Mr. Pye by Mervyn Peake

I probably am missing some vital portion of background to do a really good job of explicating this book. I was born two or three generations too late, on the wrong side of the Atlantic, for one thing. And, which I think is probably more important, I'm not Anglican.

(I come from an Episcopalian family, which is as close as Americans get, but we wandered off any vestige of High Churchiness very early in my life, and "as close as Americans get" is not actually that close.)

Mr. Pye is one of the other books by Mervyn Peake, famous in SFF circles for the massive, quirky, half-broken Gormenghast trilogy. (It's not really a trilogy. It's two big books that are basically what Peake wanted them to be, one short book written more-or-less while he was dying, and ideas for more that died with him, though his daughter Maeve Gilmore did expand a few of his notes into a fourth book.)

Unlike the Gormenghast books, Mr. Pye is set in our world. It is fantasy, of a type, but it doesn't look like fantasy for about the first half of the book. I'm afraid that any discussion of the book will "spoil" the fantasy element, so, if you are a purist about such things, stop reading now.

Mr. Pye was published in 1953. Looking at the list of Peake's works, I think it's his only other novel. So we can assume this story was important to him in some way. But it is quirky - even more so than the Gormenghast books, I think, though in a more traditional way.

Harold Pye is a small, round, middle-aged Englishman of unspecified background. As the novel opens, he's taking the boat from Guernsey to Sark, one of the smallest and most distant Channel Islands. He intends to settle in Sark and transform it: he is going to make its people good. Like so many reformers before and after him, he has an unassailable belief that he knows exactly what "good" is, and that he can mold an entire society into that shape.

More importantly, he's a compelling speaker. Even more importantly, Peake is firmly on his side, so when he talks vaguely about "the Great Pal" (his pet name for the Christian God, whom he claims to have long conversations with, though those conversations are not narrated in this book), none of his listeners scoff or laugh or raise any of the thousands of potential objections, many of which a reader will quickly call to mind and may even mutter under his breath while reading.

Instead, he first quickly enlists his landlady, Miss Dredger, who starts calling him "chief" as he calls her "sailor" and the two of them do call-and-response hymns and sea shanties to each other to show how matey they have become. Then, most of the people of the islands - Peake always divides them into natives and residents and visitors, and makes a big deal about the differences at the beginning of the novel in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in the novel - also come under his spell fairly quickly, all caught up in the thrill of the Great Pal.

The local prostitute, Tintagieu - this is the only name she gets; I'm not sure if it's a personal name or a surname or perhaps obscure identifier - for a while looks like she will be the center, or maybe the only resistance to Pye's domination, since she is willful and self-contained and not susceptible to his vague, bland statements. She might also not exactly be a prostitute: it's not clear if she regularly takes payment, but she does sleep with roughly the entire willing male population of the island on a regular basis and has no other obvious support.

Perhaps I should note here that Mr. Pye is not a tightly plotted book. It wanders about, as if it is ambling around the fields and cliffs of Sark on a sightseeing trip, and spends most of its time with Mr. Pye himself saying vague things about his faith and the concerns of his best buddy, the Great Pal. 

Anyway, Tintagieu and the local painter, Thorpe (bad as a painter, stammering, not otherwise characterized) - they're seen as something like a couple in this book, despite Tintagieu's profession (or pastime?) - talk about Pye and his influence, and look like she will do something to counter it, for much of the first half of the book, but nothing comes of it.

Instead, the fantasy element emerges. This is your second chance to stop reading to avoid being spoiled; at this point you only have yourself to blame if you continue.

Mr. Pye starts to grow wings. White-feathered, clearly angelic wings, from his shoulder-blades. At about this time, he also notes that the Great Pal is not talking to him - whether this is "any more" or if he was mistaken or lying before is left as decision for the reader; I know which way I fall.

The wings are weird, and a proper Englishman - even one aiming to convert the entire population of a small island to his quirky version of Christianity, in preparation for possibly doing the same to larger and larger regions of the world - must never do anything weird. If any other English people saw the wings, they would at best shun him, maybe give him the whole Wicker Man treatment, or, even worse: point and laugh and scoff. So, obviously, Pye must start doing evil acts to balance his clear moral purity, which will make the wings shrink and disappear.

Since the author says so, this does work, and Pye kicks over children's sand-castles and secretly lets out all of the contents of the water-cisterns on the island and, oh yes, sneaks out at night to worship Satan in the form of a local goat. These actions might seem to some readers - this one, for example - to be of such radically different levels of "evil" that they don't make any sense as a list, but Pye does them all, and tracks, along with the aid of the redoubtable Dredger, the size of his wings after each evil action.

But, woe! The wings do disappear, but then he gets an itching sensation in his brow, and devil's horns appear there. So he must, at the climax of the book, balance good (telling people about the Great Pal) and evil (hanging out with that goat) to keep both manifestations in check. They see-saw back and forth, and this exhausts Pye, physically and morally and mentally.

Eventually, the locals - I think mostly natives, if that matters - see the horns, make the obvious conclusion, and assemble with pitchforks and Frankenstein rakes to find and capture the now-fleeing Pye. They also call in the constables from Guernsey, because that's what English people do: they might be a mob and a rabble, but by God! they're a mob and rabble that will hand over a miscreant to the proper authorities!

Tintagieu hides Pye in the local jail - the last place they'd look! - until night, when he tries to flee in a way that would never, ever work. And, on the last page of the book, the horse-drawn cart he's fleeing in wrecks, killing the horse and throwing the once again be-winged Pye into the air.

He flies away, of course. And the novel ends.

I think Peake meant this as some kind of commentary about living in the modern world, living up to your own principles, that kind of thing. I think Pye is meant to be heroic, in his way. I also do not believe a single thing Pye says for one second. I find his Great Pal talk silly and infantile, and the concepts of good and evil in this book so cartoonish as to be practically useless. You might have had to have been English and living in 1953, preferably on Sark, to get it.

It's a pleasant, goofy read, though, even if you can't take it seriously. And if you're looking for weird Christian fantasy, I don't know how much else you have after you've read Lewis and Williams. 

The Mythmakers by John Hendrix

I don't usually start off here by defining a book's genre - it's too much like the reports I did for the SFBC for sixteen years back in my misspent youth - but sometimes it's the best way to be clear.  So John Hendrix's The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien appears to be a paired biography in comics form of the two most famous Inklings, focused mostly on their friendship.

It is actually a Christian apologetic, only partially in comics form, with some of the laziest vague callbacks to Pascal's Wager I can remember seeing, in which a group of men who study and interpret myth professionally are firm in their belief that this one myth, with massive parallels to multiple other things they know well, must be true, because of course what they were taught as kids is real and what other people believed in other lands is clearly entirely different, for reasons they will huff and bite their pipes and pile up formidable stretches of language to try to obscure.

Frankly, what Hendrix presents as the argument that convinced C.S. Lewis that bland 1930s middle-of-the-road Anglican Christianity is The One True Story of The Universe is so facile and dumb that I'm torn between hoping he's massively simplifying the thought-processes of professors very good at twisting ideas to their own ends or losing the bits of respect I had for Lewis.

I have to admit it: this book set my teeth on edge. In retrospect, the word "Fellowship" rather than "Friendship" in the subtitle should have been an important clue, but I missed it. It's not just that their faith was important to them; the conflict between Catholic Tolkien and atheist-turned-Anglican Lewis would have been an important thread in any book like this one. Hendrix deliberately and specifically made it central: it's the thing he most wanted to focus on. (And I see, looking at his other work, that he's a world-class god-botherer of long standing, so again I could have anticipated this with a bit more diligence.)

To me, the arguments that these men - there are other Inklings involved in Lewis's religious epiphany; I'm eliding their names for simplicity - made to themselves to justify keeping the precise faith of their ancestors are obviously naked justifications and thin excuses. I tend to cynically assume their arguments were entirely for show: they believed because it was emotionally comforting to believe, it kept them as part of the in-group, and they, as far as I can tell, pretty much all kept or went back to exactly what they had believed at about the age of five. I mean, there's no way anyone with two brain cells to rub together could seriously think "well, Balder and Tammuz and Osiris and a dozen other myth-figures have stories really really similar to that of Jesus, but Jesus is the one that God made true in the world, and I know this because...um, reasons!" is a plausible argument. It's the old circular proof of God dressed up in Oxford tweeds and wandering amiably across the countryside.

Anyway, the Christian faith stuff isn't the whole of the book, but it's central, and it distracts from the discussion of their actual work. I also think I tend to be more of a Tolkienian and Hendrix is more of a Lewisian - though, to be honest, Tolkien is a boring figure to write about, since he mostly sat and worked on things over long stretches of time, while Lewis has the religious conversion and more complicated personal life and vastly more publications and public-intellectual stuff to engage with.

This is a thoughtful, well-crafted book full of details and fine luminous art. Hendrix clearly has spent a lot of time engaging with the works of his two protagonists, and with the secondary sources about their lives and work. He has avatars of the two as paired narrators throughout the book, which is a bit transparent and a bit self-indulgent, but mostly works, in that it lets him drag a lot of subtext up and talk about it directly.

If you are a relatively orthodox Christian, the religious material will feel entirely normal and completely relevant; it may even give you some bulwarks for your own faith. If you believe in absolutely anything else in the world - if you are one of the billions for whom this is not the background noise of your life - it will be weird and off-putting and probably entirely unconvincing. I think Hendrix is writing entirely to the choir, so he probably doesn't mind.

Enlightened by Sachi Ediriweera

I think I'm writing for people roughly in my position: respectful, interested, only slightly informed. People who might have unexpected or unhelpful resonances with a book about different lives and different traditions on the other side of the world. (Do those old-fashioned clothes from Southeast Asia look like epic fantasy garb to anyone but me?)

I say that up front. If this is your culture, your tradition...well, I hope not to be wrong, or infuriating. But I doubt I will be helpful or insightful; you know this better than I do. Reviewers don't say that often enough, I think: what you see always depends on where you stand, so I want to be clear about where I'm standing and the things I can see from there.

Enlightened is a graphic novel, published for middle grade readers, about the life of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha. It's by Sachi Ediriweera, a Sri Lankan cartoonist, designer, and filmmaker. It is subtitled "A Fictionalized Tale," and it's about Siddhartha's search, but it's not a work of religious proselytization.

Maybe I should say that again: if there is a Buddhist equivalent of Chick Tracts, this isn't it. This is a lightly fictionalized biography of a person of world-historical importance, the kind of book young readers will find, hopefully enjoy, and then probably write a report about. Siddhartha's core insights are presented here, and the path he followed to find them, but the point is to inform, not to convert. [1]

Edirirweera tells his story slowly and quietly, starting with Siddhartha as a young prince chafing under the restrictions of his over-protective father. Ediriweera drops us into this world without explaining it, but the outlines are quickly clear: medieval-level tech, vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, what seems to be many small kingdoms living together peacefully, a mature and self-contained civilization.

Siddhartha's is a story about suffering: despite his father's coddling, he learns that other people suffer, that life is often pain. His people believe that they are reincarnated over and over, living lives slightly better or slightly worse, depending on the choices they made previously.

So Siddhartha grows up, still coddled and kept in the palace, with almost no contact with the outside world. He marries the princess of a neighboring kingdom, Yashodara. And when their son is born, he realizes he must break out and see the real world, and that this is his chance. He does; he runs away from his palace and wife and son and father and luxurious life, to join a monastery and live as a poor monk.

Years pass. Siddhartha has no contact with his old life. He studies and meditates and thinks and talks to other monks. In the end, he comes to a revelation: life is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, and so the only way to end suffering is to not desire. He teaches his new Eightfold Path, he gathers students, he becomes famous.

That leads him back to his old family. In the way of religious stories, there's a bit of anger, but everyone is completely convinced, almost immediately, by the obvious truth of Siddhartha's path. And so everyone comes to follow his path, as they can. I may be making this sound like a radical philosophy - and it could be one, in a strict form, all leave-your-goods-behind and break-the-wheel - but there's a lot of nuance. There's a huge spectrum between desiring everything and desiring nothing, and Buddha's path is a positive, peaceful one, as Ediriweera presents it - perhaps even assuming nearly everyone will fail, that eliminating all desire is a project over multiple lives, multiple passes through the world. I don't see any sense of hurry here: it's all about letting go of things, and the more you can let go of, the better off you will be in the end.

Ediriweera tells this story quietly, as I said, in an unobtrusive style with a few, mostly light colors overlaid on his black (for figures) and cool blue (for backgrounds) lines. It is a peaceful, undemanding look for the art, and entirely appropriate.

What I know about the life of the Buddha is scattered and random; Enlightened told me that story again in a clear, organized way and explained things to me that I probably didn't realize I didn't understand. It's a fine, meditative, thoughtful journey through the thinking and life of a man we could all do well to emulate - and I hope its path into the hands of the younger readers of North America is simpler and easier than I fear it will be.

[1] I expect to see various astroturfed mothers pretending to support liberty demanding it be removed from school libraries, though. This is a county where yoga is feared as a gateway drug to Buddhism. And, no, I am not exaggerating.

Book-A-Day 2018 #106: King David by Kyle Baker

America is more Christian than a lot of the rest of the world realizes. It's not just a right-wing thing, either -- the King James Bible is as central to the language of the USA as our Constitution is, and the question of what church someone belongs to [1] is important in hard-to-describe ways across a lot of this country.

It shouldn't be a surprise: most of the founding myths of the USA boil down to "Those People wouldn't let us do our weird Christian sect the way we wanted to, so we got the hell out of there and started in a new land, where We could be the ones oppressing everyone else." That got baked in early, and deeply. It's not a Christian country, officially -- because, when it was founded, trying to pick a flavor of Christianity would have torn the nascent country apart -- but it's a country dominated by Christianity in a million flavors...though most of them these days are much more sure that a rich man will get into heaven than that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

Thus Gilbert Hernandez's bizarre biblical sex-fest Garden of the Flesh. Thus R. Crumb's textually rigorous Book of Genesis. And, more than a decade before either of them, Kyle Baker's 2002 graphic novel King David.

As is typical for major comics-makers turning to biblical matters, King David is weird. It's from that era where Baker was shifting from making comics that looked traditional -- ink on paper, in separate boxes drawn on a page, and then colored by someone else -- into a more painted look that I think was mostly done electronically, and looks like the images might have been created separately and later assembled into pages. (Baker, then and now, had tremendous chops, so it's not easy for my eye to be clear on what tools he used to do whichever particularly impressive thing. ) That's not particularly weird, though.

How about this? King David is presented in a format more like a picture book than a comic: large pieces of art arrayed on the page in loose layouts, with text floating around them (often in very large passages) in a fussy italic font. There are a lot of words to read here, and a text that does not make that easy.

OK, and what about the tone? King David bounces back-and-forth from a relatively respectful style that echoes some Jacobean language without trying to sound Olde Englishe to snippy, snappy dialogue that would be more at home in Baker's What I Hate About Saturn. That's pretty weird, too.

For those of us brought up at least nominally Christian in America, most of King David will be familiar -- it's telling us a story we know, with a uniquely Bakeresque twist. (I have no idea how any biblical story plays out to someone unfamiliar with it, but at least this part of the Bible is relatively light on random massacres, plagues, and general horrible Bronze Age morality.) We start out with David as a cute kid, and see him first soothe the crazed King Saul, and then battle Goliath. The wars with the Philistines go on, and David grows into a popular hero, which of course does not sit well with paranoid, still-crazy Saul. Eventually, David becomes King, and we see him fall himself at the very end, cause the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he can take Uriah's wife Bathsheba for his own.

Baker calls out some of the problematic material in that occasional snarky tone -- the ancient Israelites were much more fond of one rich guy having a lot of wives than we are, for example -- but the religion at the core of it is taken seriously. I don't know what Baker believes, or what he did believe in 2002, but this is a book about faith in God and doing the right thing. None of the showy miracles come in, so it's all people talking about faith in God and doing the right thing, but they firmly believe it, and Baker presents that belief honestly.

Again, this is a biblical comic by a serious comic-maker, which means it's weird: it's neither a proselytizing work nor one that mocks religion, but nods in both directions alternately, and occasionally simultaneously. It may be the quirkiest work in Baker's career, which is saying something about the creator of Special Forces.


[1] Or, in the case of the lapsed or strayed, would have belonged to or used to belong to. Cultural markers aren't removed that easily.

Schulz's Youth by Charles M. Schulz

Success can take a while to be really obvious. Charles M. Schulz launched the daily strip Peanuts in 1950, and eventually it became a massive world-wide phenomenon that took up all of his time and required a number of helpers to do the ancillary work. (Schulz famously wrote every word, drew every line and lettered every panel of Peanuts from beginning to end.)

But, later that decade, he was still doing other odd projects, just in case that daily strip didn't keep growing. One of those projects was a weekly single-panel cartoon for Youth magazine, which he did from 1956 through 1965, mostly under the title "Young Pillars." Youth was the teen-outreach arm of something called the Church of God, which is described as a "religious movement" but probably was a more traditional evangelical organization, with some flavor of Protestant theology behind it. (A movement is not a single thing, and can't be "headquartered," as the Church of God was, "in Anderson, Indiana.") Those strips were collected and re-used and re-purposed over the years, and eventually all brought together in their original form as the book Schulz's Youth in 2007.

So the first thing to note is that these are supposedly humorous cartoons commissioned by a church group, which automatically limits the scope of their humor. (Even the most liberal church puts a lot of things off-limits, and it looks like the Church of God was a vaguely middle-of-the-road mid-century American Protestant organization.) And it's all about good, honest, upstanding church-going teens, so jokes about then-current teen topics like juvenile delinquency were Right Out.

What we get, instead, is a parade of inoffensive mildly amusing cartoons about very bland whitebread Middle America boys and girls, whom even Archie and Scooter would think are a little dull. Not all of the jokes are about "stewardship" and singing in the choir and collection plates and bible commentaries and church picnics and Sunday school...but a whole lot of them are, and calling many of them "jokes" is stretching the word inordinately. These are mostly pleasant drawings of pleasant young Christians being pleasant and doing pleasant things either vaguely church-related or, at the very least, entirely acceptable to a 1950s church for white people.

Did I mention how white and Middle America this book is? It's like a concentrated dose of 1954 directly to the vein, from a world that had not yet discovered irony. It is the book equivalent of a covered dish.

Schulz's drawing is generally good, though some of his adults suffer from really gigantic heads -- maybe because he was trying to differentiate them from the teens. I think the main audience is Schulz scholars and particularly artists who want to study his line -- Peanuts was all the same kind of thing for long stretches, but Schulz's Youth has offices and jalopies and weenie roasts and various bits of ecclesiastical architecture, besides the obvious gangly Schulz teens, who are somewhat like his Peanuts kids but interesting and appealing in their own way.

But if you are a bland Midwestern white Christian offended with The Way Things Are Nowadays, this book may be just the warm bath you want to sink into and forget that other kinds of people actually exist and want to have a say in the world, too.

Mormon Eschatology

I an not a Mormon, so I can't vouch that this here flow-chart is completely accurate in all respects. But boy howdy, it is totally awesome and I believe in it with all my heart. (Even though I personally will only end up in the Telestial Kingdom, and won't get to create my own worlds.)