Issue 157
This is going to be another long-form edition of the blog.
The Top Eleven Worst Things about Left Behind.
Well, I've been reading a series of blog posts on the book "Left Behind." They are on slacktivist.typepad.com, but it should be noted that there is a much more servicable table of contents of the posts here. The series of blog posts chronicles Fred Clark and his attempts to go through the novels of the bestselling-series "Left Behind." It took him five years, but already, he's finished the first book. And even though the man himself is an Evangelical christian (I won't hold it against him), he disagrees with LaHaye and Jenkins on many points and goes so far to say that they are among the worst books of all time. In essence, like Plan 9, but without the entertainment value (like Orgy of the Dead.) Incidentally, he mentions in his last post on the first book that a comprehensive list of how many ways the book fails would be way too long. Here is my noble attempt at the most glaring flaws with the book, and some occasional contrasting with the works of others, particularly Trevanian and Herge (the only real adventure stories I read).
11. The ideology.
Simply put, one big problem with the book, possibly the cause of one of many of its flaws, is the ideology that is horned into the book. Simply put, it seems like the whole point of the book and its series is to gloat over an event that hasn't happened yet and most likely will never happen, and how it makes them superior to non-christians. And believe me, many other asinine aspects of fundamentalist theology are there, particularly a subtext that any peace-maker is in league with the antichrist, that any believers in any other religion are not only wrong (one I could let slide), but also insincere (since, apparently, everybody believes in their conception of God), and the infamous line "if any of it [is] true, then all of it [was] true."
10. Too few locations.
I love a good chamber piece of a story that can be set in only a few locations. Of course, an airport novel like this tends to jump from exotic location to exotic location. Before i get to how this relates to LB, it should be noted that in Shibumi, we visit places like New York, The Basque region, Japan, and England, and that Herge put Tintin on five continents and the Moon. What locations are shown in Left Behind? Ninety percent of the book takes place either near Chicago or Manhattan. The other ten percent are devoted to news reports from Jerusalem, and two excursions to Atlanta and London, both of which prove entirely pointless.
9. Phones.
What is with LaHaye and Jenkins' obsession with phone calls? They seem to take up a significant portion of the plot.
8. Airline Travel should not be this easy.
Throughout the book, characters travel on planes with no apparent fear on the part of anybody (from passengers to the airline companies) of a reprisal of the rapture. In fact, both of the pointless excursions I mentioned in the book are done by plane. Of course, anybody should know that even after 9/11, airplane travel (among many other things) would never be so easy, especially two weeks after the event (early on in the review, Fred stopped calling the event which sets all this into action "The Rapture", and simply called it "The Event", to mirror how the unsaved people that seem to have been left behind would have percieved it.)
7. Electromagnetism.
Throughout the book, there only seem to be two explanations for the Event. One of which, is, of course, the rapture theory. The other theory, introduced halfway into the book by Nicolae Carpathia (more on him later) and his botanist sidekick Chaim Rosenzweig, is that electromagnetism took children, because "children have less electromagnetism than adults." No, electromagnetism doesn't work that way. Yes, these are the only theories presented as probable by anybody in the entire book. Fred decides early on that, because of their incuriousness about this most jaw-dropping of events, most of the people in the book have already read the book jacket and realized that it's God's work.
6. The death of Stonagal.
Jonathan Stonagal is a businessman who was the mentor and puppetmaster to Nicolae Carpathia, and, for a brief time in the book, is considered to be a likely suspect for the Antichrist. However, in the last chapter of the book, he is shot. [Yes, i know, there are spoilers, but it's not like anybody would want to read this book anyway.] The events surrounding his assassination, however are done so horribly wrong that they just need to be seen to be believed. Better yet, read posts 176-180 of Slacktivist's deconstruction.
5. Implied goodness.
Our two protagonists, Buck Williams and Rayford Steele, have one thing in common at the outset. This is, that they are written to be sympathetic only by the writers telling us that they are sympathetic. Buck Williams is actually called "The Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time," even though there are only a few snippets of his writing included, none of them even decent, and he never turns in a story to his superiors. He spends the first two weeks after the Event writing a story about it for next week's issue. He never gets it down. Rayford's problem is that he is considered a good man who loved his wife and kids by the narrator, but his actions seem to fly in the face of this. For instance, his wife Irene and son Raymie/Rayford Jr. (really) are taken in the Rapture. Never does he show any real grief at this. Of course, we will see how deep the rabbit hole goes when we get to #1. In other works, like Shibumi, we don't find Trevanian saying repeatedly that Nicholai Hel is a badass of the highest order. It is something that anybody who is reading the book should figure out. As it turns out, Rayford and Buck are supposed to be author surrogates for Tim Lahaye, and Jerry Jenkins. If this is true, and the authors are both leaders of the evangelical movement, then it appears that millions are hanging on the words of people with some severe personality disorders. Mystifyingly, it seems to never have occurred to the authors to portray them as anything but the unambiguous good guys.
4. The Love lives of our leads.
Throughout the book, it is revealed that Rayford has been lusting after his coworker Hattie, who was much younger, but never really went all the way with her. I'm sure that this is supposed to come off as a sort of perverse "courtly love", but it really ends up just coming off as simply perverse, especially considering that he ends up telling her that he only was in this pseudo-relationship for the sex that they never had. Buck also has a strange relationship with Chloe. I say strange because it's unusually chaste. Yes, Buck is an unsaved Ivy League Yuppie, and Chloe seems to have rejected religion for the time being, but it never seems to occur to neither of them to be physically attracted to one another. It almost seems like a scene from a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical without the music. This is made even stranger in the film, which features Buck falling for Hattie. This is, of course, because Kirk refuses to do a kissing scene with anybody else but his wife, who plays Hattie.
3. Nicolae Carpathia.
Where to begin? Did you ever see the UN scenes in Superman IV and think that there was no worse scene imaginable that could possibly involve the UN? You were wrong. Nicolae makes his first prominent appearance as the newly-elected president of Romania, and tries to woo the UN (looking to be Secretary-general, even though no SG has ever been a head of state, much less a sitting head of state, especially not a just-recently elected head of state, and certainly not one elected so soon after a cataclysmic event) by giving a speech which consists of the names and installation dates of every secretary-general, a recitation of the names of all member-states, and a listing of all of UN's agencies and their headquartered cities. He does this in nine languages. It appears that the Antichrist is supposed to be an ultra-charismatic figure. I suppose that there's a lot of possible models: cult leaders (indeed, the tape of Jim Jones' last sermon is still circulating across the net), actors, and even their own ilk. However, So far, he comes across as being profound by the world of the book, while to any reader with sense can see that he seems more like some sort of autistic savant. Later, he gives his agenda, and it drives people wild with excitement: 90% of all nukes are to be destroyed and the remaining 10% are to be given to him personally (yes, a Romanian Raymond Babbit succeeds where so many have failed, and even Superman had the sense to ask for all of them), one world currency (which makes no sense considering that Stonagal in particular makes a lot of money from currency exchange), one world language (yes, this is even though he loves to show off his polylinguality), one world religion, and a new UN Headquarters and palace for himself in "New Babylon."
2. Israel's Nuclear War.
At one point early on in the novel, the following chain of events is told in flashback: Israel develops a miraculous fertilizer which basically turns the barren wasteland of Israel into Iowa. By this point, Israel has not only made peace with its neighbors, but absorbed several of them with little complaint inside or out. Then, however, Russia sends out all of its bombers and WMDs (apparently, Russia's security council seems to have learned diplomacy from Ali G) to wipe Israel off the map (for decades, evangelicals have claimed that Russia is likely to attack Israel in the near future. They have never given any real reason why this would happen besides "it is written." Yes, Russia did support the PLO, but that doesn't mean that something of this scale is likely when they failed to bother to do a full-scale nuclear strike against us in the cold war.) However, it turns out that nobody gets hurt by the bombs because God protected them. I really wish I was making this up.
1. Nobody Cares.
In the Rapture, not only are all true Christians taken by God, but all children who haven't hit puberty yet. It appears that, while it appears that the christians are their focus, they seem to have completely ignored the fact that the sudden disappearance of all children would be enough to plunge the world into a cataclysm of grief. I mean, 3000 people died on September 11, but it still had the world paralyzed with fear for a while. Meanwhile, 1/3 of the world's population is vaporized instantly, and it's the demographic that the world seems to care the most about: children. The sight of grief should be ubiquitous in the pages of the book, but they're not. Even one of the protagonists fails to show any grief for the loss of his wife and son.
Well, I only scraped the surface of how much this book fails. Read Slacktivist's posts.
The Top Eleven Worst Things about Left Behind.
Well, I've been reading a series of blog posts on the book "Left Behind." They are on slacktivist.typepad.com, but it should be noted that there is a much more servicable table of contents of the posts here. The series of blog posts chronicles Fred Clark and his attempts to go through the novels of the bestselling-series "Left Behind." It took him five years, but already, he's finished the first book. And even though the man himself is an Evangelical christian (I won't hold it against him), he disagrees with LaHaye and Jenkins on many points and goes so far to say that they are among the worst books of all time. In essence, like Plan 9, but without the entertainment value (like Orgy of the Dead.) Incidentally, he mentions in his last post on the first book that a comprehensive list of how many ways the book fails would be way too long. Here is my noble attempt at the most glaring flaws with the book, and some occasional contrasting with the works of others, particularly Trevanian and Herge (the only real adventure stories I read).
11. The ideology.
Simply put, one big problem with the book, possibly the cause of one of many of its flaws, is the ideology that is horned into the book. Simply put, it seems like the whole point of the book and its series is to gloat over an event that hasn't happened yet and most likely will never happen, and how it makes them superior to non-christians. And believe me, many other asinine aspects of fundamentalist theology are there, particularly a subtext that any peace-maker is in league with the antichrist, that any believers in any other religion are not only wrong (one I could let slide), but also insincere (since, apparently, everybody believes in their conception of God), and the infamous line "if any of it [is] true, then all of it [was] true."
10. Too few locations.
I love a good chamber piece of a story that can be set in only a few locations. Of course, an airport novel like this tends to jump from exotic location to exotic location. Before i get to how this relates to LB, it should be noted that in Shibumi, we visit places like New York, The Basque region, Japan, and England, and that Herge put Tintin on five continents and the Moon. What locations are shown in Left Behind? Ninety percent of the book takes place either near Chicago or Manhattan. The other ten percent are devoted to news reports from Jerusalem, and two excursions to Atlanta and London, both of which prove entirely pointless.
9. Phones.
What is with LaHaye and Jenkins' obsession with phone calls? They seem to take up a significant portion of the plot.
8. Airline Travel should not be this easy.
Throughout the book, characters travel on planes with no apparent fear on the part of anybody (from passengers to the airline companies) of a reprisal of the rapture. In fact, both of the pointless excursions I mentioned in the book are done by plane. Of course, anybody should know that even after 9/11, airplane travel (among many other things) would never be so easy, especially two weeks after the event (early on in the review, Fred stopped calling the event which sets all this into action "The Rapture", and simply called it "The Event", to mirror how the unsaved people that seem to have been left behind would have percieved it.)
7. Electromagnetism.
Throughout the book, there only seem to be two explanations for the Event. One of which, is, of course, the rapture theory. The other theory, introduced halfway into the book by Nicolae Carpathia (more on him later) and his botanist sidekick Chaim Rosenzweig, is that electromagnetism took children, because "children have less electromagnetism than adults." No, electromagnetism doesn't work that way. Yes, these are the only theories presented as probable by anybody in the entire book. Fred decides early on that, because of their incuriousness about this most jaw-dropping of events, most of the people in the book have already read the book jacket and realized that it's God's work.
6. The death of Stonagal.
Jonathan Stonagal is a businessman who was the mentor and puppetmaster to Nicolae Carpathia, and, for a brief time in the book, is considered to be a likely suspect for the Antichrist. However, in the last chapter of the book, he is shot. [Yes, i know, there are spoilers, but it's not like anybody would want to read this book anyway.] The events surrounding his assassination, however are done so horribly wrong that they just need to be seen to be believed. Better yet, read posts 176-180 of Slacktivist's deconstruction.
5. Implied goodness.
Our two protagonists, Buck Williams and Rayford Steele, have one thing in common at the outset. This is, that they are written to be sympathetic only by the writers telling us that they are sympathetic. Buck Williams is actually called "The Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time," even though there are only a few snippets of his writing included, none of them even decent, and he never turns in a story to his superiors. He spends the first two weeks after the Event writing a story about it for next week's issue. He never gets it down. Rayford's problem is that he is considered a good man who loved his wife and kids by the narrator, but his actions seem to fly in the face of this. For instance, his wife Irene and son Raymie/Rayford Jr. (really) are taken in the Rapture. Never does he show any real grief at this. Of course, we will see how deep the rabbit hole goes when we get to #1. In other works, like Shibumi, we don't find Trevanian saying repeatedly that Nicholai Hel is a badass of the highest order. It is something that anybody who is reading the book should figure out. As it turns out, Rayford and Buck are supposed to be author surrogates for Tim Lahaye, and Jerry Jenkins. If this is true, and the authors are both leaders of the evangelical movement, then it appears that millions are hanging on the words of people with some severe personality disorders. Mystifyingly, it seems to never have occurred to the authors to portray them as anything but the unambiguous good guys.
4. The Love lives of our leads.
Throughout the book, it is revealed that Rayford has been lusting after his coworker Hattie, who was much younger, but never really went all the way with her. I'm sure that this is supposed to come off as a sort of perverse "courtly love", but it really ends up just coming off as simply perverse, especially considering that he ends up telling her that he only was in this pseudo-relationship for the sex that they never had. Buck also has a strange relationship with Chloe. I say strange because it's unusually chaste. Yes, Buck is an unsaved Ivy League Yuppie, and Chloe seems to have rejected religion for the time being, but it never seems to occur to neither of them to be physically attracted to one another. It almost seems like a scene from a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical without the music. This is made even stranger in the film, which features Buck falling for Hattie. This is, of course, because Kirk refuses to do a kissing scene with anybody else but his wife, who plays Hattie.
3. Nicolae Carpathia.
Where to begin? Did you ever see the UN scenes in Superman IV and think that there was no worse scene imaginable that could possibly involve the UN? You were wrong. Nicolae makes his first prominent appearance as the newly-elected president of Romania, and tries to woo the UN (looking to be Secretary-general, even though no SG has ever been a head of state, much less a sitting head of state, especially not a just-recently elected head of state, and certainly not one elected so soon after a cataclysmic event) by giving a speech which consists of the names and installation dates of every secretary-general, a recitation of the names of all member-states, and a listing of all of UN's agencies and their headquartered cities. He does this in nine languages. It appears that the Antichrist is supposed to be an ultra-charismatic figure. I suppose that there's a lot of possible models: cult leaders (indeed, the tape of Jim Jones' last sermon is still circulating across the net), actors, and even their own ilk. However, So far, he comes across as being profound by the world of the book, while to any reader with sense can see that he seems more like some sort of autistic savant. Later, he gives his agenda, and it drives people wild with excitement: 90% of all nukes are to be destroyed and the remaining 10% are to be given to him personally (yes, a Romanian Raymond Babbit succeeds where so many have failed, and even Superman had the sense to ask for all of them), one world currency (which makes no sense considering that Stonagal in particular makes a lot of money from currency exchange), one world language (yes, this is even though he loves to show off his polylinguality), one world religion, and a new UN Headquarters and palace for himself in "New Babylon."
2. Israel's Nuclear War.
At one point early on in the novel, the following chain of events is told in flashback: Israel develops a miraculous fertilizer which basically turns the barren wasteland of Israel into Iowa. By this point, Israel has not only made peace with its neighbors, but absorbed several of them with little complaint inside or out. Then, however, Russia sends out all of its bombers and WMDs (apparently, Russia's security council seems to have learned diplomacy from Ali G) to wipe Israel off the map (for decades, evangelicals have claimed that Russia is likely to attack Israel in the near future. They have never given any real reason why this would happen besides "it is written." Yes, Russia did support the PLO, but that doesn't mean that something of this scale is likely when they failed to bother to do a full-scale nuclear strike against us in the cold war.) However, it turns out that nobody gets hurt by the bombs because God protected them. I really wish I was making this up.
1. Nobody Cares.
In the Rapture, not only are all true Christians taken by God, but all children who haven't hit puberty yet. It appears that, while it appears that the christians are their focus, they seem to have completely ignored the fact that the sudden disappearance of all children would be enough to plunge the world into a cataclysm of grief. I mean, 3000 people died on September 11, but it still had the world paralyzed with fear for a while. Meanwhile, 1/3 of the world's population is vaporized instantly, and it's the demographic that the world seems to care the most about: children. The sight of grief should be ubiquitous in the pages of the book, but they're not. Even one of the protagonists fails to show any grief for the loss of his wife and son.
Well, I only scraped the surface of how much this book fails. Read Slacktivist's posts.
Labels: Books, Long-Form, Religious Right
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