From the Mouths of Babes

For the last few years, I’ve (on very sporadic occasions) been looking for good recent Christian fiction. Now, I will confess that in my mind the desire generally takes the form of a question: Where are the C. S. Lewises of today? I say I confess it because it’s a ridiculous question. Why don’t I ask where the Dante of today is? The Shakespeare of today? Writers of this caliber don’t, to borrow a phrase from a cliche about a different subject, exactly grow on trees. Part of what makes C. S. Lewis “C. S. Lewis” is that there wasn’t one before and wasn’t one afterwards. So my search as defined by that question is futile.

But if I mean that I wish to find an author who expresses a Christian view in fiction of an eloquent prose while exploring human mysteries and philosophical conundrums without claiming to answer all questions with shallowly quoted Bible verses, I have some hope of finding satisfaction. (Now, I trust that any Christian reading this ridiculously niche blog will know what I mean. But just in case, I’ll say that if one of my children were to die, I believe that the friend who cried with me would be displaying a more Christian response than the one who told me that God works all things together for good for those who love Him and then sat silently with dry eyes.) Every time I look through the internet’s tragically small number of lists of good recent Christian fiction, the recommendation that seems to come up most is Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. Now I know why.

Enger starts the book with a miracle. I’m sorry for the slow start on this post, but I have to interrupt myself for a bit more background on what I’m looking for. I believe that the Christian novelist faces an almost insurmountable hurdle merely from the definitions of the terms. How can a Christian outlook be shown without at least the implication that miracles are possible? And yet, how can a humanly contrived story be good if miracles solve all the problems? Enger’s solution is one of the two main factors that led me to love his book. By putting the miracles up front, he doesn’t escape any writer’s obligation to resolve conflicts without recourse to a deus ex machina. The miracles don’t answer any questions; they only raise them.

Reuben’s father walks on air one evening (without knowing it: his eyes are closed in prayer), but God doesn’t heal Reuben’s asthma. A miracle clears up some adult acne in one scene, but God allows an incident of sexual assault, a kidnapping, and a cold-blooded killing. Now isn’t this just like the Christian life? Every Christian eventually has to grapple with the question of why God doesn’t give us miraculous relief from the problems that seem most important to us. Why hasn’t God healed my hand? Why didn’t God make certain coworkers nicer to me? Why hasn’t God kept all our family holidays happy and argument-free?

Now I’ll tell you what I really think. I think God puts us here as an author populates a world with characters: in order to have stories to tell. Without sexual assault, kidnapping, and killing, Enger has no story to tell. And without weird fingers and colleagues who kept me sleepless at night worrying about their lawlessness and relatives who turned holiday celebrations into obligations, I would have no story worth telling, no life history that will one day bring glory to God in a way unique to my experience. Isn’t the point of my adversity not what God does to get me out of it but what I do in response to it? How else am I supposed to comfort others with the comfort I’ve experienced in the midst of hardship if I haven’t had hardship? How am I supposed to count it all joy when trials come my way if none come my way? (You see, I can quote the Bible, too. But the next time I have a trial, don’t tell me glibly to “count it all joy” or you may find yourself in need of comfort!) The structure of Enger’s story makes it very clear that Reuben’s dad’s bit of levitation isn’t anywhere near as important in the long run as what Reuben and his family do in response to bloodshed.

My second favorite aspect of the book takes much less time to explain. Enger pulls off an excellent trick in prose style. Reuben tells his story in first person and frequently says that he’s not a writer. His nine-year-old sister, Swede, he claims, is the real wordsmith, and he includes several extensive quotations from her overwrought, cliched, sing-songy epic poem about an outlaw in the Wild West. It’s hard to imitate bad writing. I’ve tried, and it always comes out too egregious. But Enger hits the bulls-eye with Swede. The poem is thoroughly entertaining and absolutely essential; it develops Swede’s character (develops it, in fact, both in her world and in ours), and Reuben’s admiration for it reveals parts of his. But it’s not good. As bad as his sister’s poem might be, though, Reuben believes he lacks her level of talent. And he isn’t totally wrong. It’s not that Reuben indulges in false modesty or has a fluency that he just can’t see in his own work; his grammatical stumbles and sometimes flat descriptions are right there on the page for us to see. And yet, in the end, this fellow who consistently can’t find the right words without seeking inspiration in a child’s purple doggerel ends up speaking powerfully. I’d say the effect is something like Huck Finn only different. But you really have to read the book to understand what I mean. I don’t have the words to describe it.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

I love J. R. R. Tolkien. And I join others similarly enamored in saying that the only problem with The Lord of the Rings is that it isn’t long enough. So I extend my deepest admiration and thanks to his son Christopher for devoting his life to working through the good professor’s mountains of notes and palimpsested drafts in order to give us more of Middle Earth. The Silmarillion is my second favorite book, so for that alone I owe Christopher Tolkien a huge debt of gratitude.

I don’t need everything he’s published in the last forty years, though; the two volumes of Lost Tales, which promised to give me a longer Silmarillion, only confused me by the variant stories and names. And I don’t begin to want to read the most recent additions to “The History of Middle Earth” providing early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. But the world is a better place after the publication of the extended version of the tragic saga of The Children of Hurin. And what Tolkien fan wouldn’t treasure the fragments of The Lost Road, in which the medieval Saxon Ælfwine discovers the Straight Road leading to the Blessed Realm (hidden from mortals after the Valar made the world round at the fall of Númenor) and writings that show the connections between Sindarin and Old English? I’m blessed just to know that Elendil = Ælfwine = Alvin = elf friend.

This month I reread the first of Christopher’s collections of fragments and drafts after The Silmarillion: the Unfinished Tales. It was published in 1991, long before Christopher started numbering his volumes with roman numerals as if they were Super Bowls or Chicago albums. It had been, as the math tells me, twenty-nine years since I read the book, and I had forgotten almost everything. The memory that stood out the most clearly was mostly inaccurate. But I was in a the bliss of Valinor all over again as I reread it.

First of the many highlights in the book, I have to mention the extended version of Gandalf’s explanation for why he sent a hobbit with dwarves to kill Smaug, and what exactly any of it had to do with defeating Sauron. The little story was Tolkien’s means of retrofitting The Hobbit, which he wrote before he had ever conceived of the importance of the ring Bilbo obtains from Gollum, let alone imagining the Lord of said Ring, into the narrative logic of the great trilogy. Did he ever mean to publish the fragment, or was it only for his own satisfaction?

The book also contains such gems as an essay on the background of the Wizards, which reveals some of the reason Radagast the Brown had so little to do with anything everyone else saw as important. There’s also a geographical description of the island of Númenor and a story about the origin of the palantiri. Confusing but fascinating were the many versions of the tale of Galadriel. Apparently, Tolkien tried late in his life to work out the details of a story in which Galadriel’s struggles with conformity were revealed. Whether she merely refused to cooperate with the elves at the end of the First Age or actually committed some perfidy, Tolkien developed the idea that she had lived for centuries afterwards with guilt and shame and self-doubt. The touching scenario, in any of the five or six versions offered, explains so much about the scene with Frodo at the scrying pool! The story of Aldarion and Erendis is beautifully melancholy, but what I remembered as the central image of Erendis staring hopelessly out to sea doesn’t happen until the last sentence of the last editorial endnote. (Women should not marry sailors – or musicians.)

But this time, for me, the best part of Unfinished Tales was the extended story of Tuor. This hero gets far fewer pages in The Silmarillion than his cousin Turin, but I think his story is even better. Tuor befriends Ulmo, the Vala of the Waters, and is led by swans to find a magic shield. He’s given a divine task of warning Turgon. He lives incognito with bandits for a while. Maybe it’s all the ways in which Tolkien draws from the Arthurian legends here that attracts me so much. Sadly, though, this Unfinished Tale ends just when Tuor gets to the hidden city of Gondolin. (The description of the hidden path’s seven successive gates is by itself enough to sell me on this truncated story.)

But, like discovering the warming appearance of Eärendil in a cold evening sky, I now find that Christopher Tolkien, still hard at work, has only two years ago published a polished version of the complete tale of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin. I’ll start hinting to my family now that I will be as happy as a hobbit with a full larder if I could start reading that book on December 25.

From the Baptizer of Imagination

Somewhere George MacDonald made the excellent observation that all mirrors are magic mirrors. Who hasn’t looked in one and thought of the reversed human image inside as the living being who sees you as the reflection? Or tried to imagine crossing the glass and moving into the unseen flip-flop world around the corner or through the door that limits your sight of Mirrorland? Knowing MacDonald’s line about magic mirrors, I sensed good things to come when his Lilith started with a magic mirror in the garret.

MacDonald wrote many “realistic” novels (well, as realistic as Victorian literature gets with all its coincidences and hidden identities and long-thought-dead spouses suddenly reappearing) and several fantasies. I prefer the novels but enjoy the riddles of his fantasies. And Lilith is chock-full of riddles. When Mr. Vane (I couldn’t help thinking of Bunyan when I discovered the protagonist’s name) ends up in a parallel world where ravens read books that are fake decorations in our world and where all the best people are perpetually asleep, the reader has to start thinking. Sometimes you have to think about when to stop thinking and just enjoy for a while since things get so bizarre. What could be called the weirdest riddles are the easiest to understand when reading Christian literature: people have to die to truly live and aren’t themselves until they give up themselves. If you still don’t understand those riddles (and does even the most faithful Christian truly understand?), at least you recognize that they come straight from the Savior’s parables.

It’s the other, more routine puzzles that make the story so murky. It’s the mystery land where our rules don’t work. It’s the string of elements that seem like connected symbols but without obvious connections or clear symbolic reference. For instance, Vane hears rumors of people with fairy-tale names: one is called the Cat Lady. Then he encounters a lot of cats, some of the domestic variety and some of the leopardous. (Hah! I just added a sixth member to the very select list of common-ish English words ending in -dous.) Then some of the larger cats change into princesses. But neither of them is the Cat Lady. I think. Other shrouded vales of mystery abound. The reader slowly meets the various characters he hears about early on and learns their names, but still without knowing who’s good and who’s bad. The characters eventually seem to fall into two camps, each of which calls the other bad. But how to decide whether Mr. Vane is choosing correctly between them or asking the right questions? It’s like a blown-up version of the two-doors-liar-and-truthteller riddle.

And yet it’s fun to be confused by this book. Today I thought about sewing while reading Lilith. My mind often wanders while reading; I’m the kind of reader who can suddenly realize that the words of a whole page have each passed under my eyes without any meaning registering on my mind because I’ve been thinking of something else the whole time. William James calls the habit a mark of genius, and I choose to agree. Usually the mental sidetracks are inspired directly by the topics in the book. But the sewing thread (see what I did there with the word “thread”?) came up because of the way I have to read Lilith. Like a backstitch (I don’t really know anything about sewing; I think it’s a backstitch), I have to go forward a bit and then back to search for what I missed, then forward again until I realize I’ve gone too far again and have to scramble back to tighten up that hem.  

One thing stood out clear as crystal right away, though. The land behind the mirror’s glass has no rivers, no ponds, and no tears. But once Lilith – Adam’s first wife according to the Talmud, and the monarch of the fairy land in MacDonald’s book – has learned to cry, the waters cascading from her eyes meet waters springing up from below the surface, and rivers start to flow. MacDonald gets to make a pretty point about remorse and repentance with this fantastic image. But the moment also struck me as the clear inspiration for Lewis’s coming of spring in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a moment brought about at the end of the reign of the White Witch, who, says the narrator, is descended from Lilith, the first wife of Adam.