usually lauded for his bravery and courage and strength.  The female hero is usually lauded for her beauty and beauty and beauty.[2]  This, ultimately, is something I find extremely frustrating, mostly because one of the most human responses of all is to say, “This is how things have been, so it must be the way they should be.”

In Christian circles (and Muslim circles, really, but I’m not talking about Muslim literature here) this is known as “complementarianism.”  It goes back to that whole Genesis thing where god made Adam in the Garden of Eden, then said, “Hey, it sucks to be that guy, I should make him a helper,” so god made Eve.  The specific Genesis passage doesn’t actually have to be taken as a misogynistic explanation and codification of gender roles, as there are plenty of easy ways to interpret the idea of “companion to help him do stuff” can be regarded as a positive for everyone involved.

That’s not what it’s been taken to traditionally mean, however.  Women have, with few exceptions, been treated as second-class citizens throughout the history of civilization.  It’s something that happens even if the Bible isn’t involved.  Greek and Roman society, for instance, was hardly egalitarian.

In fact, egalitarianism can happen in spite of the Bible.  Several of the de facto leaders of the Byzantine Empire, one of the most Christian of all empires, were women.  They had to be somewhat creative in how they led, but their levels of power were scandalous as far as the rest of Europe was concerned.  The point there is that nothing is black and white.  Even where the Bible is concerned.

We do not live in the Byzantine Empire, however.  We live in the 21st Century.  We are heirs to the feminist movement, which I see as an almost 100% good as far as the history of humanity is concerned[3].  We are also the heirs to the counter-feminists, a movement spearheaded, like so many other shameful movements throughout history, by those who could be referred to in the shorthand as “conservative Christians.”  This is not intended as an indictment of all conservatives, nor of all Christians.  It’s just that in Western society the people most likely to say, “We have to do it this way because we’ve always done it this way,” are waving Bibles around for all to see.

“Complementarianism” is a convenient fifth column for those who want to repress women using the Bible as justification.  It relies on a whole shitload of prooftexting to say, “Hey, look, god wants women to hang back and, y’know, cook and stuff.  And that’s totally okay because it’s what women were made to do.  By god!”

Books like Wild at Heart serve a purpose (even if unintended by the author) of supporting that particular attitude.  They push the, “Men go out and have adventures,” meme by pushing an idea of “Biblical manhood,” that basically says, “Men go out and fight stuff.”  In the Bible, of course, women don’t go out and fight stuff.  As long as we ignore Deborah.  Or Jael.  Or we give them lip service, but then say that they did what they did because the men had temporarily failed at their duty.[4]

So, then, with regards to the subject at hand…

One of the consistent problems throughout Night of the Living Dead Christian is the lack of female perspective characters.  This is compounded by the fact that the female characters, in general, play secondary roles.  The main good characters basically leave their wives behind.

Now, I understand that there was a driving point in the book that could basically be summed up as, “Don’t ignore your familial obligations whilst going out on your great adventures.”  This is actually a good lesson and can, in many ways, be taken as a contradiction of that very Wild at Heart mentality I just spent two pages lambasting.

Part of the reason that I spent the first half of Night of the Living Dead Christian giving the book the benefit of the doubt was that I saw that as one of the points the book was attempting to make.  Mikalatos-as-narrator did basically set himself up as an unreliable narrator.  Assuming that was intentional, it was actually outside the scope of what I was expecting to see.  There’s a lot of earnestness in Christian fiction, after all.  Also, too, the way Mikalatos-as-author set Mikalatos-as-narrator up was pretty damned Gary Stu-ish.[5]

On some level, though, the Gary Stu nature of Mikalatos-as-narrator got in the way of the unreliable narrator nature of Mikalatos-as-narrator.  Geds-as-reader tended to downplay the unreliable narrator angle in favor of the Gary Stu angle.  Geds-as-book-reviewer realizes that this might not have been correct.[6]

There are two pivot points for this balance of potential misogyny: the treatment of Lara and the treatment of Clarissa (Luther’s wife.  I might not have name-checked her in part 2).  Actually, there’s kind of a third: the bit where zombie-guy-whose-name-I’ve-totally-forgotten says he’s going to marry a woman named Krista and then just kinda drops the subject half a page later.  What becomes of poor other-Krista?  Doesn’t she have any thoughts about this?

Hmm, that really should have been a footnote.  Ah, well.

Anyway, I interpreted Lara’s story as being an attempt to create sympathy for Luther.  I didn’t really see her pain and abuse as being properly treated, and the sort of blithe explanation that she was a vampire because of what she did in response to her story seemed extremely reductionist and, well, rather cold hearted.  Everything that came before and after was colored by that perception.

Similarly, I don’t think that Clarissa’s motivations were really given enough thought, specifically from Mikalatos-as-narrator.  And this is where the issue gets really thorny.  I understand that Mikalatos-as-narrator was, fundmentally, an unreliable narrator who didn’t know as much as Mikalatos-as-author (which, to give all due respect, is a really hard thing to do, especially if the narrator is supposed to be something less than omniscient).  What ultimately bugged me was that Mikalatos-as-narrator didn’t seem to give a shit about Clarissa’s motivations.

The night before he’d witnessed Luther go in to a rage and attempt to kill his wife and nearly gotten killed in the process.  Mikalatos-as-narrator’s basic response was, “Yeah, Luther probably deserved the mean things she said, but now I want to talk to Luther about freedom in Jesus.”  It was extremely dismissive in a way that was jarring.  Or, rather, it would have been jarring in another book.  By that point all the goodwill I’d been building up had been tossed out the window because I’d gone from, “Here’s a guy who’s trying to break out of the stereotypical Christian thing,” to, “Ah, crap, it’s another poorly disguised evangelical sales pitch.”  In fact, I sent a buddy a text that said, “Wow.  The salvation pitch can really derail a decent book,” when I hit Lara’s explanation of what a vampire was.

And it’s now eleven thirty here in the Holy Land West and I haven’t even hit on my other two big complaints.  I think I’m looking at a five-parter.

Or a six-parter.  Hell, seven or eight.  That’s just how I roll here in Gedsmoland…

---------------------------

[1]Um, wow.  Since I know that there’s at least one person reading now who doesn’t know, I figure that I should give a quick re-cap: there is an individual I refer to as “Her” ‘round these here parts.  She was someone with whom I was kinda-sorta pretty much in love back a few years ago who was also a Baptist pastor’s daughter and very much daddy’s little princess, which made the fact that I was in the process of leaving Christianity at the time very difficult for everyone involved.  I spent a bunch of time in late 2008 and 2009 using her as a sort of stand-in for my now-absent faith and also lamenting the fact that it didn’t work out.

The last couple places she appeared in a post were here and here, though.  Things have changed a bit lately.

[2]There are notable exceptions, though, specifically the beauty and the beast tales or their close Eastern European cousin the Hedgehog Prince.  In that the man is an uncouth, wild creature who is saved by the love of a woman whose chief quality is loyalty and the ability to see beyond the physical.  That, too, has a parallel in the old Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, in which the noble knight marries a terribly ugly woman, but then finds out that she is an accursed princess and the curse cannot be broken by a kiss, but by giving her the right to choose her own destiny.

It’s rather on the nose, really…

Also, too, there are other examples in traditional story.  Off the top of my head there are stories that I shorthand as “Clever Gretel” tales after the Brothers Grimm tale.  Basically, though, they’re Trickster (or, more appropriately, Jack) tales with a female lead.  There are also a few archetypical female heroes, like Atalanta.

By and large, however, the role of men in traditional stories is to go and do.  The role of women is to wait loyally.  That is not a particularly great division of labor.

[3]I say “almost 100%” because there’s always someone, somewhere, who fucks something up.  It’s simply impossible for something to be 100% or 0% good or bad.  In aggregate, though, the social equality movements of the 20th Century made the world a better place, no questions asked.

[4]Yeah, I have actually seen that argument.  Off the top of my head I can’t tell you where.  But it pops up from time to time.

[5]I have a hard time seeing it as not-Gary-Stu, since Mikalatos-as-narrator bumbles through a lot of stuff, has an epiphany about his own comparatively-minor-but-similar-to-the-other-characters flaws, then ultimately saves the day.  That’s kinda-sorta the very definition of Mary Sueism.  With the caveat that Mikalatos-as-author did try to retain a sense of Mikalatos-as-narrator being really super confused about everything, when the truly traditional Mary Sue/Gary Stu is the only one who knows what’s what.

[6]Geds-as-footnote-writer, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to fix his vanilla-pumpkin-granola yogurt concoction.  “Not eating it while drinking Dogfish Head World Wide Stout” is probably a good first step for next time.

The Unexpected Twists and Turns...

For those who wonder about such things:

One Matt Mikalatos (who I am assuming is THE Matt Mikalatos but you never can tell because it's the internet) has popped up in the comments of my review of Night of the Living Dead Christian.  He seems a perfectly pleasant and affable fellow, which is probably more than he'd end up saying for me if our roles were reversed.  I like to think I'm a perfectly pleasant and affable fellow who's open to criticsm.  I also like to be an asshole, especially on the internet, so that's a tough call.

Anyway, pop in to the comments, either on Part 1 or Part 2.  There is currently a conversation going on over at Part 1.  I have no idea what's happening in Part 2.  But it's something.

And remember: Be kind, be curteous, and push the malt liquor.  It's all we've got.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 2

[Warning: spoilers shall abound.  The only way it can be avoided is by, y’know, not writing this post.  But I have every intention of not not writing this post.  So my hands are tied.]

Stories have turning points.  Most of the time when we think of turning points we think of them in terms of plot, but there’s a different kind of turning point that can have a much greater impact on the book.  Well-written books avoid these second turning points to a certain extent and focus on using plot based turning points.[1]  This is because the second sort of turning point is one of style or tenor.

The worst thing about these secondary turning points is that they don’t usually come up suddenly.  Stuff starts to…happen, I suppose.  For those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about writing and telling stories these turning points are fairly obvious and when they’re beginning to approach they drop hints of their impending arrival.  So, basically, the reader spends a lot of time with various sphincters clenched in dread.

Even though I was absolutely prepared for Night of the Living Dead Christian to hit one of those turning points, I wasn’t prepared for what happened.  Right around the midpoint of the narrative the book went from a fairly light-hearted, if ham-fisted romp to downright mean.  The sad thing was, too, that Mikalatos had actually managed to build up a measure of goodwill when it happened.  He seemed to be trying to make several important points and struggling against the constraints of his chosen genre.  He seemed to be trying to create interesting, coherent backstories.  I was far more willing to blame the obvious problems on Tyndale House than Mikalatos.

In the early pages of the book he took several shots at his own people.  The obvious references to zombies as unthinking conformists who just do what their pastor tells them counted in his favor.  The bit where he made the point to have one of the characters say that Hitler was not an atheist over the course of an argument about who counts as a real Christian, not to mention the insistence that Lutherans and Catholics were actually Christians[2]

From here, though, I fear I cannot go on without basically spoiling the entire premise.  I’m okay with that.

There are three basic monsters in the book: zombies, werewolves, and vampires.  These monsters hew pretty closely to the way they’re used in non-Christian contexts.  Zombies are unthinking conformists with a rapacious desire to convert everyone[3] to their system.  Werewolves are a representation of the unconstrained animal nature of man.  Vampires are people who take from others for their own benefit.

In the early pages of the book we’re introduced to Luther, a werewolf.  We find out that he was raised with a strict, disapproving pastor father who forced extreme religious instruction on his son.  We also find out that his wife has just left him and taken their daughter because she’s, y’know, afraid of the werewolf thing.  He’s been struggling mightily to overcome the whole werewolf thing, but it’s just not working out and all of the religious instruction has only made him believe god don’t give two shits.  If you haven’t already figured out how that story arc goes, then you obviously don’t know anything about the conventions of Christian fiction.

We also briefly meet Lara in the early pages of the book.  She’s a vampire.  In the middle we get her backstory.  It’s here where the sphincters start to really clench.

See, Lara had a high school boyfriend who she moved in with after graduation.  He, as it turns out, was a vampire.  She tells a sad story about him abusing her and, eventually, biting her.  Now, at this point it almost works.  Because she’s telling her story to Luther, who is seeing his wife in Lara and realizing, “Oh, shit, I’ve been a monster.”

But remember, Lara is a vampire.  It’s not a passive thing in this particular universe, as you get bitten, then you bite someone else, then you become a vampire.  Then you get chased around by some dude named Borut who’s basically the Van Helsing of this particular universe and who has no sympathy for your back story but just wants you dead or de-monsterfied.

So let’s review.  We have a woman who was abused.  But once we get done hearing her story of abuse so that one of the other characters can have sympathy, we learn that we really shouldn’t be sympathetic to her, since she then turned around and did that shit to other people.  Oh, and also?  This is the only female perspective character in the book.  All of the other women are just kind of there as props so that the various men learn the all-important lesson of, “Don’t ignore your wives.”  Well, except for the counselor woman, who gets a special place in Hell.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I can’t completely go after the use of the Lara character.  In a vacuum that particular backstory would make a certain amount of sense.  Her reaction to being abused was fairly realistic and actually fits pretty well with the standard vampire tale.  I can go after it, though, because it highlighted the misogyny of the book.  See, her story is basically there so that Luther can feel sympathy and decide he needs to change.  Any sympathy for her is transferred to Luther’s journey and she makes it a point to not feel sympathy for him, so you know that she’s actually kind of a bitch.

But then she goes and engages in self-sacrificial battle against Borut.  So that everyone can get Luther out to get him the help he needs.  Yeah.  That actually happens.

It works, too.  Everyone goes to find the one man who can help Luther.  That man turns out to be (drumroll, please), Luther’s estranged father.  If you didn’t see that coming, I cannot help you.

Luther, not surprisingly, doesn’t want to go see his father.  He instead opts to go see a psychologist.  At this point Mikalatos (who, I should add, is the narrator, main character, and only “normal” person in this book.[4]  Other than, I suppose, his wife and children and various other wives and children.  But they don’t count, since they’re only there to drive the plot) goes off on a seemingly random tangent about a terrible experience with a school counselor he had as a youngster who actually hated children and was way dumber than his ten year-old patient.  It then came as absolutely no surprise that Luther’s decision to avoid church and go to a psychologist works out really, really badly.

The next time we see Luther he’s a werewolf in a suit because the psychologist has told him to embrace his werewolf nature.  For those who are wondering, yes, it is that bad.  This is the standard evangelical Christian explanation of the depraved nature of mankind.[5]  The werewolf is bad, the man is good.  The werewolf must be purged.  Dressing the werewolf in a suit is obviously a terrible idea destined for failure.

Meanwhile, Luther had managed to convince his wife to come over and bring their daughter so he could attempt to patch things up.  She shows up with a gun loaded with silver bullets instead of their daughter.  He finds out she’s not going to play to his tune and becomes enraged.  She doesn’t shoot him, but leaves the gun behind and walks out, saying, “Here’s the cure.  But you’re not man enough to take it.”  So, y’know, total bitch, right?

Later on, then, Mikalatos-as-narrator offers this internal monologue: “I felt badly for the way his wife had treated him the night before, even though he deserved it and probably worse.  But still, he had invited her to the house in good faith, wanting to show her that he had made steps toward health, and she had purposely torn him apart.”

This bit comes on page 121 (Nook epub edition).  After Mikalatos-as-narrator has already reminded Luther that Luther almost killed him the night before whilst attempting to kill his wife.  And other than the whole thing about how he “deserved it” there’s no real sympathy or empathy for the wife.  Because the very next sentence is, “I wanted to help him find the peace I had found in myself, and though he wasn’t interested, I wanted to try to explain again that following Jesus didn’t have to mean zombified Christianity, that it could be something with real, vibrant, overflowing life.”  Because that whole “almost killing me and your wife,” thing is less important than the whole “finding Jesus” thing in the narrator’s mind.

I feel like I’ve skipped over something here.  Oh, wait, right, I totally forgot about the chapter in between, where we get more of Luther’s backstory, with Luther as narrator.  That chapter starts with some high-minded philosophy-esque stuff about how he’s a selfish jerk but it’s okay because everyone is a selfish jerk.  Because Luther, of course, is the voice of natural man in rebellion against god and people with god are just jackasses.  It then goes sharply downhill from there.

I’m going to do something that I’ve never done on this blog before.  I’m going to offer a trigger warning, because this next bit sickens me.  Because we find out that Luther-the-werewolf is actually Luther-the-wife-beater.  And that’s just the start.

I could tell you that it was, in fact, the first time I had struck her, but not the first time I had considered it, and I could tell you that I instantly wondered what I could do to stop myself from doing it again while quietly planning to make it a habit.  I wondered what it would be like to strike my daughter.

Yeah…that.

No doubt you recoil from these frank admissions, but I suspect you recoil because you recognize them and have buried your own similar stories too deeply to acknowledge me as a mirror.  Not to say that you desire to strike your spouse, or even that you have a spouse.  But perhaps you like the tiny thrill of pocketing something that does not belong to you, or you enjoy taking a small bit of another person’s vitality in a one-night stand and then slipping out the door.  Perhaps you merely enjoy the small barbs and carefully destructive words that can cause a coworker to look like an imbecile and you his superior, or you enjoy sharing information that is not yours with someone else, or giving attention to a man who is not your husband because he makes you feel for one moment like someone cares.

No.  Just, no.  I don’t recoil from that frank admission because I see a bit of myself in a wife beater.  I don’t see a bit of myself in a character who planned to make beating his wife a habit and fantasized about hitting his daughter.

This is the problem of evangelical Christian theology that Mikalatos attempts to address but fails miserably to actually do anything about.  See, this entire thing is about pulling out the Romans Road.  You get someone to admit that they’ve sinned, then say that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god, the wages of sin are death, but Jesus offers the free gift of forgiveness of sin.[6]  In order for this to work, though, everyone must be a sinner.  To make that argument though, all sins must be equally capable of destroying the relationship between god and man.  So we end up with the absurd notion that making a coworker look bad is equally as evil as fantasizing about beating your daughter.[7]

Futhermore, we also learn that the mother who is simply trying to protect herself and her daughter from a man who intentionally made beating his wife a habit and fantasized about beating his daughter is actually the real bad guy because she’s not helping her violent, abusive get closer to a true relationship with Jesus.  I mean, sure, she told her husband to kill himself and belittled his manhood.  But, y’know, intentional, premeditated spousal abuse and fantasized child abuse.

Luther is a bad person.  Luther is an extremely bad person.  And Matt Mikalatos-as-narrator is an enabler.  Furthermore, Matt Mikalatos-as-author is an apologist for wife beaters and child abusers, so long as they manage to learn about Jesus in the process, though.

Oh, and remember that psychologist I said deserves a special place in Hell?

When we first meet Luther-as-werewolf-in-suit he is waiting for his wife to show up for their ill-fated conversation.  Mikalatos-as-narrator is confused.  So Luther helpfully explains, “Your psychologist helped me understand that I am, in fact, a werewolf, and that is not something that can be changed.  It can only be lived with, and through behavioral training she has helped me to embrace that fact, allowing me to remain a werewolf but not behave as a werewolf.”

That’s right.  The psychologist’s advice boiled down to, “Embrace your inner habitual wife beater.”  Because that’s totally what psychologists do when they’re not child hating morons who work in grade schools.

The problem here is that sometimes psychologists do, in fact, help people to embrace the inner-thing-creating-self-loathing.  Usually, though, that happens with people who have been abused in some way or are dealing with self-confidence or self-image problems.  Then, of course, there’s the other obvious parallel: self-loathing homosexuals.  Affirming those thoughts and integrating them in to the whole self is a good thing.

Affirming thoughts of wanting to beat your spouse and daughter and integrating them in to the whole self is not a good thing.  I can’t imagine any mental health professional doing anything even remotely like that.  I can’t imagine the any of the major professional associations of mental health professionals allowing their members to do that and not receive censure.

Matt Mikalatos seems to think this is just what psychologists do, however.  And he defames psychologists in the process of advancing his own view, which is the far more laughable, “Accept Jesus in the correct way and that stuff will pretty much go away.”  Because, really, we all know that the only reason Christians aren’t perfect is because most Christians aren’t the right kind of Christians.  They’re going to the wrong churches and stuff.

I hate this book.

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[1]Which isn’t to say that this sort of turning point is necessarily all bad, nor is it to say that a book can’t be well-written and not have them.  Consider for a moment Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or Neverwhere.  Both books absolutely hinge on a character suddenly finding the world is not what he thought it was.  The secondary turning point, then, is necessary, as the world goes from normal to not-normal.  But, of course, that secondary turning point is also a plot point.  So it’s, y’know, intentional.

[2]Lutherans, after all, can be a little too liberal or high-church for evangelicals.  And the Pope is regarded as the anti-Christ half the time.  And the rest of the time evangelicals, by and large, think that Catholics worship Saints as alternatives to god.  Baby steps, people, baby steps.

[3]And it is, literally, everything.  Which, again, is a shot at those who create divisions between Christians.  The zombie church is the only correct church as far as everyone in said church is concerned and they’ll attempt to convert non-Christians and not-the-same-as-them-Christians equally.

The irony in this, though, is that the book basically attempts to say, “This isn’t the right kind of Christianity.  This other kind of Christianity is actually the right kind of Christianity.”  Out of the frying pan, in to the fire, as they say.

[4]This, by the by, pissed me off to no end.  Because he was not “Matt Mikalatos, narrator of his own wacky tale.”  He was, “Matt Mikalatos, author of a book all of the other characters have read and everyone seems to find it necessary to reference.”  This particular conceit is extremely arrogant and really got in the way of all of the other arrogantly annoying shit that happened in the book.

I’d contrast that particular turn of events with Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil.  That book starts with an author who has a successful novel that sounds a lot like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, then gives up writing because his epic follow-up ends up being terrible, but then finds his next tale.  Over the course of the rest of the book, then, you have the question in the back of your mind, “Is this supposed to be an autobiographical-type thing?”  In that case it totally works due to an intentional ambiguity and a general lack of, “Everyone recognized me as Yann Martel, famous and excellently wonderful author.”  In fact, one of the major plot points turns out the narrator not being recognized at all.

[5]This one is especially problematic.  Of the three monster types, the werewolf appears to be the only one that someone just is.  The vampires and zombies are converted.  When we get Luther’s story it includes his father walking in to his bedroom and catching him in the act of, y’know, being a werewolf.  He also talks of his brother standing up in church, declaring himself an atheist, and walking out of church, an act he refers to as a “flamboyant, dramatic streak.”  These two things made me think that the author was attempting to make a point about the church’s treatment of homosexuality.  At the point I drew the comparison I was still offering charity and I hoped it was actually a subversive attempt to make a point to an otherwise unreceptive audience.  Sadly, that was not to be.

[6]I’ve mentioned the Romans Road on this blog before, I think.  It’s prooftexting at its finest.  You start at Romans 3:23, then jump to Romans 6:23, then go back to Romans 5:8, then Romans 10:13 and 10:19.  Put these together and it says (paraphrased), “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of god (3:23), the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of Christ is life (6:23), and god loves us so much he gave that gift to us even though we didn’t ask (5:8), so all you have to do is call upon Jesus and confess he is lord to get salvation (10:13 and 19).”  Of course, if you read those verses in order and with all the other stuff in between they don’t quite offer such an easy and clear-cut story.

[7]You might say this is an unfair assessment, as I’ve already said that Luther is supposed to be the worldly character in rebellion against god.  I’m going to put my 25 years as an attendee of various evangelical churches up as an offer of my credibility and say that, no, we were all pretty much running around believing that one lie was exactly as bad as murdering because all sin is ultimately against god.  The whole system only works if someone who only screws up a little is exactly as worthy of eternal damnation as, say, Hitler.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 1

[Warning: There will be spoilers.  In fact, I’ll be spoilering the shit out of this book.  There’s no way to say what I intend to say without doing so.  I’m sure that the reasons behind it will soon be made abundantly clear.]

I’m reasonably certain that Scalzi’s “Big Idea” series has cost me $600 since I bought my Nook.  Of course, part of that is because on some level I blame Scalzi for the fact that I own a Nook in the first place.  Well, okay, that’s not fair.  I, after all, opted to get the more expensive Nookcolor and the fancy-schmancy faux leather case.  And I’ve overestimated the number of books I’ve purchased because of it.  The actual number is nine.  So he’s cost me, like, a hundred bucks.  Still, y’know, consideration could be paid.  Or something.

Anyway, I love Scalzi’s Big Idea series because it appeals to me as a writer and storyteller.  I’m often far less interested in the story than the story behind the story.  And sometimes I can become interested in an otherwise uninteresting narrative precisely because of the story behind the story.

That was the hook that took me to Night of the Living Dead Christian by Matt Mikalatos.  He sold it as a comedy novel about the monsters we see every day with theological discussion thrown in.  I’ve seen comedy, monsters, and theology put together before, specifically in Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.

Were I to meet Matt Mikalatos I could say to him, “I’ve read Christopher Moore and you, sir, are no Christopher Moore.”  But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.  Because I knew what I was getting in to with this one.

See, my general strategy with Big Ideas is a three-step process.  I decide if I want to check the book out.  I then download and read the available Nook sample.  Then if I like it I buy it.  At the moment the Big Idea is 9-5-2 on my Nook, with the 2 being one book I haven’t decided if I want to buy but probably will and one that I just downloaded the sample for today and haven’t actually checked out yet.  And there were a couple other Big Ideas that lead me to buying books in the before time, the long, long ago.  One of those was Cat Valente’s The Habitation of the Blessed, which also handled issues of religion and theology and technically had monsters.  I just thought I’d toss that out there.[1]

One of the problems that comes up in a piece like this is the, “Well why don’t you offer something constructive, instead?” question.  It’s generally the last resort of the butthurt so I ignore such things in counter-criticism.  But one of the big issues here is that Mikalatos book fails miserably, but for a single, entirely predictable reason.  That reason boils down to two words:

Tyndale House.

If you’re reading this blog and you didn’t come here through a Google search for “coldplay sucks”[2] there’s a pretty good chance that you’re well acquainted with Tyndale’s big fiction series.  For that would be Left Behind, which Slacktivist will be deconstructing until the end of time.  I nearly decided not to buy the book when I saw those two little words in the sample.  I had no urge to give Tyndale House my hard-earned money, as they do not deserve it.

But then I realized something.  This is a book that uses monsters as allegory published by the same publishing house that is so allergic to allegory (allegorgic?) that they have published, like, 60 goddamn books turning a pretty explicit allegory in to a supposedly factual history of the future.  I was curious, then, how they’d handle using real monsters.  And if the real monsters would approach the level of inexcusable nastiness of Rayford Steele and Buck Williams.

Now, I suppose my perspective on this whole thing is wrong.  If I’d been reading Left Behind I’d probably have loved to have the option to read Night of the Living Dead Christian.  Because if you’re the sort of person who primarily purchases books from Christian book stores, you’re pretty much limited to theology, “Christian Living” books (which are basically self-help books about Jesus), and the plodding, unimaginative fiction of Frank Peretti or Tim LaHaye.[3]

I, however, had just finished reading Merrie Haskell’s delightful The Princess Curse.  I’m now reading Lee Arthur Chane’s Magebane.  Both of these books are infinitely better.  They’re very different books that are infinitely better for different reasons, but those different reasons and why they’re better than Night of the Living Dead Christian can be summed up with three words: not Tyndale House.

In this I can say that I can feel bad for the author.  It is almost impossible to write for an explicitly Evangelical audience and write for entertainment purposes.  Still, the subtitle quickly made me angry.  “One Man’s Ferociously Funny Quest to Discover What it Means to Be Truly Transformed.”

The book isn’t “ferociously funny.”  The book isn’t even particularly funny.  It spends a page[4] on a tangent in to a discussion of which Bible translation is most accurate.  This is the sort of thing that could be played off as funny and I get the impression that the author was genuinely trying, but the explanation of why they were having the argument came out in an overly earnest expository paragraph.

Sadly, it couldn’t be any other way.  The intended audience to which Tyndale House panders is afraid of…well, they’re afraid of many things.  I suppose I could shorthand it as, “The Unknown.”  Allegory is a gateway to The Unknown.

Let me take this back, for instance, to Merrie Haskell’s The Princess Curse.  That particular story, which I will endeavor mightily to not spoil,[5] is also a tale of transformation.  There are multiple points in that story, however, where an apparent victim becomes a villain or a villain a victim.  The apparent universal order is flipped on its head and black becomes white.  Or, at least, an interesting shade of gray.

The flipping over of the universal order is fundamentally something that cannot be done with Tyndale House’s intended audience.  Turning the villain in to victim, after all, might well engender sympathy for the Devil.  And we cannot have that, can we?

I mean, sure, Milton might disagree.  But he probably wasn’t a real, true Christian.

Allegory, then, must be avoided at all costs.  And if allegory is necessary, then it must be accompanied by explanations of the allegory.  This, too, takes away from any of the fun of the book.  I’m pretty sure that the old saw about having to explain the joke wasn’t meant to be a suggestion for how to be a successful comedian.  Now that I think about it, it’s more of a warning about how explanation robs the joke of its, um, jokeness.  Yeah.  That sounds about right.

The book, then, is long on “tell” and short on “show.”  This seems to be the disease of the Christian publishing industry.  The reader is not allowed to just get the joke and roll.

Shortly after the first time we’re introduced to zombies in the book we see them handing out flyers to a church.  It’s pretty obvious that they’re supposed to be a certain type of Christian.  Just in case we didn’t get it, though, we’re eventually told that, yes, those zombies are a certain type of Christian.  Then, if I recall, we’re told that several more times.  I kind of wish I’d have counted, now.  But that quickly became a lesser complaint for me.

While the whole non-allegorical-allegory problem is glaring, it’s not really a big deal.  Lots of people fuck that one up.  And it’s a feature, not a glitch in Christian publishing, so I can’t really hold it against Mikalatos if he wants to write Christian fiction.  In fact, many of the things he said in the book really need to be heard by the intended audience.  Which is why I wish I could actually endorse the book, with the caveat that people who are willing and able to read Christopher Moore or Cat Valente won’t enjoy the book and probably shouldn’t read it because, y’know, why bother?

No, the bigger problem is that once you get past the central conceit of “monsters as allegory for spiritual transformation,” the book is actually a mean little book.  It’s downright vicious, really.  It forces us to, ask that question that always comes up with Left Behind: “Who are the real monsters in this story?”

That’s why this post is only Part 1.

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[1]Especially since I just discovered the sequel, The Folded World, is due out next month.  And I was reminded that I’ve been intending to check out The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, due to a different Big Idea.  And I just took a break from this post to basically turn the left home page of my Nook into the Valente page.  I’m [this] close to buying The Habitation of the Blessed on the Nook, too, making in the second book I have purchased in both formats, the first being Craig Ferguson’s inimitable Between the Bridge and the River.

[2]That’s, like, half my traffic.  And I’ve learned that one of the things that has traveled all over the world is the simple fact that Coldplay does, indeed, suck.  Although I suppose that’s easier to explain than the top search term that got people to my old digs, which was some combination of the words “28,” “year,” and “virgin.”

[3]I say this as someone who once worked in a Christian book store at the height of the Left Behind craze.  I think I purchased one fiction book from the store in that time.  It was a historical fiction book that was controversial because it used the word “hell” as an expletive and not a place name.  Once.

[4]A page-ish.  It’s really hard to figure out page breaks with electronic books.

[5]Because you should go read it.  Now.  Or, y’know, soon-ish.

So, About that Thing I Said...

You may remember this post, in which I said a book called Night of the Living Dead Christian "looks amazing."  Yeah, um, don't go out and buy it just yet.  I'll be running a review, hopefully this week.  I've never seen a book derail so fast.  But I suppose I should have guessed it would happen, since there were two words that screamed, "This won't end well:" Tyndale House.