Clint Eastwood defined the essence of the role in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. A lone rider with no ties and no dependents and little interest in the human condition, the "Man with No Name" is an unapologetic misanthrope who, despite himself, ends up doing right by his fellow man.

A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were based on characters created by Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune for the equally iconic chanbara films Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

Manga and anime embraced the trope, often adding a sidekick (a gregarious Watson to his taciturn Sherlock) and spirited girl with a cause or quest of her own. The relationship between the "wandering swordsman" Himura Kenshin and Kaoru Kamiya in Rurouni Kenshin is a case in point.

Such pairings became a staple of the romantic dramedy, perhaps no better exemplified than in Clannad. When we first meet him, Tomoya (Yuichi Nakamura) is a senior in high school. Cynical and aloof (not without his reasons), he proudly wears the label of "class delinquent."

The first day of school (one of those halcyon days in early April), he runs into Nagisa and his whole life changes. Not because he falls for her (that takes two dozen episodes) but because she presents him with a problem to solve. Solving the problem is what brings them together.

Hyouka follows a similar formula with equally outstanding results. That includes again casting Yuichi Nakamura in the lead and again pairing him with Daisuke Sakaguchi, who played his sidekick in Clannad.

Unlike Tomoya, Hotaro Oreki has no "troubled past." His goal is to get through high school with the least possible social involvement, expending as little energy as possible. That goal is frustrated when his older sister insists that he join the soon-to-be defunct "Classic Literature Club."

He shows up for the first club meeting to find one other person there, Eru (Elle) Chitanda, scion of one of the wealthiest families in town. The story, though, avoids the "poor little rich girl" meme and instead begins with series of one-off Encylopedia Brown type mysteries.

As it turns out, Hotaro is really good at solving puzzles. This realization prompts Eru to present him with an unresolved family scandal. Along with Satoshi (his childhood friend) and Mayaka (the student librarian), they tackle the curious fate of Eru's uncle.

Her uncle helmed the Classic Literature Club forty years before, until he was expelled from school under questionable circumstances. Hotaro ends up expending a whole lot of energy figuring out why.

Hyouka is the title of the literary anthology the club publishes every year. It becomes the most revealing clue of all. "A dumb joke," Hotaro mutters when he figures it out, and exactly the kind of dumb joke a wronged teenager with a literary bent would come up with.

The author of the series, Honobu Yonezawa, includes an additional twist in the opening and closing credits with his punning alternate titles to the stories, such as "The Niece of Time." I got that one. I had to google "Why Didn't They Ask Eba [Evans]?" to get the Agatha Christie reference.

The ED for the second cour is a delightful tribute to the "cozy" genre that could constitute an episode all on its own.


The ED for the first cour, on the other hand, is simply surreal.


Some episodes are straightforward head-scratchers, even so basic a matter as why a teacher messed up his lesson plan (which begins with a debate of why some people have shorter tempers than others, which leads to discussion of the seven deadly sins, which leads to Eru's version of "greed is good").

And then the film club sets out to make a murder mystery video for their class project. In the middle of the shoot, the girl writing the script quits. So the film club turns to Classic Literature Club to figure out how she intended to finish it, which means solving the mystery she started.

No sooner has he done that but Hotaro finds himself wrestling with issues of artistic integrity and authorial intent. These themes also arise in a surprisingly complex arc in the second cour that begins with a harmless prank and concludes with a meditation about creativity and talent.

These slice-of-life whodunits often involve no crime at all. The real mystery is human nature and why Eru can so easily knock the otherwise cool Hotaro for a loop. Sensing that "the game is afoot," she is bound to exclaim, "Ki ni narimasu!" (I'm curious!) and will not relent. Alas, he cannot resist.


Here Kaname Naito explains the grammar of the expression.


Hyouka gives us Kyoto Animation at its finest, and more stellar work from the talented and productive Yasuhiro Takemoto. His previous directorial projects include Amagi Brilliant Park, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, and The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Honobu Yonezawa wrote five novels and half a dozen short stores in the "Classic Literature Club" series, which have been adapted to 11 manga volumes, 22 anime episodes (plus an OVA), and a 2017 live-action film.

Hyouka is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, book reviews, japan, kyoani, mystery

I'd never gotten around to the last two novels in the Anne of Green Gables series. My brother Joe recently did. He didn't think much of Rilla of Ingleside or Kevin Sullivan's adaption (Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story).

I'd seen the latter too, which was in no way encouraging. Sullivan's Anne of Avonlea (also known as Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel) is a good example of how to deviate from the source material while keeping true to its substance and spirit.

The Continuing Story is a good example of getting it all wrong. Sullivan manages to turn Anne, as Kate puts it, into a "bucolic female James Bond." Yes, it's supposed to be about Rilla, but the lead had to be Megan Follows. Like I said, it's a mess.

Rather, Joe points to Rainbow Valley as the standout in the post-Green Gables books. So I clicked over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded it. And he was right. Rainbow Valley is a real gem.


As Joe points out, Rainbow Valley is less about the staid Blythe kids than the wacky Merediths. They're the offspring of the eccentric and widowed minister. Following the death of his wife, the children mostly raise themselves (not a social worker in sight).

Things only get dicier when Mary Vance shows up, the orphan girl they take in like a lost dog.

Mary Vance is the alternate universe version of Anne. While Anne coped by filling up on literature, focusing her mental energy inwards and fueling her imagination, Mary Vance turns hers outwards, with the goal of controlling the chaotic world around her.

Not surprising, given an upbringing that makes Anne's pre-Green Gables life look comfortable by comparison. Nowadays, Mary Vance would be cast as the pitiful victim on a Law & Order episode, a serial killer's childhood flashback on Criminal Minds.

"My grandfather was a rich man. I'll bet he was richer than your grandfather. But pa drunk it all up and ma, she did her part. They used to beat me, too. Laws, I've been licked so much I kind of like it."

Or pumped full of Ritalin and handed over to Child Protective Services. But a century ago, a tough childhood gave a kid "character." Indeed, Mary Vance isn't looking for excuses. To be a "victim" is to not be in control, and that's that last thing she wants.

Mary tossed her head. She divined that the manse children were pitying her for her many stripes and she did not want pity. She wanted to be envied.

With her considerable wit focused so long on day-to-day survival, the attendant niceties long ago went by the wayside. And so unconstrained by a still nascent superego, her id leaks out all over the place. She definitely gets all the good lines.

"Mr. Wiley used to mention hell when he was alive. He was always telling folks to go there. I thought it was some place over in New Brunswick where he come from."

"I haven't got anything against God, Una. I'm willing to give Him a chance. But, honest, I think He's an awful lot like your father, absent-minded and never taking any notice of a body most of the time, but sometimes waking up all of a sudden and being awful good and kind and sensible."

"Give me Daniel [in the Lions' Den]. I'd rusher have it 'cause I'm partial to lions. Only I wish they'd et Daniel up. It would have been more exciting."

"If one has to pray to anybody it'd be better to pray to the devil than to God. God's good, anyhow so you say, so He won't do you any harm, but from all I can make out the devil needs to be pacified."

As Miss Cornelia puts it, "If you dug for a thousand years you couldn't get to the bottom of that child's mind."

But Mary Vance hardly has the story all to herself. In the second half of the book, the misadventures of the untethered Meredith kids take over the story, along with the emergence of a possible romantic companion for their father (a sweet note to end on).

Reading Rainbow Valley is like listening to a gossipy small-town newspaper read aloud, the chronicler now and then stepping back from the narrative to offer an aside or two about her subjects. But always with the best intentions--and honest empathy--in mind.

Although I shy away from the omniscient point of view, Montgomery's relaxed command of the narrative is such that the "head hopping" never bothers me, and even imbues the story with a touch of magical realism that places it apart from the real world.

Though with the Great War just over the horizon, the book briefly breaks the reverie at the very end with a haunting bit of foreshadowing.

This was certainly a great part of Montgomery's appeal in Japan. Hanako Muraoka completed her translation of Anne of Green Gables during WWII. The Japanese edition was published in 1952. "Reality" was one thing they didn't need any more of.

Though as far as reality goes, Rainbow Valley hews closer to my own childhood (considerably less than a century ago) than the nanny state reigning today. Back then, the only parental constraint imposed on us as we flew out the door was: "Be home by dinnertime."

Labels: anne, book reviews, free-range kids, kate, social studies

So I was reading Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino. It's a mystery in the classic whodunit (or howdunit) style. I got to chapter nine and there was "Professor Yukawa." I stopped, looked again, and a light went on in my head.

"Oh," I said to myself, "this is Galileo!"

Galileo is a Japanese television series (Fuji TV) that's roughly a cross between Numbers and Bones, the only big difference being that the consulting detective is a physicist.

The series stars Masaharu Fukuyama as Professor Yukawa. Fukuyama made a name for himself as a pretty good pop singer.

He's a pretty good actor too. He played Sakamoto Ryoma in NHK's historical drama, Ryomaden (2010), and most recently starred in Hirokazu Koreeda's Like Father, Like Son (2013), which won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

The book doesn't introduce Professor Yukawa until chapter nine. In the second TV series (I didn't see the first until later), Kaoru Utsumi (Kou Shibasaki) is replaced by Misa Kishitani (Yuriko Yoshitaka), a character invented for the series.

A casting issue, no doubt, as the first and second series were made six years apart. Kaoru Utsumi only appears for about five minutes in the first episode, so I missed the connection. Professor Yukawa is far more prominent in the TV series.

(Incidentally, the first television series was broadcast in 2007 and Salvation of a Saint was published in 2008, which may explain why Detective Utsumi is listening to a Masaharu Fukuyama album on her iPod in chapter 24.)

As you can see, Fukuyama's Yukawa favors vests and tailored shirts while in the book he's often described wearing short sleeves or a T-shirt and maybe a leather jacket.


But once I made the connection, in a blink my brain automatically cross-linked all of the visual data from the television series to the book. It's a quite curious experience when that sort of thing happens in real time.

So now Masaharu Fukuyama is Professor Yukawa. He looks and talks that way, and his office is the television set. Even though they're not the same character, Yuriko Yoshitaka becomes Kaoru Utsumi because they essentially fill the same role.

Sort of the reverse thing happens if there are multiple data sources to choose from. When it comes to Sherlock Holmes, as soon as I'm done watching Robert Downey Jr. (whom I quite enjoy), Sherlock Holmes flips back to Jeremy Brett.

James Bond always reverts to Sean Connery.

Oh, and about that set. In Bones and Tokyo Broadcasting's Mr. Brain (the consulting detective is a neuroscientist), the sets are designed to look cool, not real. But Professor Yukawa's office looks like an honest-to-goodness applied physics lab.


As a bonus, now and then they do a real physics experiment or demonstration, such as racing a supercooled puck around a track.

Labels: book reviews, crunchyroll, japanese tv, personal favs, taiga drama, television reviews

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix is somewhat misnamed, as 600 of 700 pages deal with the first half of Hirohito's life, from 1901–1950. 1950–1989 constitutes a long footnote. It's more Hirohito and the Making of WWII. Bix's analysis of WWII sets this hefty biography apart from previous efforts and the prevailing wisdom.

In short, Bix argues that the Showa Emperor, rather than being a passive pawn of the Tojo militarists, was deeply involved in every aspect of WWII. He was, to mix modern terms, an "activist" emperor who hung onto power as long as he could and deeply resented giving it up.

Perhaps Bix's most disturbing claim is that Hirohito himself was responsible—contrary to the propaganda fashioned both by MacArthur's GHQ and the Imperial staff and Hirohito himself—for delaying surrender until after Nagasaki, while he attempted to secure (largely through fruitless negotiations with the Soviet Union) the continuation of his reign in a post-war Japan.

Bix is not as compelling a writer as John Dower (Embracing Defeat). For one thing, Dower draws from a wider spectrum of secondary materials, such as mass-media publications, to flesh out his arguments. Bix's primary sources—diaries and interviews by members of the Imperial household, the parliament and the cabinet—bring us eyeball-to-eyeball with the day-to-day machinations that drove both the war and the peace, but it also results in dryer prose. It's all "inside politics."

And unlike with Germany, one finds not so much a banality of evil arising out of deliberate, malicious intent, but rather a banality of evil rising out of ego and incompetence and self-ingested propaganda and raw political power struggles. Japan's war-era cabinets tossed around prime ministers like juggling balls.

One apt criticism of Bix's approach is that his focus is so narrow that he never pulls back far enough to examine in any kind of depth the horrifying consequences of this Machiavellian, play-king gamesmanship.

But as does Dower, Bix concludes that the Tokyo trials ended up a farce to equal any Stalinist show trial. The real quest for the truth was corrupted by MacArthur's desire to use Hirohito for his own purposes, and, as Bix notes, Hirohito was only too happy to be used if it'd get him off the hook (and sell his subordinates down the river in the process).

To make matters worse, a dozen judges from Pacific Rim nations showed up at the trials, all with competing agendas.

The Nationalist Chinese, who had collected mountains of evidence of war crimes, checked their severest indictments in hopes of securing Japan's backing against the Communists. The OSS spirited away all the hard evidence of Japan's battlefield use of biological and chemical weapons. An iconoclastic judge from India was hardly upset that the British had spent four years getting their butts kicked by Asians.

Of course, MacArthur made sure that his battlefield enemies in the South Pacific were summarily tried and executed. Bix does credit MacArthur for being as aggravating to the Japanese as he was to the Joint Chiefs. The Japanese navy had anticipated a winner-take-all contest with Nimitz in the central Pacific, believing that the ultimate objective of naval warfare was "to win by hurling a large, powerful fleet into a single decisive battle."

After Pearl Harbor, every time the Japanese navy maneuvered itself into such an engagement, it lost, and badly. Equally unprepared to support a land war against MacArthur at the same time, it ended up throwing away a third of its resources in the process.

Perhaps Bix's most astute observations comes in the parallels he draws between MacArthur and Hirohito. They were diametrical opposites in terms of physical presence and personality, but both saw themselves at the center of all victory—the sole reason any great effort should and would succeed—while ascribing failure to dark forces and political conspiracies and placing the blame on their subordinates (and expecting them to do impossible things).

In the end, Hirohito's fascination with his own manufactured image as a divine emperor, combined with his incompetence (rarely questioned by his handlers), both led to the war and guaranteed that Japan would never win it. MacArthur's ego and presumptuousness (bolstered by a powerful cohort of ideological sympathizers in the State Department) meant that the emperor, and by extension the nation, would never take responsibility for it.

That is the Showa Emperor's true legacy, and one that unfortunately continues to this day.

Related posts

Kantai Kessen
The last shogun
The known unknowns

Labels: book reviews, embracing defeat, history, japan, showa period, ww2

Dean Smith points out the most pertinent fact in the ebook pricing debate, and the ongoing woes of "traditional" publishing.

Paperback book prices went from 25 to 35 cents in the early 1960s to the $8.99 range today. If publishing had just adjusted prices for inflation, a paperback book priced at 35 cents in 1960 would sell for $2.60 today.

In that light, Amazon's $2.99 ebook "sweet spot" (the price at which the 70 percent royalty kicks in) makes a lot of sense. Nate Anderson aptly describes the publishing business as having a "global pricing problem."

It's equally revealing (literally) to remember what publishers used to publish when their goal was to get and hold readers. If stories like these were on the curriculum, I bet schools wouldn't find it so hard getting boys to read.

Periodicals. Those science fiction magazines created the modern genre and shaped how we think about the modern age.


Paperbacks. Some surprisingly NSFW covers and a few still-famous authors.

Labels: book reviews, business, ebooks, publishing

Haibane Renmei by Yoshitoshi ABe, directed by Tomokazu Tokoro, 2002.

Set Apart by Daniel Cronquist, WinePress Publishing, 2009 (ISBN 978-1414112565).

In a small town in a mid-20th century Eastern European country is the "Old Home," an orphanage whose residents are known as Haibane, or "gray wings." The Haibane are born from cocoons with no memories of their previous lives. They sprout flightless wings on their backs and wear glowing halos over their heads.

The story begins with the "birth" of the newest member, Rakka, and follows her life at the orphanage as she tries to remember who she is and what she is doing there. Couched as a modern fable—never digressing to explain itself—Haibane Renmei is an deeply moving study of character and personal redemption.

In his short monograph (running 80 numbered pages), Set Apart, Daniel Cronquist describes Haibane Renmei as "the most Christian anime I have ever seen. [It] has more spiritual truth in it than most American media." His book is an episode by episode analysis of the series from a Christian perspective.

Cronquist is not forcing an unwarranted religious interpretation onto the art. According to its writer and creator Yoshitoshi ABe [sic], Haibane Renmei "is not a story about any specific religion; but it is, nonetheless, a religious story" inspired by his own salvific experiences.

Though Cronquist approaches the subject from an Protestant perspective, nothing in his analysis should raise hackles in a Mormon audience. In fact, the elements of Haibane Renmei that Cronquist admits "exists outside of canonical theology" would likely be considered even less objectionable by Mormons.

Mormons should also be comfortable applying concepts such as the "veil of forgetfulness" and "spirit prison" (though I suspect ABe was thinking more of Catholic purgatory), and the "probationary state" (Alma 12:24) to key plot points.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia defines it: 

Purgatory (Lat., "purgare", to make clean, to purify): in accordance with Catholic teaching is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God's grace, are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions.

Cronquist expands on the unique metaphor ABe has devised to answer (we assume, though the symbolism is well-nigh perfect) the challenge in John 3:4, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" The Haibane are "reborn" fully formed from their cocoons.

They are all children or young adults (lending support to a Catholic gloss). They live for an indeterminate amount of time and then vanish as mysteriously as they arrived.

The Haibane work alongside humans, living in the world but not of it. They amass no material goods for they can take nothing with them. Instead, "theirs is a world of spiritual growth—a second chance to move beyond what brought them there." Or as it says in Alma, "a space granted unto man in which he might repent."

Once the Haibane have come to terms with the sins that are keeping them grounded, they are are essentially "twinkled" in a "day of flight."

Cronquist's exegesis is clear, concise and insightful. Set Apart is organized as a lesson plan with discussion questions at the end of each chapter. It could easily serve as the textbook for a BYU religion course. Frankly, it'd be a lot more substantive than most of the required religion courses I took at BYU.

When it comes to Christian allegory that succeeds as art and metaphor, with Haibane Renmei Yoshitoshi ABe capably rises to the standard set by C.S. Lewis.

Labels: anime, book reviews, BYU, funimation, haibane, lds, personal favs, religion

Having previous put Harry Potter under the literary microscope, John Granger has set out to discover academic substance in Twilight. And while I get the feeling he is uncovering subtlety where none was intended, and giving Meyer the benefit of doubts never demanded, and getting Mormon popular culture plain wrong, I heartily applaud the effort.

On that last point, non-Mormon critics who take on low-brow Mormon fiction really need to think much lower brow when it comes to the theology as well, especially when the subject of "predestined" marriage comes up. Quite coincidentally, while working on the sequel to The Path of Dreams, I recently wrote the following exchange:

     Elly said, "Can I ask you a dumb question?"
     "How dumb?"
     "Do you think people are made for each other?"
     "Like in Saturday's Warrior, you mean?"
     She grimaced at the comparison. "I suppose, minus the tacky and saccharine stuff."

That's the first reference any born and bred Mormon will seize upon. Incidentally, the most direct--and entertaining--access to popular Mormon culture can be had via Robert Kirby and Calvin Grondahl. Card's Saintspeak is worth a mention too.

But such obvious misses aside, popular fiction deserves defending, and Granger rises admirably to the task. Taking on a Washington Post story about educated women embarrassed to admit they like Twilight, he observes how stunned such readers are when,

having suspended disbelief and entered a "cheesy vampire romance" novel that by their arbitrary checklist of literary do's and don'ts is "trash," they have the mythic, borderline religious experience the best stories deliver. What is so stunning--and embarrassing?--is less the "out of nowhere" surprise of this experience (think Susan Boyle) than that their usual fare of reading, the right sort of books, is nowhere near as engaging, even transformative as Mrs. Meyer's "junk."

I think this gets to the heart of the "otaku" experience, devotees who muster far more passion for a particular "art form" than the urbane consumers of less "plebeian" fare. The problem, explains Granger, is that "the very well educated have a basic misunderstanding of what good writing is and isn't" [italics added].

Great story telling isn't elevated language or literary style. It isn't conformity to category standards or to genre formulae. And it isn't about "speaking truth to power" postmodern nihilism. Certainly great stories can have those qualities (except perhaps the last) and most do. But what a great story has to do, as C.S. Lewis noted in conversation with George Sayer, is make you answer "yes" to the questions: "Does it make you better, wiser, and happier? And do you like it?"

Stanley Fish makes a similar point in his review of Sarah Palin's autobiography (and the same thing could be said of Meyer):

Do I believe any of this? [Is this "great literature"?] It doesn't matter. What matters is that she does, and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic.

Granger also dings Stephen King (deservedly) for criticizing Meyer in "pot meets kettle" fashion, pointing out that it's usually King at the receiving end of such comments. And after dumping (deservedly) on Harold Bloom, he comes up with a great term to describe literary critics who can't see the forest for the trees: "Genre revulsion."

And he digs up a great King quote to boot:

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

That's the standard I'm literally living by these days.

Just as the transformational effects of a religion on a culture and society make the religion worthy of study regardless of whether one believes its transcendental claims, at the bare minimum, the effects of popular entertainment make it worthy of serious study, apart from the question of whether it's "good" or not.

Labels: book reviews, lds, pop culture, religion, twilight

Dracula belongs to the corpus of "classic" literature that people don't bother with because they're so familiar with the larger body of derivative work it inspired that they think reading it would be redundant and boring. In some cases, the derivative work has indeed obviated any pressing need to labor through the original work—Michael Mann's remake of The Last of the Mohicans, for example.

In the case of Dracula, though, adaptations early on introduced an invidious element of dramatic corruption into the core structure of the story. The mutation has by now contaminated the entire lineage, so that the ubiquitous meme of Bela Lugosi in a dinner jacket has become about as terrifying as a Sesame Street Muppet. Attempts to repair the damage—like putting Gary Oldman in a dinner jacket—only perpetuate the original mistake.

That mistake was to give the Count top billing. It's an understandable one. Playing evil (plus lonely and misunderstood) is much more fun—and tasty, given the scenery to chew on—than playing the virtuous good guy. Milton, as they say, gave the devil all the good lines in Paradise Lost. But Milton did it on purpose; it wasn't a hack screenwriter's attempt to mollify the casting director because The Big Movie Star didn't want to end up with a bit part.

Because, the way Stoker wrote it, Dracula is a cameo, not the lead, and never the controlling point-of-view. Though his mere existence threatens and so must be mercilessly extinguished—no sympathy for the devil here—he nevertheless spends most of his time off-stage while more important things are going on.

To understand how it is supposed to work, we need only turn to the one writer/director who got it right: Joss Whedon. Consider the story's basic formulation: an eccentric professor of the dark arts plus a couple of associated geeks and some useful imported muscle gather around a tough woman, her dorky boyfriend and ditzy girlfriend, and end up pulling off some major vampire slayage.

The devils don't get the best lines. Mostly they get summarily dusted.

You can get carried away with this kind of thing, but the parallels are easy to draw: Mina/Buffy; Professor Van Helsing/Giles; Jonathan Harker/Xander; Dr. Jack Seward/Willow; Lucy/Cordelia. Quincey Morris is a Texan in London; Spike is a Londoner in California (though Quincy Morris is perhaps closer to Charles Gunn in Angel, and Lucy's fate is more similar to that of Lilah Morgan at the end of the 2002-2003 season).

That's right, Stoker created the first Scooby Gang, and Joss Whedon's 21st century version proves a surprisingly faithful homage. Buffy, to be sure, has more Quincey Morris in her than does Mena, although Mena certainly has more Buffy in her than does her squeeze Jonathan. Mena brings to mind C.S. Lewis's quip, "They don't make great aunts like they used to."

Another unfair assumption about Dracula is that anything written a century ago must surely be slow going. In the category of dense Victorian literature, Dracula can be honestly described as a page turner. As an author Stoker deserves comparison to Michael Crichton. Much of the fun arises out of his eagerness to incorporate the very latest in late 19th century high-tech with the graveyards and Transylvanian castles.

Telegrams fly back and forth like email. Quincey Morris packs the latest Winchester repeaters from America (and a Bowie knife, natch). Dr. Seward records dictation using just-invented phonograph technology, and performs so many blood transfusions that in The Dracula Files, Fred Saberhagen has his 20th century Dracula complain Lucy died because blood typing wasn't discovered until 1900, three years after the publication of the novel.

So much gets read into Bram Stoker's Dracula and its offspring in the name of tedious literary (and psychological) analysis that generation after generation pushes it aside without discovering what a thumping good read it is. It's time to rescue the novel from the musty mausoleum of "literature" and call it something far worse in the eyes of academia: entertaining.

Labels: book reviews

If the word "classics" intimidates you, consider the Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid. I never could abide the Dryden long enough to get past the first page: all that incessant rhyming! (I don't understand this compunction to rhyme translated verse—haiku, for example—since it means imposing a form on a form already distorted by the translation process.)

Granted, even with that hurdle mostly surmounted, there are still obstacles: lots of names I have no idea how to pronounce, bounteous references to historical incidents and heroic characters I know too little about, portentous foreshadowings such as Hannibal crossing the Alps and Caesar crossing the Rubicon that I missed completely until I read Fitzgerald's commentary at the end.

Nevertheless, a good story is a good story, and this is a ripping good yarn. A strong authorial voice (it helps to read it aloud in your head as you go along) and a galloping pace guaranteed to fill the cheap seats, while sneaking in enough high-brow commentary to keep the intellectuals tuned in. It convinces me that, indeed, Sam Raimi is the definitive modern interpreter of the Greco-Roman tradition.

Of course, Shakespeare accomplished the same. And like Shakespeare, Virgil is a master of the concrete metaphor and the action verb, as well as being an astute observer of human behavior. His analysis of how small dust-ups can lead (or be manipulated) into all-out war resonates well with contemporary geopolitics.

And there's something for everybody. Today it'd be called Aeneas, the miniseries. Every element of the modern dramatic style is touched upon at some point: man against man, man against nature, man against god, man against himself; you've got romance, adventure, political intrigue. A whole chapter for sport enthusiasts. And lots of combat scenes.

With lots of explicit detail, who stabbed who where, and where the blood and guts went. This isn't depersonalized violence. Before some poor piker gets his head whacked off, Virgil takes a few moments to tell us who he is, where he came from, what he had for breakfast, and how he loved his mom. It's rather disturbing, frankly.

All of this plays out under the gaze of the Roman pantheon, which is half the fun. Jupiter tries very hard to be a good deist—not getting involved unless to answer pleas based on individual merit—except that Juno and Venus are running around getting the rest of the gods involved in their knock-down, drag-out proxy war.

Juno, for reasons I am not well-informed about enough to explain, hates the Trojans with a white-hot passion. Aeneas, leader of the Trojans, is Venus's son by a mortal father (these gods are unapologetically polyandrous). Having grown up with the Botticellian image fixed in my mind, Virgil's Venus was a pleasant surprise. None of this demure, floating in on the half-shell stuff. She's tough, feisty, cunning, loyal (to Aeneas, that is; when she snuggles up to husband Vulcan to get him to crank out some quality armaments for the Trojans, he grouses, "You know, I'd do it even if you didn't sleep with me").

There are a number of strong female characters. Camilla, for example, kicks Trojan butt all over the place, and Juturna, Turnus's nymph half-sister, does Juno's dirty work, mostly in order to keep her brother (the villain in the piece) from getting killed by Aeneas. Though in the ends-justify-being-plain-mean department, Juno is way ahead of all of them. Husband Jupiter finally pulls her aside and says, "Enough already!" In an ironic twist, Juno wins for losing: as part of the deal, the Trojan identity is subsumed by the Etruscan Italians.

Fitzgerald comments on the curiosity of the Romans (way, way after the fact) identifying with the Trojans in their founding myths, along with a fair amount of trashing of the Greek demigods (i.e., all the enemies of the Trojans) in the tale. It was a way of one-upping Greek civilization while stealing from it.

What impresses me the most is the extent to which The Aeneid fits into the modern, western, narrative tradition, both in style and subject matter. And, additionally, how un-odd the religious context is. Many scenes of sacrificing animals and beseeching gods could easily be confused with Old Testament accounts.

Consider as well the concept of the hero being the child of a god and mortal parent. The transition from patron god to patron saint is a simple one. I think Virgil would be at home with the theological dynamics of Touched by an Angel. For example, like Juno and Venus, Camilla's patron god, Diana, is limited in the extent to which she can interfere with Fate and keep Camilla from harm once she decides to join forces with Turnus. Human free will seems to rule the liberty of the gods rather than the other way around.

It makes me believe that Rome never fell. In the same way that China absorbed invader after invader, instead of conquering Rome, the barbarians from Northern Europe became Roman, and so brought to Britain and then to America that self-dramatizing, essentially Ptolemaic view of ourselves. The universe revolves around us—we are the cause of everything good or bad that happens—and in the end, if we pray to the proper gods, they will be on our side.

(John Hamer analogizes The Aeneid with The Book of Mormon. I consider the comparison apt.)

Labels: book reviews, deep thoughts, lds, religion

In Japan, The "His Dark Materials" trilogy is titled「ライラの冒険」or "The Adventures of Lyra." Not quite as poetic, but to the point. (And I doubt many English-language readers get the Milton reference.)

The British title for book one is Northern Lights, which I believe was changed to avoid confusion with Northern Exposure. The Japanese title for book one is a literal translation of the American title, which does render very nicely in kanji. And the original title is included in English for good measure.

The British sit-com The Good Life (one of my favorites) was retitled Good Neighbors because of an American sit-com with a similar title. The American title might even be an improvement, considering the nod to Robert Frost and the episode about the fence. A triple entendre.

TokyoPop has followed the obvious-but-dull route with the "Twelve Kingdoms" novels, using only half of the original Japanese. Volume 1: Sea of Shadows. Volume 2: Sea of Wind (I detect a pattern here). TokyoPop's title for volume 2 is (half) literal. Stretching definitions a tad, I came up with: Zephyr Oceans, Labyrinthian Shores.

Granted, a good title is one that potential book buyers can actually remember. So too much poetry might be ill-advised on this account. (Just don't get me started on the English title for Ai no Kusabi . . . . )

More musings about title translations here and here.

Labels: book reviews, pullman

My sister has been posting some thoughts and critiques about the romance genre and references this review I wrote for Irreantum a few years ago. So here it is.

The Last Promise by Richard Paul Evans
(Dutton, 2002)
When Deseret Book CEO Sheri Dew announced the store's revised buying guidelines late last year [2002]—and specifically that Richard Paul Evan's latest novel, The Last Promise, hadn't made the cut—my immediate reaction was to snort in derision. A bunch of sanctimonious, neo-Victorian fussbudgets trying to micromanage our moral and aesthetic lives, under the guise of what Dew had the audacity to claim was a "business decision."

Then I read the book.

Deseret Book may indeed be run by a bunch of sanctimonious, neo-Victorian fussbudgets, whose recently-discovered principles in this case only gave a bad book much free publicity (I read the book, to start with). But they are right to insist that The Last Promise does not deserve the imprimatur of any institution even peripherally related to any church anywhere.

This isn't the primary reason, but the overwrought title is itself ultimately germane to nothing. The "last promise" (indeed, not made until the last 40 pages of the book) is quickly broken, which I suppose should be read to mean: this is the last promise people like this should make to anybody. It is, in fact, a category romance of sub-par quality. I hasten to add that I have nothing against category romances—an unjustly slighted genre, I believe—just bad writing in general, and especially pretentious, bad writing.

If nothing else, The Last Promise will quickly exhaust any fondness you might have for the epigram-as-chapter-heading style.

Delving into a subject Evans knew something about might have also clarified in his mind what was worth promising in the first place. Eliana, our heroine, is ostensibly "a devout Catholic," though by all indications what the author knows about Catholicism he picked up on the Vatican tour. He keeps his protagonist away from any actual worship, keeps her from breathing a word to any actual priest, because "the priest at the small church near the villa used copious amounts of incense in his worship," and the incense gives her son asthma. Alas, "She had tried other churches in the area and found them all to be the same" (p. 10).

Convenient, that.

The only discernable point to this bit of biographical background is to enable her to marry the scion of an Italian winery without turning the whole thing into a comedy. Straining credulity further, he has her growing up in Vernal, Utah. You would think that a Catholic growing up in Utah would have something to say about the plentitude of Mormons there, and the inevitable clash of small-town religious cultures. Nope. You would not know from reading the book that any Mormons live in Utah. Thus do the incongruities gush forth.

It would not have been an insurmountable problem had Evans played around more with the obvious subtext, analogizing the non-Mormon in Utah to the fish-out-of-water American in Italy. Instead, he shies from the intriguing dramatic possibilities and resorts to hackneyed story devices that are old by category romance standards.

To sum up: impossibly beautiful wife (Eliana) is trapped in a loveless marriage to philandering rogue of husband (Maurizio). One day a handsome American expatriate with a mysterious past (Ross) rents a flat in the family villa. But when you get right down to it, it's no different than those silly French farces about the wife who discovers her husband is cheating on her, and gets even by cheating on him back with the houseguests. Except that Evans' version is not even indecently humorous.

Okay, Evans can't actually have them sleeping together. No, wait, they do sleep together, the loophole being that they only "sleep." Evans has claimed that the snogging going on when they are awake is "not adultery." Yes, and Bill Clinton did not have "sex" with "that woman," and "didn't inhale," either. If it is facile to assert (as I do) that the explicit description of sexual behavior is, ipso facto, immoral, then it is equally facile to argue that a narrative somehow garners a patina of respectability solely because of its lack of explicit content.

At any rate, I wasn't aware that copulation alone defined adultery. Stranger still, given Evans' protestations, are his several references to the Vestal Virgins, remembered for the gristly fate that awaited them if they fell from "virginal grace." In a climactic scene (p. 221), Eliana interrupts Ross's museum tour group before an exhibit of The Vestals and asks in a loud voice if it was "worth it" to these women to break their vows, considering the penalties that awaited them.

To which Ross answers, "I guess only the Vestals could say. But apparently eighteen of them though so."

Now, exactly how are we supposed to read that?

Evans rationalizes this morally muddy relationship with he-hit-me-first logic. Short version: if your husband is a jerk, it's okay to get emotionally involved with another man. Fifteen billion times we are reminded of what a louse Maurizio is. The narrative from his point-of-view exists only to damn his character with cheap shots and borderline ethnic slurs.

Our first introduction to the Italian male (not Maurizio) consists of the following: "Just then a man, shirtless, maybe in his later fifties with a belly hanging over his swimsuit and a cigar clamped between his front teeth, stopped in front of her chair."

Feel swept off your feet yet? Eliana later helpfully explains that "the Italian men regard a lone woman the same way they would a bill on the sidewalk." And Evans (in authorial voice) confirms that "It was true" (p. 4). True or not, it's not the point. I'm reminded of the Dilbert strip in which one of Dilbert's colleagues confides to Dogbert, "I criticize my coworkers to make myself look smart." To which Dogbert replies, "Apparently it isn't working . . . . Oh, remind me to add nuts to my grocery list."

Evans thinks this is a workable strategy. So we are further reminded that none of the wives of Maurizio's friends "expected their husbands' help in domestic matters," either (p. 15). The marriage counselor Eliana drags her husband to sides with him and tells her that it's all her problem (p. 16). And the husband of Eliana's sister-in-law, Anna, "left her for a young Swiss woman she discovered he had been having an affair with for more than seven years" (p. 53).

Ross, in contrast, is described by every Italian woman he encounters as bello, and a hotel receptionist he's known for about five minutes offers to sleep with him (p. 200). "We'd have fun," she tells him (p. 202).

Oh, and Maurizio is the World's Worst Father Ever. It is simply not enough that he be immature, irresponsible, or a workaholic. We are supposed to believe that the man is utterly indifferent to his son's existence, that he "never inquires about his son's health" (p. 13), has "no idea how to take care of his own son's basic needs" (p. 15), and uses him as a pawn to keep his wife a kept woman.

We are supposed to believe as well that the son, in turn, should deny all the incalculables of human nature and transfer all his affection, at the drop of the proverbial hat, to a complete stranger. By page 116 we find Eliana telling Ross, "[Alessio] was so upset that he missed you the last time. I had to promise him that he could stay up until you came." And by the end of the novel, Maurizio is confessing to Eliana, "He's not really my son . . . . He doesn't call me father . . . . He hates me" (p. 261).

Of the six impossible things I'm willing to believe before breakfast, this isn't one of them. But, gee, doesn't it make divorce the easy next step to take.

Still, Evans must reduce the Maurizio to wife-beating status to make the case compelling enough. The literary ends do not justify the means. While Maurizio is undoubtedly a jerk, the thesis, "My husband is a jerk," is a thin and unrewarding source of conflict. This is not to say that infidelity or bad parenting should be lightly excused, but it's not like he's smuggling drugs or harboring terrorists. The man has tact, if nothing else. He doesn't bring it home, like, ahem, his stupid wife. And why, your grandmother would ask, should he change his behavior when he can have his cake and get the milk for free?

All Eliana has to say in her defense is that she married "too young." Too young—she was in college. So she went to the store one day to pick up a rich, handsome, Italian husband, and, darn, if she'd waited a day or two she could have gotten a better model, and on sale, to boot.

Were she a conservative John Paul II American Catholic, that would have made things interesting. But the obvious contention, "I can't divorce you because I'm Catholic," is never raised. Instead, she stays in the marriage, we are told, because she's afraid she would lose custody of her child, a child whose existence is exploited by Evans for all shoddy manner of story conveniences. (When in doubt, send the sick kid to the E.R.) It is a valid concern—the reasons sound fairly convincing once you accept the Maurizio-as-monster caricature—but such a concern should lead to the weighing of freedom and happiness, and the making of deals with your own personal devils.

Even as compromised a woman as Hillary Clinton reportedly whacked Bill with an ashtray on occasion, and then went out and made a life for herself. Sure, her not-yet-erstwhile husband being President of the United States sure helped. Call it metaphysical alimony. And Eliana is hardly a single mother struggling to survive on scant child support payments. In exchange for her husband's money, she lives a comfortable, almost royal (no kidding, Evans makes her by marriage a de jure countess), if dilatory existence.

She does nothing to change the state of her life, a curious contrast with Birdman-of-Alcatraz Ross. That's the sinkhole the book crumbles into and never crawls out of: she's BORING. No wonder her husband never comes home, to a beautiful but dull woman who mopes and sighs and makes dinners he won't eat, and dabbles at paintings no one will see, and spends an awful lot of time doing laundry for three people (a glaring lapse: a man of Maurizio's stature and resources, if for no other reason than sheer vanity, would hire help for these menial tasks).

Early on in one of Evans' many head-hopping digressions, we are treated to Maurizio's thoughts on the subject. In a passage that feels like the author was responding to an editor's suggestion that he try to show the husband's side of things, the reader is rewarded with a several hundred words of the man's stream-of-consciousness, detailing his coping strategy in this dysfunctional relationship:

American women are crazy, [Maurizio] thought. She works all day to make me a meal, then sulks through it . . . .

Eliana would sulk for a while then she'd blow, inevitably launching into a tirade about how little time he spend at home or why he hadn't bothered to call her . . . . Either way, [she] didn't have the stomach for conflict that he had. She would go off for a while then come back and be civil—be a good wife.

Always the same foolishness, he thought. If she wants me home so much, why does she make it so damn miserable to come home? (pp. 31-32)

Why, indeed? But having raised them, Evans never effectively counters these charges. He only tells us that Eliana "blamed herself for not seeing it coming," and then reverses himself a page later, asserting that she "felt the victim of a marital bait and switch" (p. 16). Victim turns out to be her primary occupation.

Based on the themes of her General Conference addresses, I can believe that this is what raised Sheri Dew's hackles most of all. Evans is climbing on his best-seller soapbox to preach a medieval theme I've encountered in other Mormon romances, that of the Great Wheel of Fate. Climb aboard at the wrong instance and your life is doomed until it rolls around and rights itself. We are supposed to admire the protagonist merely for hanging on and letting go when the sunny side of life shows up like a stop on a Disneyland amusement ride.

Had Evans eliminated the implied infidelity business from the start, he would then have had to address this problem with human agency. Were Eliana already divorced, for example, but in the interest of her sickly child living in her ex's villa and growing dependent on his largess, and he on the free child care and the warm hearth to come home to—and were it not strongly implied that, despite his travails, Ross still had bucks in the bank—this would have forced her to make a decision of her own volition, not wait for heaven to smile upon her, the ball to drop into the right slot at the roulette table.

To write the story right, though, you would have to have some insights into why the Hillarys end up with the Bills in the first place. I'm not convinced that Evans has a clue. And we're not necessarily talking about deep psychology. As Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice columnist advised a reader in a similar quandary, the quandary that Eliana apparently blew through without a second thought: "My dear, when it comes to making a judgment about a man's character, what else is there besides his past? It is through one's history that you learn about judgments, morals, and choices."

Judgements, morals, and hard choices are the last things on anybody's mind in The Last Promise. Which is why Evans can't begin the book without first rationalizing his choice of subject matter. Though here he does demonstrate some talent in composition. Evans introduces himself in a self-deprecating account of the Famous Author Nobody's Heard Of, bumbling around Italy with his family. One day he's relaxing poolside at a country club outside Florence and is told this story by a gorgeous, sunbathing woman he strikes up a conversation with.

Unfortunately, this promising narrative voice is soon drowned out by the drone of a loquacious, self-important guy who's got you cornered on a five-hour bus trip and is convinced that you are dying to hear his profoundly superficial life story. But who only convinces you that this is the last time you're riding this particular bus anywhere, thank you very much.

Labels: book reviews, business, kate, lds

At the library the other day I noticed a dozen newly-released paperback editions of Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci and Dalemark series, clearly an attempt to leverage the Harry Potter phenomenon. Well, if that's what it takes, then that's what it takes. Gift horses in the mouth, and that kind of thing.

The first book in the Chrestomanci series, Charmed Life, was published about the time I became too sophisticated for young adult literature, a problem that has since been remedied by age. But age also has the benefit of allowing one to experience authors I'm pretty sure I read Back Then as if for the first time. (See: Red Dwarf, when the AI unit has Lister erase its memory so it can re-read all the Agatha Christie novels.)

My reaction: amazement. Several times I found myself stopping to flip back to the title page to check the original copyright date. Yep, 1977. Because I kept thinking, she borrowed this from Rowling, right? And that? And this bit here? That one, there? But, no, excepting the possibility of time travel, the other way around, more likely.

I'm not talking about plagiarism. Other than the common elements of the "family romance," there is little resemblance in plot or character (although Chrestomanci himself is routinely referred to as "he whose name should not be spoken," by those who are terrified by its mere mention).

I would make the following comparison: an entire arm of the publishing industry (legal and samizdat) is devoted to the third-party exploration of copyrighted universes, expansions upon existing characters and settings that are, frankly, often better than the original. Dave Wolverton's Star Wars novels, for example. In Japan, there's the whole doujinshi movement.

Nothing even that specific, in this case; rather, a "sense of the world" which makes Jones's and Rowling's universes seem so similar. Call it convergent evolution: establish the same environmental variables, the same shaping narrative, and you end up with remarkably similar creatures at the end of the biological tree.

But this is somewhat besides the point I'm getting to (to quote Monty Python: "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who"). The question is, why Rowling and not the far more talented Jones? Now, to be sure, Diana Wynne Jones is hardly a commercial or artistic failure as an artist, just not warping-the-fabric-of-space successful the way Rowling is.

Let's explore some possible reasons:

1. Not too close for comfort

Rowling snugs the Muggle universe and Magical universe side by side. In Chrestomanci, Jones is thinking more along the lines of L'Engle: parallel universes. Moving from "our" universe to the Chrestomanci universe is difficult, and entails serious repercussions.

Morever, in the Chrestomanci universe, as in Rowling's, advances in modern technology have been hamstrung by the pursuit of magic. But unlike Mr. Weasley's fascination with all things Muggle (one of my favorite characters), that world is too far away in Chrestomanci to have immediate relevance. You can't take your Sony Walkman with you.

I am no fan of the theory that children must identify with characters that are somehow copies of themselves, socially/racially/economically. Half the fun of a story is getting as far away from yourself as possible (besides, all those Star Trek aliens behave exactly as you would expect a normal human being to, unlike the normal human beings).

But there is something to be said for easing the ability to project oneself onto a protagonist. By making transit between the normal and the magical as simple as literally taking the train, Rowling makes it that much more accessible to her readers, who can imagine making the journey themselves, without having to make the existential leap of abandoning everything they know.

Consider, as well, Hogwarts. As foreign as the British boarding school may be, its social structures and politics are recognizable to any secondary school student. Chrestomanci also has a school of magic, in a castle, but it only has four pupils. Harry Potter for the home-schooled, perhaps.

2. If it's not baroque, don't fix it

Simply in terms of style, you can say this about Harry Potter's universe: there's a whole lot more of it. The entire Chrestomanci series would fit inside Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Rowling perhaps demands comparison to Dickens, who (and I'm paragraphing somebody else) wrote long because nobody back then had television.

Rowling didn't simply prove that kids will read a LOT given good reason to, but she also disproved the canard that they will only read simple, short, solipsistic stories about themselves, and furthermore that only nerds will wade through baroque, 1200 page genre fantasy epics, such as Robin Hobb's Liveship triology (BTW, recommended!).

Rowling's American editors actually did edit her manuscripts, removing the more "British" examples of the language, but I doubt that was ever necessary. It's all about the narrative, about "what happens next."

3. Market timing

I've heard Madeleine L'Engle speak directly to this matter. When the manuscript of Wrinkle in Time was first circulated by her agent, it was turned down with hardly a second look. It languished so long in publishing purgatory that L'Engle feared it would never see the light of day. But that delay, she believes now, in large part accounted for its success. By the time it was published (1963), an audience had evolved that was ready to embrace it.

Jones, an Oxfordian who attended lectures by Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford (suppressing envy, suppressing envy), started publishing in the 1970s. Charmed Life came out the same year as Star Wars, and for the next decade Space Opera (much of it very bad indeed) ruled the day and soaked up all those wandering attention spans instead.

Harry Potter, in contrast, arrived on the scene when the trend in young adult publishing had been for a decade towards "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing way possible," what Moira Redmond terms "Dreadlit." The neuroticism of Dreadlit, she notes, "may be the millionth reason why children like Harry Potter so much."

Incidentally, the amazing Ghibli Studios has done a very good job with Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, with Miyazaki coming out of retirement to direct for likely the very last time. Although not as well received as his previous feature efforts, I find that Miyazaki's visual depiction of Sophie's every-changing appearance makes her one of his most subtly and insightfully-rendered of all his female protagonists.

Labels: book reviews, harry potter, magic

Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan is the latest in a series of polemics that began most prominently with Karel van Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power. Unabashedly iconoclastic, the revisionist themes common to these critiques hearken back to earlier academic criticisms of Ruth Benedict's landmark anthropological survey, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Written during Second World War on behalf of the Office of War Information, Benedict's work continues to be one of the most influential, if not the most inaccurate, studies of Japanese society ever published.

Even if the Japanese immigrants Benedict interviewed during her field research did represent the greater Japanese population at the time (the war foreclosed any access to the latter), lacking in the data she gathered was the context of Japanese political history since Meiji (or even Sekigahara). She limited the scope of her research to such narrow and predetermined objectives that in order to justify her conclusions she found it necessary to integrate the substance of a civilization reaching back two thousand years into the product of a man-made ideology less than a century old.

Benedict's work was undoubtedly a major reason why SCAP bought so completely into the emperor system that in fact had only existed since 1868. The whitewashing of imperial involvement in the war continues to this day to be at the root of diplomatic tensions between Japan and her Asian neighbors.

According to Douglas Lummis, professor of political philosophy at Tsuda University, Benedict's underlying error was that of recognizing among her Japanese subjects a set of publicly acknowledged and condoned behaviors and relationships, and then concluding, in a gross fallacy of generalization, that the repression endemic in Japan both before and during the Second World War was "voluntarily embraced." ⁽¹⁾

In Benedict's eyes, "to be totalitarian and to be Japanese [were] the same thing."

Machiavelli argued that the founder of a political state could create institutions that allowed the founder to instill fundamental changes in society while at the same time "mak[ing] [the] new prince seem ancient, and render[ing] him at one more secure and firmer in the state than if he had been established there of old." Likewise, the much heralded Meiji Restoration that thrust a 17th century agrarian society into the 20th century in less that fifty years did not occur without careful planning—few "restorations" or "revolutions" ever do. ⁽²⁾

In this case, along with the resurrection of bushido and the imperial emperor was the introduction of the pseudo-theology of the kokutai, or the polity of a singular, unified, genetic "family-state" (an essentialist approach that came to typify the entire Nihonjinron school of thought). And where, asks Daikichi Irokawa, professor of Japanese history at Tokyo University, did it come from? "It appeared to have been created by the Meiji idealogues for the purpose of solidifying the Emperor system." ⁽³⁾ Agrees Gluck, "From the time Japan began its deliberate pursuit of civilization in the mid-nineteenth century, ideology appeared as a conscious enterprise, a perpetual civic concern, an affair, indeed, of state." ⁽⁴⁾

Lummis puts it more bluntly: Benedict's interviewees all reflected the totalitarian patterns she anticipated because those patterns "had been pounded into them by a modern, highly organized, state-controlled school system, and by all the other 20th century techniques of indoctrination which the government had available to it." ⁽⁵⁾

The revisionist school of Japanese studies, exemplified most recently by Kerr and Patrick Smith (Japan: A Reinterpretation), similarly portrays the common man as the oppressed tool of a fascistic state. Except that the modern Japanese aren't oppressed and don't live in a fascistic state. The neo-Marxist indictments of the admittedly imperfect institutions of democratic capitalism as in some way analogous to 20th totalitarianism are as miguided and tired as Benedict's attempts to conflate a political behavior of the moment with the cultural heritage of the past.

But another striking, and forgiving, difference between Kerr and Benedict is the unapologetically subjective nature of the commentary. Kerr's less-than-academic tone often reminds you of a disappointed parent scolding a stubbornly misbehaving child that refuses to heed his wisdom and follow his advise. The hurt here is personally felt. And the corresponding absence of the typical set of academic imprimaturs allows to you take his rhetoric at face value, without the sense of having your arm intellectually twisted behind your back.

Besides, I can understand where the author is coming from. Kerr grew up in Japan, has lived there for three decades—in a suburb of Kyoto, not Tokyo—and is fluent enough in the language to have edited the translation of his book. A rare thing for a westerner. It's easy to imagine him perusing the work of popular "experts" such as James Fallows, who spend the entirety of their two or three-year tenure "inside the Yamanote" (the rail line that encircles Tokyo), and just seething.

Even T. R. Reid, a veteran of the Tokyo Press Corps, produced as his last book on the subject (before he up and transferred to London) an embarrassingly fawning account that spoke more to a comfortable life schmoozing among the internationalized upper middle-class than anything relevant to the lives of the average Japanese.

So Mr. Kerr feels it incumbent upon himself to set the record straight, and relates his account in the tone of taken insult. He's particularly pissed off at the destruction of "old" Kyoto, and devotes a chapter and copious anecdotes to the subject. But the bulk of the book concerns itself with corruption, á la Upton Sinclair (á la Junzo Itami). The first couple of chapters—about graft, corruption and Keynesian economics-gone-mad in the construction industry—pretty much sums it all up (it gets a little redundant after that). Another reason why van Wolferen's remains the more relevant analysis: it is a story of political institutions sinning against culture and society, not the other way around.

(And more relevant to China, as well. By blaming culture and not politics, Benedict's approach only confirms comforting ethnic stereotypes, and does not illuminate the true source of the current conflicts between China and Japan in the grubby, prosaic world of diplomatic gamesmanship and manipulation of public opinion.)

Working through an inbred and unaudited system of "government" and "public" corporations (with no open bidding), the Japanese construction industry, spending twice the percent of GDP as the U.S. in a country not much larger than California, manufacturing more raw tonnage of cement than the entire United States, and laying thirty times as much concrete per square foot, has locked sixty percent of the shoreline behind artificial breakwaters, built 2800 dams with five hundred in planning, completely diked all but three of Japan's rivers, and drained every costal wetland in the process. Along the way it replanted almost half of all native woodlands with industrial cedar and carved out 280,000 kilometers of mountain roads in order to access the lumber, most of which, it turns out, is not economical to even harvest.

This is make-work on a scale the administrators of the WPA never dreamed of: ten percent of the workforce directly employed by the construction industry, and another ten percent in supporting and peripheral industries; entire rural communities that do nothing but pour concrete.

This is all paid for by massive off-budget borrowing from Japan's Postal Savings Accounts, essentially a trillion-dollar piggy bank run by the postal service. It's a bad habit that has spread to the private sector, and now seventy percent of corporations can't cover their pension obligations; 800,000 companies have simply stopped paying the equivalent of social security taxes. Banks have resorted to an accounting trick called tobashi to write off bad debts: the non-performing asset is sold to a subsidiary; the bank then lends the subsidiary funds sufficient to cover the interest payments. The debt is thus considered "retired."

Combined with another trick, called "latent value"—a property is kept on the books at its purchase price, not at its market value—and this, combined with zero percent effective interest rates, means that banks have no incentive to write off their real debts. The total real debt could amount to as much as twenty-five percent of GDP. Brokerages play this game, too, listing a company's capitalization based on the stock's IPO value, rather than on its market value. (Not a few dot-coms would go for that kind of accounting.)

And Kerr is just getting warmed up. His account is grim, to be sure, but he not a nihilist. Japan is simply too big to fail, he admits, and at some point it will have to go through the equivalent of a massive S&L bailout. Indeed, Japan should provide an interesting test case of what happens when a country borrows past the limits of its ability to lend. He concludes, "Tobashi is a form of make-believe in which Japan's banks pretend to having hundreds of billions of dollars they don't have. But, after all, money is a sort of fiction. If the world banking community agrees to believe that Japan has these billions, then it essentially does."

A more dangerous experiment taking place on a national scale is the lack of enforcement of environmental protection directives. Japan provides for a test case of industry—almost without oversight—setting the agenda, from dioxin levels to zoning to logging on public lands. And as frightening as Kerr's account is—frightening even for an environmental agnostic such as myself—even taking into account such notable disasters such as the Minamata mercury poisoning incident and the occasional nuclear plant malfunction, the Japanese just keep living longer and longer.

I remain divided on Kerr's analysis of the why, that is, his analysis of the problem on a cultural/psychic level. I agree with his dismissal of the "occidental contamination" theory, that Japan was "true to itself" until the arrival of Perry's "black ships" in 1853. The problem, Kerr argues, is that Japan is being true to itself. He offers as a metaphor the bonsai tree, nature bound and manipulated so as to conform to the artist's sense of what nature should be, rather than what it is. He cleverly identifies the post-modern, post-apocalyptic world depicted in much of anime as an honest artistic rendering of the popularly perceived state of affairs.

But then he contradicts himself with a poetic conclusion embracing the "traditional" and what he terms jitsu, the Platonic ideal that a country represents, what it should be "true to." Mom, baseball, and apple pie, that sort of thing. The problem is, to identify a set of "traditional values" one must pick an equally artificial point in history from which those traditions are imagined to have sprung. Speaking of the "traditional" one more often communicates instead a sentimentality for a certain era, in the case of Japan the late 17th century "Genroku" period, during which all the unemployed samurai, with nothing else better to do, began busily inventing the modern image of the samurai—much in the way that modern conception of the medieval knight and the western cowboy have long been the products of Hollywood producers.

This is not to say that society should automatically yield to the modern and the new without caution and reflection. This is Kerr's biggest cultural complaint: Japanese simply are not sentimental enough for his tastes. And I suspect later generations will prove him right, just as so many city planners in the U.S. came to regret the destruction, in the name of "urban renewal," of their traditional and historic city centers during the 1960s and 1970s. True, being old is not a value in and of itself: great art and architecture should stand on their own merits; but I can empathize with Kerr's anguish at runaway urban planning doing to Kyoto exactly what the WWII didn't.

But Japan will come around. I've come to believe that all societies must go through the same stages of evolution, in periodic, sinusoidal iterations. Having arrived at the top of the post-industrial, navel-gazing, tree-hugging ladder first, Americans too impatiently fret that the rest of the developing world isn't scampering up into the branches with us. It's a lot like the notion that with cloning you'll be able to hatch a complete and socially acclimated adult out of the shell. None of that fussy toilet training and adolescence to struggle through.

Actually, the more worrisome topic Kerr covers is the rise of ethnocentrism in an almost ethnocentrically-pure country. It's reminiscent of know-nothing and isolationist attitudes the U.S. suffered during recent and historical recessions, and is no doubt spurred on by the same forces (and Japan's disturbingly Huxleyan government). But I believe it too shall pass, once people are given more appropriate targets for their frustrations—namely, politicians.

In terms of environmentalism, for example, you start out with the industrial revolution and the exploitations of nature, then people notice how ugly and unhealthy it is and you move into the subduing nature stage (the Colorado River and Tennessee Valley Authority being prime examples), and then you start to figure out that just leaving nature alone is not such a bad thing. Japan is still in the process of seeing every example of imperfect or threatening nature as a candidate for another TVA project. And unlike the U.S. during the 1930s, Japan has a whole lot more money to get carried away with.

But the process takes about a century, and Japan has been a functioning free-market democracy for only fifty years, while the United States, in 1776, had been hard at work at both capitalism and democracy for two centuries already, and had the legacy of the transcendentalists and naturalists and politicians like Teddy Roosevelt to draw on when the movement did get underway.

Similarly, it doesn't surprise me that the current generation in China is so much more nationalistic and less reactionary—life, for them and their parents, is better than they could have ever possibly imagined. (The same was said of the baby boom generation in Japan.) But let the alloy of capitalism and democracy slowly work its magic. Call it the Consumer Reports syndrome. Once you have come to expect a certain quality and satisfaction in the goods and services you consume on a regular basis, and to expect an inevitable increase in the standard of living, it's a small step to cast about and begin to expect the same of political and social institutions as well.

You eventually get to point we have reached in U.S. politics, when every generation is convinced that the environment is more polluted, the politics more corrupt, than the last. When, in fact, the truth is the opposite. The result, though, is an incessant pressure to "save the Earth" for each upcoming crop of children, which, while generating unappetizing streams of hand-wringing and angst in the process, does serve to motivate the society as a whole in the direction of constant improvement. So, paradoxically, the less we believe that things are getting better, the more likely they will. Japan, I believe, is proving itself no exception to this rule.

---

1. C. Douglas Lummis, A New Look at the Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Tokyo: Shohakusha, 1982), p. 76; Roger W. Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 312: "The farmers of the 1880s had learned that imperial absolutism was absolute and that they were not going to change the political system by armed rebellion. But that does not mean they ceased rebelling." [return]

2. Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 39-41; Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 81-86. [return]

3. Daikichi Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 280. [return]

4. Gluck, p. 3. [return]

5. Lummis, p. 75; Gluck, p. 3. [return]

Labels: book reviews, culture, environmentalism, japan

With the publication of The Amber Spyglass and the completion of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, Philip Pullman has produced a first-rate adventure that dares for the first time since C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" to place the entire sweep of Christian eschatology at the heart of a young adult fantasy series.

Having set the stage for the apocalyptic showdown in the The Golden Compass, and then filling out the cast of characters in The Subtle Knife, Pullman goes on in The Amber Spyglass to question the existence of God, the nature of good and evil, the nature of thought and matter. The structure of his argument holds so well over 1000 pages because the author has set his foundation firmly in the classics, a good place to begin any discussion of the meaning of life.

Borrowing from Dante and Vergil, he sends Will Parry and Lyra Silvertongue on the mythic heroic journey: literally from the top of the world, to the depths of hell, and back to Eden.

The title of the trilogy comes Book II of Milton's Paradise Lost, which itself foreshadows the theological challenge Pullman has laid out for himself:

But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds

And considering how well he rises to the challenge, I think it only appropriate that Andrew Marvell's summation of Milton's work, found in the introduction to the Second Edition (1674), so well applies here as well.

In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown'd, Gods Reconcil'd Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav'n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent

"Yet as I read," Marvell records, "I lik'd his project." An understatement, to say the least. Displaying a breathtaking reach of imagination (his conceptualization of the "daemon," alone, surpasses expectations, and strikes deep chords of affirmation), Pullman pulls off his equivalent epic with a sagacity and a depth of feeling that stirs the soul.

Into the Breach
To a sufficient extent that "His Dark Materials" constitutes some of the most important writing in the genre in the last half-century. It is a work of serious literary weight, and works of serious literary weight beg comparison, or at least a vigorous shoving match.

At first glance Lewis's "Narnia" seems the prime candidate. As in Pullman's trilogy, Lewis's protagonists cross the boundaries of adulthood as they cross the boundaries between worlds. The decisive element perhaps in all successful juvenile fantasy is this transitional period between childhood and adulthood, where the characters possess the qualities of both simultaneously.

This is difficult--if not impossible--to depict in real life (which is perhaps why I so dislike all the video renditions of Narnia I've ever seen. Though I think that Hayao Miyazaki could carry it off--note the relationship between Nausicaa and Asbel, and Lyra and Will.) But as a literary device it works wonderfully when done right. Harry Potter, for example.

And it's not a matter of portraying children as small grownups. Though Lyra and Will and Harry Potter (and Miyazaki's Nausicaa) are often called on to behave as no child could or would--no matter how brave or precocious--they are not behaving as adults could or would, either. They act, rather, even when yielding to their darker impulses, with a purity of intent that adults never achieve. They thus represent a state of transcendence: in the world, but not beholding to the distracting and prosaic and cynical concerns that become the inevitable burden of growing old.

So these are easy associations to make. Even easier to make when you consider that both Lewis and Pullman studied at Oxford and went on to teach literature (Pullman at Westminster College, Lewis at Oxford and Cambridge).

In terms of theological surmise, although both works similarly circumnavigate the continents that separate Genesis and the Ends of the Earth, the more appropriate mirror to hold up to Pullman's work is the lesser known "Space Trilogy." To begin with, both Pullman's "His Dark Materials" and Lewis's "Space Trilogy" are informed by an intimate knowledge of the academic environment. Out of the Silent Planet sets forth from Cambridge; The Golden Compass originates at Oxford, and both are ultimately concerned with the triumph of good over evil.

But these are also correlations that can distract more than they inform, and hide the more important similarities hidden deep within the stories the two authors tell.

A Return to the Schoolyard
Their styles, to begin with, differ considerably. Pullman sweeps his landscape with a spyglass, pulling his characters into focus with the long lense; Lewis writes with a microscope, focused on the small, sharp, human foibles that make his human (and no so human) actors human. His comminatory narrative shines above all else, proving the old writer's adage wrong: you can show by telling. ⁽¹⁾

It is, to be sure, a strange talent. Heroes and villains of Shakespearean magnitude only peripherally step onto his stage: Aslan is the Lion, and the White Witch is, well, a wicked one. But if Lewis doesn't have much to say about the melodramatics of evil, he has plenty to say about ordinary meanness (both the unpleasant and the small). ⁽²⁾ Enough to constitute two notable volumes: The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters. He has Screwtape, in fact, complain of the task that he, the author, has been reduced to: sinners "so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment," as to render them "hardly worth damning."

And not so pleasant to have around, either. Many of his child actors seem refugees from some hellish school playground, gripped by a kind of nascent nastiness that occasionally infects the narrator; though, as in The Screwtape Letters, Lewis's slings and arrows more often than not puncture his protagonists.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis diverts the point-of-view of the first two books away from the now Jeremianic Ransom and focuses instead on Mark and Jane Studdock. Two very ordinary people--indistinguishable even today from any middle-class professional couple--with very ordinary problems, contemplating ending a marriage that has ceased to inspire either of them. "He was an excellent sleeper," Jane Studdock observes of her husband. "Only one thing ever seem able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long."

And poor Mark Studdock, whose soul is up for sale in That Hideous Strength, hardly comprehends the Faustian bargain he is negotiating.

Like the rest of us, he's after a good job, better pay, an enhanced reputation. His weakness is a quiet insecurity, a wanting to be liked: "If he were ever cruel it would be downwards, to inferiors and outsiders who solicited his regard, not upwards to those who rejected him. There was a good deal of the spaniel in him."

Yet nobody shouts or weeps or carries on, no lawyers are retained, no divorce papers filed. The apocalypse waits upon the fate of a mundane marriage that shows every sign of dying with a whimper. Yet the import of this lost cause is never lost. Lewis's eschatology can be as subtle as his sense of the fine divide--that moment of zero slope along the curve--between what makes right and wrong:

There may have been a time in the world's history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But . . . it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad thing before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

Lewis's attention to such subtleties of human frailty, his acuity of observation, makes for a rhetorical weapon with a dangerous edge. Lewis is too easily able to reduce his enemies with ad hominem appraisals that possess the veneer of rational discourse. And in combination with his sometimes reactionary Victorianism, it turns into a kind of blunderbuss, and you hear the sound of the white Englishman's burden falling to the floor with a hollow clunk. Equating quality of character with the wearing of corsets, for example; and a remark about Eustace Scrubb's parents at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader being "vegetarians, nonsmokers, and teetotalers" and wearing a "special kind of underclothes" that is so far out of left field I cannot pretend to understand what he meant by it. ⁽³⁾

Subversive Christianity
And then there's Lewis's theology, outside the context of which nothing he wrote can be intelligently discussed. Lewis is carrying on in Narnia the job he began in Mere Christianity, laying on top of his stories a thick layer of apologetics, answering his academic critics (The Silver Chair being a case in point) with children's voices. And when it's your world and your rules, it's not hard to win all the arguments. It's not exactly fighting fair, and Lewis, making the most of his education, with a rich command of allegory at his fingertips, knows how not to show his hand all at once.

Lewis risks, nevertheless, what may be called the Socrates Syndrome. George Bernard Shaw describes it well in the introduction to Saint Joan: the intelligent, rhetorically-gifted individual, convinced of his own rightness, who never quite understands that his brilliant arguments, although transfixing to the choir, only piss off those who disagree with him. Having been weaned on Lewis, I have developed something of an immunity to his faults. He comes across to me now almost as one of his characters, a frumpy Edwardian, the eccentric relation who pops up every Thanksgiving grumbling about the slipshod state of the modern world. You put up with him because when you settle him down the old guy tells such good stories.

Nevertheless, extreme annoyance is exactly my reaction to Plato. His mentor's fate may have been unjust, but it doesn't surprise me one bit.

But C.S. Lewis is read primarily by children to whom these machinations are mostly transparent, or by adults who have already claimed discipleship. It is the surprising strength of Lewis's ecumenicism that demands study by any serious propagandist, as the whole Christian world wants to claim him as their own, even those sects whose theological differences are sufficient to bring them to evangelical knife points. ⁽⁴⁾ I suspect Lewis has achieved such a mythic status because what he stands for eclipses what he says. Few of his fans, I'm convinced, have read carefully what the man actually wrote (true of Holy Scripture in general).

Notwithstanding all this, the enormous popularity of the series proves yet again the power of raw story to overcome deficiencies in the prose (J.K. Rowling, being another prime example). Which is why I praise "The Chronicles of Narnia" as one of the most subversive works of young adult fiction ever written.

To the contrary
Subversiveness, you see, is not necessarily a bad thing. To good or bad ends, it depends on which side you agree with. (We don't really mind the cheap shots when we wish we thought of them first.) And I'm not sure that what you can't see can hurt you, else the world would be full of many more Anglicans than it is. There is a quality of cluelessness--call it innocence--that protects children from ulterior motives, just as it protects them from the Specters of Cittàgazze.

Philip Pullman has also been branded with the label, not because he is, but because people don't agree with him. And because people liked to be shocked and offended, and thereby reassured that we'd all be better off if everybody else saw the world exactly the way we see it. Taking the label at face value, "His Dark Materials" is, yes, an exercise in not seeing the world the way most Americans see it. (Not that I believe that Pullman had Americans particularly in mind, but we rise always to the occasion.) But there is a difference. You can't exactly be subversive when you lay all your cards on the table. Pullman does.

And quite a lot of cards Pullman does put on the table, embracing Really Big Ideas in not-so-acceptable ways. In this reworking of Paradise Lost, he asks a compelling hypothetical. Given that Milton's version gives the devil all the good lines, what if--because it's the winner's version that's always the accepted version--what if those rebellious angels were on the side of right all along? For our bad guy, Pullman posits that Metatron ⁽⁵⁾ has pulled a coup d'etat on God, thrown out the good guys, and decided that it's time to tighten the screws--using the Church as his instrument--the human race having gotten a bit too carried away with this free agency stuff.

Frankly, not an unreasonable surmise, considering the way organized religions (and governments) have behaved throughout great swathes of human history. Personally, I like the idea that if we were in fact that unruly third of the host of heaven cast down to Earth, it would go a long way in explaining why human beings can be so awful to each other, and why power and agency are so coveted yet so abused.

In the larger view, though, Pullman has adopted a more Olympian than Christian architecture. The Gods meddling with the humans. (Compare Vergil.) But it's an unfortunate commentary about our jaded times that heresy--by which I mean nontraditional ways of looking at the relationship between God and man, not blasphemy, with which it is often confused--doesn't get much of a rise out of anybody but the Fundamentalist fringe, and then them for all the wrong reasons.

It's somewhat reassuring to see that J.K. Rowling has managed to ruffle the feathers of a few Muggles. But very few.

Outrage is typically reserved for shocking! (always include the exclamation point) discoveries of hints of teenage sexuality, implicit (as in The Goats by Brock Cole), or explicit (as in The Wind Blows Backward by Mary Downing Hahn). In any case, for the easily offended sex is suggested--though never stated explicitly, you can read into it what you will--in, of course, the Garden of Eden scenes, foreshadowed throughout the series.

The real shocker, though, is Pullman's exegesis. This retelling of man's fall "upwards" into grace positions Pullman as a modern Pelagius to C.S. Lewis's Augustine. And here, finally, there emerges the possibility of a philosophical nexus between these two authors, and one more, that great, grossly underestimated, early 19^th century transcendentalist neo-Pelagian, Joseph Smith. ⁽⁶⁾

Saints and Heretics
Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine, well educated and fluent in Latin, most probably a native of Ireland. ⁽⁷⁾ He resided in Rome during the late 4^th century and there developed a theology of salvation and personal perfection that two decades later, at the Council of Carthage in 418 would be declared heresy. Augustine's view of the Fall of Adam, Original Sin, the necessity of child baptism and the necessity of the Grace of Christ, would become the unquestioned orthodoxy of the Catholic church.

In the spring of 1820, in western New York State, Pelagius found himself a champion in the person of Joseph Smith. A Yankee (born in Vermont), and a Methodist by upbringing, Smith saw visions of God as a fourteen year old boy, was instructed by an angel to dig out of a nearby hill the ancient record of the ancient Americas, which he published as the Book of Mormon. He went on to define a theology both outrageously unique and brazenly syncretic; it would be received by the greater Christian community about as graciously then (and today) as Pelagius's preachings were fourteen centuries before.

Joseph Smith's effort was not simply to reject Original Sin and child baptism (his second Article of Faith reads, "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression"; from the Book of Mormon: "little children need no repentance, neither baptism"), and knit together Protestant grace and the Catholic sacraments. His boldest step was to portray the human race as gods in embryo, not the offspring but the siblings of Christ.

The kernel at the core of this theology is found in Psalms 82:6, "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High," which Christ later quotes in John 10:34, and which Joseph Smith chose to take literally, overthrowing the old Nicene gods as surely as does Pullman.

Compare Joseph Smith's writings with Balthamos's assertion (in The Amber Spyglass) that Dust itself is matter made self-aware, that the Angels "condensed out of Dust" and are co-eternal with God, and not the original creations of God. "Man was also in the beginning with God," reads the Doctrine & Covenants. "Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be." The most definite pronouncement of this doctrine was made in a funeral address now known as the King Follett sermon, first published in the Times and Seasons, August 15, 1844:

There never was a time when there were not spirits; for they are co-equal with our Father in heaven. . . . [I] proclaim from the house-tops that God never had the power to create the spirit of man at all. God himself could not create himself. Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle.

Ask an informed Christian what disqualifies Mormonism from Christian fellowship, and this is the doctrine he will site. More unfortunate is that the leadership of the Mormon Church has taken the criticism to heart, and has for decades been steadily covering up and backing away from what Joseph Smith preached. ⁽⁸⁾ Ever since rejecting polygamy in order to gain Utah statehood at the turn of the century, the church has turned ever more sharply towards an aspect of Pelagianism that Joseph Smith never fully embraced. Call it the revenge of the Augustinians.

His Good Materials
Pelagius was an ascetic, out of the Stoical tradition, and Joseph Smith definitely was not. Although the modern church has tried hard to turn him into one (it makes for a nice fit with the poor, illiterate, farm boy, Horatio Alger image). Smith loved life, loved women enough to reinvent polygamy at the same time he was inventing a brand-new religion, was at home in the physical and often gave as good as he got (which, in part, eventually got him killed).

"The great principle of happiness," he wrote, "consists in having a body. The devil has no body, and herein is his punishment."

On this point all three authors converge. "Dust loves matter," observes Mary Malone. Lewis uses almost the same language: "God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. . . . He likes matter. He invented it." God, pouts Screwtape, is "a hedonist at heart." In That Hideous Strength Lewis creates the opposite of Dust, the macrobe. Like the microbe ubiquitous, but situated "above the animal level of animal life." And while communication between humans and macrobes has been "spasmodic, and . . . opposed by numerous prejudices," it has had a "profound influence," which if known would rewrite all of history. But the macrobes are the stuff of dark angels, inimical to human freedom, with a Manichaean loathing for matter and emotion.

So much like the councils of Pullman's Church (in which Lewis's Reverend Straik would certainly find welcome tenure), the ultimate goal of the macrobes is to compromise the intellect and crush the will. Keep the context in mind when Rita Skadi contends that "[this] is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." Lewis wouldn't necessarily disagree:

I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure were bad in themselves. But they [are] wrong. Christianity . . . thoroughly approves of the body [and] believes that matter is good.

In the conclusion to his chapter on sexual morality in Mere Christianity (that surely places him at odds with the conservative--and surprisingly gnostic--Protestant view that presently eclipses the American religious landscape), Lewis unapologetically states that the "sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins." He provides us with this vivid comparison: "A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute."

To which he adds, "Of course, it is better to be neither."

The Ferryman
This distorted emphasis on "sins of the flesh" reflects that incessant human need to judge and evaluate and categorize, which arises partly out of necessity, mostly out of prejudice. The great sins, Lewis argues, are spiritual in nature, or rather, metaphysical. And the greatest of all, he insists, is pride. There is much irony in the fact, Lewis admits: "Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity."

The problem is, it's a lot easier to tell if a man smokes, or is a drunk, or sleeps around, and the strictures of organized religion are readily amenable to the human need to define tribal allegiances, to say who's on our side, and who's not. Even when it comes to outright war, religious wars are rarely about religion. It'd be almost reassuring to believe that what really divides Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland is the question of Papal infallibility and salvation by grace vs. works. But at the core of most "religious" conflict are battles over property and power and the right to rule. Religion supplies each side with the flags, the uniforms, and a convenient, existential grievance, if one happens to be lacking.

And the choicest piece of real estate in any religious conflict is heaven.

Regardless of the strength of sincere belief, heaven is still a hypothetical. But that hasn't kept anyone from staking a claim. Sort of like selling the naming rights to craters on the moon. It'd be hard to come up with a better example of this pretension in action than the "Rapture," according to which all the good, God-fearing folk (Christian God-fearing folk, that is) will be "caught up into heaven" right before the apocalypse counts down to zero. The rest of us sad sacks will get "left behind." ⁽⁹⁾

Compared with this, Pullman's vision of the afterlife, pursuing Dante and Vergil, is almost refreshing. We all go into the dark, as Eliot phrased it, and it sucks big time.

Lewis's hell in The Great Divorce is equally dark, though its occupants there are tormented by the banalities of evil. Hell is both small and infinite. Infinitely small. Heaven can't join hell simply because it can't fit. Even Minos, as it turns out, would rather rule the dead than judge them. It is a hard reality for those looking forward to an afterlife in which they will lord their righteousness over their neighbors. But like C.S. Lewis's dwarves, who make it into heaven fine, but are blind to its gifts, the dead in Pullman's Hades can't see the hell they carry inside them. The Harpies tell Lyra and Will and the Gallivespians,

Thousands of years ago, when the first ghosts came down here, [God] gave us the power to see the worst in every one, and we have fed on the worst ever since, till our blood is rank with it and our very hearts are sickened.

Lewis takes an opposite, but not opposing, tack. It is not even the name of the god that matters, Aslan tells Prince Emeth, but how we behave in the name of that god that instructs the better "angels of our nature":

Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.

Joseph Smith also preached judgement relative to all possible factors. He considered it "preposterous" that anybody would be damned "because they did not believe the gospel." God, he declared,

will award judgment or mercy to all nations according to their several desserts, their means of obtaining intelligence, the laws by which they are governed, the facilities afforded them of obtaining correct information, and His inscrutable designs in relation to the human family.

In an echo of Vergil, Smith envisioned that these "several desserts" would require a heaven with three rings, the innermost, or highest, divided into three more. It is one of his oddest creations, and one that Mormons (proving themselves equally susceptible to human nature) have gravitated towards with particular enthusiasm. So much so that it's given rise to the joke about St. Peter giving the newly deceased a tour of Heaven. They pass by a heavily secured door, behind which a great congregation seems to be in assembly. And what is behind that impressive door? St. Peter is asked. "Ah," he says, taking the group aside and speaking in the strictest of confidences, "That's where we keep the Mormons. They think they're the only ones here."

In the end, Smith concludes, "we shall all of us eventually have to confess that the Judge of all the earth has done right, [for] a man is his own tormenter and his own condemner."

The Justifying Will
The essential statement of man's relationship to his own salvation is found in the Book of Mormon: "by grace we are saved, after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23). That comma is much debated: whether we are saved only after exerting all, or saved despite our best efforts. Drawing on the Stoical tradition, Pelagius would have aligned himself with the former, believing that "the moral strength of man's will" was sufficient to bring a man to salvation. Justification itself depends on faith alone (anticipating Luther by a millennium), though it does not automatically sanctify the soul.

Even for Lewis, our attending Augustinian, the physical must follow upon the existential, and action upon reason. But must follow. It should come as no surprise that the preeminent explainer of the Christian religion should prove a master of the dialectic. This is most apparent in That Hideous Strength, described by Lewis as a "fairy tale for adults."

And a grim tale it is. Lewis is fighting with the gloves off, but at least here he stays inside the ropes. Throughout the "Space Trilogy," thought and meaning, discovered in dialogue, resolve to action: Ransom kills Weston only when other means of reason have been exhausted, after lengthy discussion; Merlin is summoned only at the climax of the conflict, with a full knowledge of what must be done.

Pullman's only similarly-informed counterpart, his man with a very big plan, Lord Asriel, is kept mostly off-stage. And he never really explains himself; he just is. At the opposite extreme, Asriel's lover and Lyra's mother, the inscrutable Mrs. Coulter, propels herself from moment to brutal moment, the grasp of meaning hovering always beyond her fingertips, while Will and Lyra and Mary Malone leap continually into the Kierkegaardian dark. As with the Studdocks, they "see through a glass, darkly"; it is action that precipitates knowledge and leads to belief, the product of which might be called trust or obedience.

Obedience to this faith is not blind; obedience for Lewis requires the clearest of all vision: to see the self through the eyes of God, and then to acknowledge the humility necessary to act upon that raw and white-hot knowledge. When Mark Studdock discovers heaven, "all the lout and clown and clod-hopper in him was revealed to his reluctant inspection." Lyra likewise learns the difference--between doing what she wants, and doing what she knows is right--when she disobeys the advice of the Alethiometer:

I done something very bad [she tells Will]. Because the Alethiometer told me I had to stop looking for Dust--at least I thought that's what it said--and I had to help you. I had to help you find your father. And I could, I could take you to wherever he is, if I had it. But I wouldn't listen. I just done what I wanted to do, and I shouldn't . . . .

Lyra's obedience to the Alethiometer is the opposite of that "obedience" rejected by Rita Skadi, when the good witch (not all witches are good in Pullman's universe, but the ones we know are) observes that "every increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." That is that same viral strain of "obedience" preached to Mark Studdock in the "Objective Room": a bowing down to men who on one hand embrace iconoclasm as the right of those "more equal" than the rest, and at the same time preach acquiescence as the mark of the pure and the faithful.

The eternal siege
As with these elements of story, narrative, and character, there are issues of substance between Lewis and Pullman that seem more diametrical at first glance, but which, I believe, dissolve under the light of closer examination. At the heart of it, Lewis is a monarchist. Pullman is a republican, and so the monarchal Church is the enemy. The witch Rite Skadi thus sums her centuries of observation: "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." Mary Malone later calls Christianity a "well-meaning mistake."

Considering my own measured antipathy toward the "organized" part of organized religion, I can sympathize with the sentiment. The problem is, religions sprout like crabgrass even in the most desolate of landscapes. Any examination of human civilization, I believe, drives towards one or both of two conclusions: there is either an ecclesiastical god, or there is such an inclination in the human animal bred deeply in the bone. ⁽¹⁰⁾ The Church is the way it is because people are the way they are.

And therefore suffused with human weakness: the idea that the contemporary church would even qualify as some sort of blueprint for a Kingdom of Heaven is one Lewis rejects over and over again. "You are to imagine us," Ransom lectures Mrs. Studdock, "living on a world where the criminal classes of the [angels] have established their headquarters." It is a theme that permeates all of Lewis's writing. Facing the final showdown with evil, Ransom reminds Merlin, "We are four men, some women, and a bear ⁽¹¹⁾ . . . . The Faith itself is torn to pieces . . . . The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes."

A situation not so different from that faced by the desperate heroes battling the Church in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Yet battle they must, against desperate odds. Because Lewis, while a monarchist, is a democrat, suspicious of the collective, holding out great hope in the wisdom and resources of ordinary men. Lewis may not be a deist, but his God is forced to play the role.

Consider angels. Like Pullman's, Lewis's good angels stand mostly apart from human activity. Lewis's Gods are forbidden to "send down the Powers to mend or mar in this Earth until the end of all things." In the meantime, the Oyeresu communicate through Ransom, who seeks out Merlin (as John Parry seeks out his son), while the dark forces at the Institute gather about a disembodied head, their "new man" (Lyra, like Jane Studdock, dreams of a severed head), a gateway to the gods.

It is the revolt against nature which both emboldens evil and destroys it. The means become the ends. The subtle knife looses upon the world the Specters, destroyers of souls. Yet it is the "one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant," Will's father tells him. Ransom crosses the dimensions of heaven by means of a "subtle engine," devised by his archenemy Weston to breach the wall of heaven and undo Eden. ⁽¹²⁾ Weston dead, the Institute on brink of destruction, Ransom reflects,

If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.

The same fate awaits Metatron (and Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter) in the climactic battle in The Amber Spyglass, "Deep Heaven" literally pulled down upon their shoulders, tumbling them into the same Abyss that swallows up Bracton and the Reverend Straik, who dreamed of the Kingdom of God established by "the powers of science" as its "irresistible instrument." Like Father Gomez and the Constitorial Court, men building kingdoms on Earth and rendering unto God that which is Caesar's, The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, Lewis informs us, "was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world." But its heart belonged to hell.

The Last Republic
There is no institutional solution to righteousness. Human beings build cities on a hill, but they can never found a kingdom of heaven on Earth without first building a Gulag Archipelago. So when Will's father tells him, "It's time we started again, but properly this time," he is not proposing yet another utopian dream soon to degrade into self-righteous totalitarianism. As Will remembers later,

[My father] said we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are. . . . I thought he just meant Lord Asriel and his new world, but he meant us, he meant you and me. . . . No one could [build Heaven] if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds. . . .

"We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world," says Lyra, "because where we are is always the most important place." ⁽¹³⁾

Instructive in this regard is a comparison of Edens. In each lines can be drawn between Weston and Mary Malone, and between Ransom and Father Gomez, between those who fear truth and knowledge, and those who trust it implicitly. One hears echoes of Lewis's Malacandra and Perelandra in the land of Pullman's Mulefa, in Will and Lyra's return there from Hades and Armageddon (compare the final chapter of The Last Battle).

But a return to the Garden is not a return to paradise; it is a graduation from innocence into knowledge. In his acknowledgments, Pullman credits an essay by Heinrich von Kleist titled "The Marionette Theater." ⁽¹⁴⁾ The themes of this essay--drawing out the essential contrast between experience and innocence, and pointing to the deliberate labor that any return to Eden must require--play out with Lyra and her mastery of the Alethiometer, in an extension on the mustard seed allegory, delivered by the most unlikely of characters, and in a wonderful concluding discourse upon grace and works. As the angel Xaphania instructs Lyra,

You read [the Alethiometer] by grace, and you can regain it by work. But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you've gained it, it will never leave you.

This is the whole point of Eden. The problem with archetypes (and with such laden words as "grace") is that it's easy to remember the mythology and forget the original point. In the Biblical story God's greatest act is to permit Eve to be tempted, to allow the knowledge to flow to hearts and minds capable of accepting it. Again, Joseph Smith got this one right, portraying the "Fall" as a necessary step upwards in the evolution of the human race:

And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. . . . wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin. But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things. Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. (2 Nephi 2:22-25) ⁽¹⁵⁾

A similar sentiment is echoed in the anime series Scrapped Princess. Finding humankind trapped inside a Rousseauian bell jar, Pacifica (the Eve character) must choose between the guaranteed safety of enforced innocence, and the perils of freedom and self-determination. She must destroy a cruelly anticeptic Eden, its gods and its church--where "Satan's rebellion had been successful"--to make humankind fit for salvation. This is the unique message of Mormonism, and one that Philip Pullman stands squarely behind.

A Tale Newly Told
"This is good doctrine," Joseph Smith boasted. "It tastes good." In other words, this is the way the story should be told. "We all need stories," Pullman points out, "but children are more frank about it." Indeed, the admonition to "become as little children" is, if anything, an admonition to treat the structure of story seriously, to recognize that even if you don't believe in Santa Clause, you should still believe in the story. Because some subjects are "too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book." Or perhaps, as Lewis prefaced That Hideous Strength, in a fairy tale.

All religious--all political, nationalistic, ideological--belief resolves to story, because the essence of faith and feeling cannot be reduced to objective fact, and story is the only way experience can be effectively transmitted from one mind to another. Mormonism (as an example) is known today for its staid, business-suited veneer, for its proscriptive moral code. A far cry from the infinite expanse of imagination that Joseph Smith suffused into a green and vibrant theology. Smith began his ministry at the age of fourteen, and began a religion with the epic story of two teenagers (Nephi and Mormon).

These are the stories that persevere, that still reach out from beneath the layers of propriety, earnestness, and bureaucracy. Said Philip Pullman at the conclusion of his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, "We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."

The telling moment, for me, occurs in the third chapter of The Subtle Knife. Will finds himself in a situation where he must hide his identity. The alias he provides is "Ransom," as indicated above the eponymic name of C.S. Lewis's hero of the "Space Trilogy." What the two authors have created, then, are not parallel universes, but rather alternate worlds. The view from the one to the other is polarized; the symmetries align; light becomes brighter and contrasts turn dark. Because, regardless of what universe you are in, truth persists, in an eternal center, even when approached from opposite directions.

Even in the midst of darkness the awful, punishing Harpies recognize truth. To the Gallivespian Tialys they explain why they did not attack Lyra when they had wounded her earlier, under similar circumstances,

Because she spoke the truth. Because it was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn't help it. Because it was true. Because we had no idea that there was anything but wickedness. Because it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because it was true.

What the Harpies read as truth is the story of a life honestly told. Not lives good or bad, but recounted for what they were; the goodness is in the honesty of the telling. (Also the moral of The Great Divorce.) The stories these authors tell, in turn, are true to their characters, and true to themselves. As Daniel Moloney insightfully argues in First Things, Pullman's story "is not subversive of Christianity, it is almost Christian, even if only implicitly and imperfectly. But implicit and imperfect Christianity is often our lot in life[.]" ⁽¹⁶⁾

There is ultimately more lost than won in searching for two sides of an argument buried somewhere in the rhetoric. There are three sides here, and many more beyond. And each of these authors reinforces a face of the pyramid, and braces the glittering crystal against the gathering dark.

---

1. Lewis's reportedly awful boarding school childhood would have provided him more ammunition, I think, than motivation. His academic training I consider a more likely contributor in this regard.

Namely, that pedagogical approach popular in institutions of higher learning that confuses the Socratic dialogue with actual instruction. As exemplified by John Houseman's portrayal of Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase, the goal apparently is to goad students into learning by insulting them, the excuse being, I suppose, that all aspects of character are somehow related to the intellectual task at hand, and the professor's task is to beat the undesirable ones out of them with a verbal cane.

Granted, Houseman's Kingsfield is taken to be a caricature of the generic "great professor," a Mr. Chips in extremis. And this attitude is more likely revealed, in the real world, not between teacher and student, but between dueling scholars of elevated and equal status. Commentators on the political scene have long observed (as any loyal C-SPAN follower can attest) that the intensity of debate rises in inverse proportion to the political distance separating the two sides. The rancor between creationists and evolutionary biologists, for example, is only exceeded by the bar fights that break out among the more vocal proponents of the accepted (pro-evolution) schools of thought. Robert Wright's chapter-long evisceration of Stephen Jay Gould in Nonzero, for example.

There is something of a dark art thus fostered in the halls of learning: that ability to dismantle the opponent's position with high-minded logic over the academic table, while weakening his foundation with skewering jabs beneath it, showing all the time the white, kindly smile of objective reason. It demands a sharp mind and sharper wit, and its practitioners hone their blades in the Darwinist crucible of the peer review and high-brow popular press.

Contrary to the popular facade which paints science as an ascetic realm where cool heads and the scientific method prevails, "truth" is often brought to the fore by sheer will and persistence, or by simply waiting long enough for the old guard to die off: Alfred Wegener's theories of continental drift, not accepted until decades after his death; Michael Coe's fascinating account of a single "great" scholar holding back an entire field of study in Breaking the Maya Code.

Such predilections are only exacerbated in the social sciences and the humanities, where experimental data cannot be readily produced to test contrary assertions. And Christian conviction can only compound it. I don't mean the truly contrarian convictions--such as believing the world was created in a literal week--that place the believer completely outside the mainstream, but the scholar who imagines that his work is, in the eyes of the secular world, "tainted" by his faith. This leads the Christian of evangelical spirit to perceive himself as a besieged minority--true to some extent--and worse, one whose opinions are not taken seriously. That is the lowest blow of all.

And hardly unexpected, then, that he should strike back with the weapons his secular education so generously provided him. At my alma mater, Brigham Young University, you can see this dynamic in action at the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), a think tank devoted to Biblical and Book of Mormon archeology and Mormon apologetics. Their peer-reviewed, scholastic work I find readable, worthy of honest debate, and often convincing.

In the arena of polemics (acknowledged as such in their publications), not only do they often choose obscure and deliberately provocative targets, but works by authors embarrassingly less educated than themselves. The FARMS fellows sport degrees from the country's most respected secular institutions, and have no trouble slicing and dicing their enemies to small pieces. It can make for mean satire--think Don Rickles with a Ph.D.--but I'm less than convinced that it serves any useful purpose.

They claim to be following the admonition to be "wise as serpents," but having grown the fangs, they seem to awfully enjoy piercing the flesh. [return]

2. Which isn't to say that great insights are only to be had from the travails of the Lears, Hamlets, and MacBeths. Lewis's point is that we at one extreme pride ourselves on sinful natures that are prosaic at best, and at the other claim a holiness we do not deserve. [return]

3. Here, Lewis is just being snide, and the aspersions fall flat:

He didn't call his father and mother "Father" and "Mother," but Harold and Alberta. They were up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, nonsmokers, and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

It'd be clever to think Lewis was referring to Mormons, except that I doubt that he ever met a Mormon in his life. And Mormons certainly aren't vegetarians, they stuff their houses with as much junk as the next person, and no Mormon child I know refers to his parents by their first names. He only gets three out of six. [return]

4. I have even heard Lewis referred to as "the Mormon theologian, C.S. Lewis." [return]

5. According to the Doors of Peace web site, "Metatron was said to have once been the prophet Enoch (the seventh Patriarch after Adam), who had been taken up by God and given a coronet, 72 wings and innumerable eyes. His flesh was transformed into flame, his sinews into fire, his bones into embers, and he was surrounded by storm, whirlwinds, thunder and lightning. Enoch had been a scribe, and as Metatron he continued his functions, becoming the heavenly scribe who resides in the 7th Heaven and transcribes all heavenly and earthly events." [return]

6. Which is not to say that the average Mormon would accept this particular interpretation. For a discussion of the transition in Mormon theology away from Joseph Smith and towards a more mainstream (though rather half-hearted), Augustinian belief system, see Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy by O. Kendall White, Jr.

While I essentially agree with White's plot of the evolution of accepted Mormon belief, I reject the global finitism inherent in what he calls "metaphysical materialism." I propose another branch of Mormon theology that I would describe as "Non-finite." That is, the universe as we perceive it, and all matter, space, and time is God's unique creation. Or, more precisely, this finite universe, and everything in it--except our souls--constitutes a small subset of God's greater infinite existence. However, the nature of our (finite) universe, and the heavy and far-reaching demands of agency, imposes upon God finite characteristics when dealing with human beings. According to Eugene England,

God is [thus] not absolutely omnipotent in the traditional Christian sense; he has limits imposed by the co-eternal nature of other components of the universe which he did not create, such as matter, and eternal laws, and especially human intelligences. As modern revelation teaches us, God is bound when we do what he says, that is, he is limited to some extent, required to respond in certain ways by our obedience to the eternal laws he teaches us. In other words, besides being infinite in many important ways (such as providing an Atonement infinitely able to save those who will accept it), he could in some ways be thought of as finite. [return]

7. See "Pelagius and Pelagianism" in the Catholic Encyclopedia. [return]

8. As Eugene England puts it, "There seems to be at present a bad case of loss of nerve, of preferring negative, safe religion to the positive, adventuresome kind championed by the founders of Mormonism." [return]

9. Okay, I'm not being very nice. But then the devout Baptist considers Joseph Smith just as wacky and heretical. All's fair. [return]

10. "When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion out to be an enormous error conceived by priests, at least they were able to explain its persistence by the interest of the sacerdotal caste had in deceiving the masses. But if the peoples themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas, at the same time that they were the dupes, how has this extraordinary hoax been able to perpetuate itself throughout the course of history?" (Émile Durkheim, quoted in Nonzero by Robert Wright.) [return]

11. Mr. MacPhee (in That Hideous Strength) speaks of a bear that "would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except some other bear that none of us had ever heard of." He is of course referring to Mr. Bultitude, though the description apply well to Iorek Byrnison. [return]

12. Another interesting (and I'm sure coincidental) parallel between Pullman's Golden Compass and Joseph Smith's Liahona can be found in the Book of Mormon:

And it came to pass that as my father arose in the morning, and went forth to the tent door, to his great astonishment he beheld upon the ground a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness. (1 Ne. 16:10)

And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the thing which our fathers call a ball, or director--or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it. (Alma 37:38) [return]

13. Paraphrasing Seneca, "When shall we live, if not now?" [return]

14. You can reference the article at the Magellan's Log web site. [return]

15. Compare also Moses 5:10-12, and Paradise Lost, 12: 470-474. Here Adam contemplates being cast out of Eden:

O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! [return]

16. A review of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass by Daniel P. Moloney (May 2001). [return]

Labels: book reviews, deep thoughts, lds, pullman, religion, science fiction