John C. Wright ([info]johncwright) wrote,
@ 2006-09-22 13:05:00
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Seperation of Church and Spaceship VI

By one of those odd (may I say Providential?) coincidences, someone answered by challenge to write a fantasy in a Christian background.  I had just been writing about Job, and lo, here is a modern take on the oldest and saddest tale still in print.

I was just sent an advanced reading copy of THE BOOK OF JOBY by Mark J. Ferrari. I don't know when the book is going to hit your bookstores, but probably not this quarter, since the publisher is still soliciting quotes for the dust-jackets. Maybe by Spring of next year? Usually I cannot recommend the books I am sent; some are bad, some I have no time to read, and I do not want to lend my name to a work I cannot confidently recommend, lest my recommendations be no longer honored.

But this one ... this one ... is something special.

This book is the real thing. It has the strong moral core of something by Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, but also the sense of elfin awe and melancholy one might see in the "People" stories of Zenna Henderson.

Three children are talking about their new schoolteacher:

"How did he hear anything outside a closed ring?" Bellindi insisted.

"So, he's of the blood and doesn't know it yet," said Sophie. "Hawk didn't know it either when he first came, remember? Lots of people don't."

"And what about the Earthquake and the Storm the night he got here?" Asked Vesper.

The BOOK OF JOBY should have been called the Book of Joy. The magic of childhood, the magic of Camelot, the grand mystery of Creation, the tears of humanity, the petty cruelties of Hell, all are within these leaves. From schoolboy bullies to homeless shelters to an enchanted hometown where time stands still, from shy first love to tragedy and death, the Mark Ferari weaves his spell. If you have been wearied by the dry, narrow, sarcastic books, bitter in the mouth like iron, so much in evidence these days, here is an oasis in the wasteland, here are deep waters to refresh you.

If Wormwood from SCREWTAPE LETTERS had been assigned the task of corrupting Wart from ONCE AND FUTURE KING, set perhaps in Pottersville from ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE or The City from LITTLE, BIG then the result might approach what Mark Ferari has done. Return to the wonder and grandeur and, yes, the sorrow you once knew, back when the earth was young and heaven was near.


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[info]carbonelle
2006-09-22 05:41 pm UTC (link)
(Forthcoming) Books in Print and the Tor website proving unhelpful, I googled "Mark Ferrari" and discovered that he's also an accomplished artist. According to a MileHiCon progress report, his book is due out in the spring of 2007.

From your description it would appear that The Book of Joby might be appropriate for a teenage audience.

If this is a case, would you be willing to loan me your copy for me to review for WashYARG?

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Cool!
[info]elliot_h
2006-09-22 08:52 pm UTC (link)
Wow! Thanks for the heads-up. This sounds like it's a must-read.


By-the-by, since you've been talking about religion and SF/F, can I ask you a somewhat related question?

I've been writing reviews of relevant SF/F books on my own blog and for the Christian Fandom website, and I usually try to include a few paragraphs on the theological symbolism and/or ethical ideas in a book. Well, recently I read (and enjoyed) your Orphans of Chaos, and was thinking about writing a review of it. But I got stumped on one point.

When Miss Daw explains her Donatist beliefs to Amelia, she complains that the canon of the Bible is incorrect. In that section, she makes a few claims which seem rather odd, even for a Donatist - I'm not a biblical scholar, but her account seems at odds with even secular scholarship. In places she sounds like a neo-pagan who doesn't know much about history, which is strange since she was supposedly there when it happened. The most obvious bit is when she says that though their Gospels are written in sophisticated Greek, Luke and John were actually illiterate fishermen. That made me pause - Luke? Tradition says he was a Greek physician. The Bible never claims otherwise.

So I wanted to ask you - what's up with that? Was that on purpose, or just a typo? Did you agree with her when you wrote the book? Does she come from some alternate reality or something?

If this is explained in "Fugitives of Chaos," just let me know and I'll head off to read it.

Thanks!

PS. Christian Fandom is here: http://www.christian-fandom.org/

And my SF/F reviews are collected here: http://clawoftheconciliator.blogspot.com/2006/06/science-fiction-fantasy-and-faith-book.html

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Re: Cool!
[info]johncwright
2006-09-25 02:44 pm UTC (link)
Thelxiepeia 's story is a combination of fact and fiction. The Donatists were real, but their conflict with the Roman Church was more political and cultural than based on (as far as we know) any conflict of doctrine. They were Carthaginians who still resented their Roman conquerors. I selected them because they are one of the earliest known schisms in the history of Christianity, and one that is most entirely wiped out. Gnostics and other second-century heretics are still around (you can find their web pages).

The atmosphere your humble author was trying to project was one of disorienting isolation, similar to what Amelia feels at that time, of being oppressed and surrounded by lies. I thought it would be interesting to present the viewpoint of a pagan goddess who converted to Christianity, and I stole a folktale from Irish myth about a mermaid who converts, figuring that mermaid and sirens are much the same race. I thought it would be ironic to make her a member of an ancient schism, one long forgotten, which she regarded and still regards as the only legitimate Church--her notion of heaven is that it is occupied by a few people from North Africa who lived between the first and fifth centuries AD.

The Bible had not been reduced to a canon at that time, and so her claim that certain books were left out is undisputable. The irony is that she regards the Apocrypha as canon and the canon as apocryphal. But there is no historical basis in real life to back her claim that Luke was actually an illiterate fisherman rather than the physician tradition says he is--the line was added merely for atmosphere, to imply that everything we know about the tradition is wrong.

Had I known that THE DA VINCI CODE was about to prove, beyond doubt, that the reading public truly knows nothing at all about history or the Bible, I would have had her make much more outrageous claims, such as that Jesus was a Buddhist who lived in 1492, or that the real Messiah was Vespasian, who substituted a wrong-doer, Simon, on the cross to perish in his place.

Oddly enough, this one scene in one chapter has generated more comment than most of the rest of the book. Some reviewers have decided the book is pro-Christian apologetics, even though this passage (written by an atheist) is a mockery of the Church. I have to assume that, for some people, a condemnation of the Church insufficiently heavy-handed and crass is tantamount to praising it: to them, any writer who is not Phillip Pullman is CS Lewis.

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Thelxiepeia's tale
[info]elliot_h
2006-09-25 04:15 pm UTC (link)
Thanks for this! That clears things up.

St. Augustine went after the Donatists for their rigorism and perfectionism, right? But as you say, aside from that, they were pretty orthodox. That was one thing that puzzled me about Thelxiepeia's account - some of the sacred books she lists were Gnostic ones that I didn't think the Donatists would have used.

Since I'd seen your explanation of your conversion on the Web before I read the book, and knew that you were an atheist when you wrote it, I had a general sense of your position. I think that passage certainly does create a sense of disorientation, of 'a world of lies.' The combination of real historical arguments (I've heard that A.N. Wilson claims, as Thelxiepeia does, that St. Paul created a watered-down neo-Platonist theogeny around Christ - a claim which scholars like N.T. Wright argue is nonsensical) with things that seemed impossible (Luke as fisherman), certainly left *me* confused. And so I wasn't sure if you had been satirizing a 'Da Vinci Code'-style history, or creating one of your own which you took semi-seriously, or hinting at something entirely different.

You've mentioned elsewhere that two years prior to your actual conversion you had begun a philosophical investigation of Christianity or at least theism. My impression was that you didn't believe it, but you'd begun to feel that it was an intellectually serious system, one that was internally coherent. Is that impression accurate? I may have been letting that idea affect my reading too much, but I got a vague sense from it that you were seriously pondering religious ideas when you wrote the book, and that you let some of these concerns show. Christianity turned up in the book more often, and more sympathetically, than I would have expected from most other atheist authors - the Prelapsarians, or Quentin's prayer, or Thelxiepeia's story about the saint. In short: I didn't think that you were a Christian, but I got the feeling that Christianity was on your mind.

Was that the case, or is it, as you say, just that you were less aggressive than Philip Pullman and his ilk, so that by contrast you seemed to be a sympathizer?

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The Merman's Children
[info]jordan179
2006-09-27 08:10 pm UTC (link)
Did you ever read Poul Anderson's _The Merman's Children_? One of the merfolk in that story does, in fact, become a Christian, which is an interesting outcome because this is set in a world in which Christianity and Elvenkind are naturally opposed forces (which is similar to some of the medieval myths).

- Jordan

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Re: The Merman's Children
[info]johncwright
2006-09-29 05:35 pm UTC (link)
I assume he read the same folktale as I did.

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