Comoran Strike and the Prisoners of Truth

About midway through the first Comoran Strike novel, “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” the hero attends a party for his young nephew. The writer, Robert Galbraith, tells us that Strike “never wanted children.” In the midst of the chaos of a child’s birthday gathering, the narrator observes that “Another child fell over, crashing its head on to the cricket stump decorated with a giant strawberry, and emitting an ear-splitting shriek.” 

The writer, of course, isn’t a “former plain-clothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left the armed forces in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry,” but one of the best-selling children’s authors in publishing history. So the impersonal word choice, the objectification of a child, functions as a way to underline how far we are from Hogwarts in the Strike novels. But we’re not as far one might guess. 

Rowling introduces us first in “The Cuckoo’s Calling” not to her new hero, but to Robin Ellacott, who arrives at Strike’s doorstop from the temporary agency. She is his new personal assistant, even though he doesn’t feel he needs one or can afford one. Her arrival, though, seems fated – not only is Robin nursing a secret interest in investigation, she arrives on the very day that her new boss loses his long-time love interest. The detective’s fashion model lover leaves, and is replaced by the resourceful, quick-thinking – and very engaged – Robin.

To engage our interest, Rowling gives us Strike – whose looks are supposed to remind us of “a limping prize fighter.” After losing his place in army investigations – and his leg – to an IED in Afghanistan, Strike is struggling to build his practice when we first meet him, hovering on the edge of failure, devastated by his latest and most wounding loss. He has poetry on his lips, lives on the outskirts of respectability and celebrity, but he is confident enough of himself to know what he does best. He has a job to do, he tells us, and he means to do it, the best he can.  

If all you know of J.K. Rowling is Harry Potter, then the Strike novels can be a shock. The F-word shows up enough to remind you this isn’t a kid’s story, just like our earlier example of Strike’s obliviousness to the fact that children may be necessary in the world.  I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but I got the impression as I made my way through “The Cuckoo’s Calling” that the journey felt fairly rote and routine. Here is the chapter where we meet the sidekick. This is the main character. Here is the mystery. These are the suspects. Here is the plot twist. Here is the second murder, signaling the accelerated action of the last act, and so on. That does not mean the Strike novels are unimpressive, though the mysteries are overly-elaborate, and might strike you as slightly preposterous when solutions are finally revealed. 

But where the Potter novels dealt with issues in black and white, and great notions in bold capital letters – Good and Evil – Strike is more pedestrian, more at street level. Where Rowling revealed her magical world in the shops of Diagon Alley and the classrooms of Hogwarts, she places Strike firmly in a recognizable London of pubs, posh dinner parties, suspicious married couples and street toughs. At first, he investigates the apparent suicide of the supermodel Lula Landry, while in “The Silkworm,” he probes literary London in search of the missing writer Owen Quine. Aspects of the Princess Diana story occasionally flash to our attention, as well as the British press hacking scandal.  

This is Rowling, though, so everybody lies. Repeatedly. “It frightened people when you were honest,” observes a character in her other novel, “The Casual Vacancy. “ The Potter novels were packed full of concealed facts, fudged stories and expedient explanations. The story begins when Harry is revealed as a wizard, a fact kept from him by his family. In the same way, Strike conceals from most people who he is – the illegitimate son of an aging rocker whom he has only met twice.  Strike encounters face after face in his expeditions in London which conceal the truth, sometimes for no reason.

Truth is dangerous, especially in murder investigations. And murder is the most visible and most attention getting of all manifestations of evil.  It also makes for the most entertaining. Strike has questioned enough people to know when they are lying, and how they reveal themselves. Rowling is adept to point these moments out in little details, but crafty enough to sometimes let Strike reveal them only at the end, for maximum effect. As in any mystery, the truth is harder to deal with for some than others. Manipulating the meaning we find in life sometimes means that we take a life. Strike isn’t necessarily interested in motive though – as much as opportunity. The murderer’s explanations will come out soon enough. 

Like the Potter books, Strike also gives Rowling a platform to talk about the pitfalls of wanted and unsought fame. Strike is never quite sure of anyone’s interest in him – it could be that they want to get closer to his more famous father, just as Harry had to deal with being the most famous wizard in the world. Strike is always smarter than those around him, yet in a quiet, understated way that seeks little attention. He’s had it before and it didn’t make him feel better. He has been wounded by notoriety. 

I’ve seen a few reviews that criticize both of the Strike novels for being overlong and not cutting short his witness interrogations, but I think those comments miss the point. Rowling isn’t just introducing us to information sources as we make our way through the mysteries. She wants these to be people, to illustrate the larger issues of the books. But then again, when you get to the solutions of these mysteries, they seem unnatural and unworthy of the personalities she has given us. When Strike says to the murderer, as “The Silkworm” draws to a close, “Though you had it all worked out, didn’t you?” I’ll confess I laughed. The line sounded like I’d heard it in every whodunit I’ve ever come across. 

If the mysteries don’t quite satisfy as realistic, you don’t really care, because the road getting there is entertaining. In “The Silkworm,” Rowling not only introduces us to writers, publishers and agents and gives an occasionally acidic tour of their world (literally), but she gives us a peek at the dark-side of the imagination that created Potter in the grotesque images of “Bombyx Mori,” the missing writer Quine’s allegorical novel. She creates a self-satisfied prideful male author, and a self-hating female literary agent, and somehow neither manages to come off as clichéd. When her detective wonders why everyone in the literary world has this mania to seek publication, we laugh at what the observation says about that world, the nature of writing, and about the author. 

Rowling has succeeded in crafting two main characters for this series that we will want to revisit again and again. Though the canvas isn’t nearly as grand as that of Harry and his battle against Lord Voldemort, she is using a different palette with earthier, more familiar colors. And as she has already shown, Rowling is very skillful at working magic. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.

Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

(Warning: If you haven’t read “The Fault In Our Stars” or seen the movie, there are spoilers.)

We are all going to die. How’s that for a spoiler?

John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” makes this very clear from the first page. The book’s narrator, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager in Indianapolis, Ind., is suffering from depression due to her repeated contemplation of death. That wouldn’t be particularly out of character for any American teenager, but Hazel Grace has an excuse – she has terminal cancer. The only thing holding it tenuously in check is a drug whose effects over the long term are uncertain. 

In the course of going to a cancer support group at a nearby church, Hazel Grace meets Augustus Waters, another teenage cancer victim who is immediately smitten with her. Through the story that follows, the two discover how to care about each other despite the mounting obstacles that disease and doubt throw at them. 

“The Fault In Our Stars,” of course, takes its title from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Cassius laments the fact to Brutus that, though they both seem fated to be slaves to Caesar, they themselves are to blame. This reference is one of several namechecks that Green employs to boost the philosophical heft of his story. At first blush, it is not possible that two cancer victims could be responsible for their fate. The disease, and so, we are led to believe, the universe, does not care who lives and who dies. But death is not the issue here. It is how our characters meet death, and life. 

As has been observed this week with the premiere of the film based on the novel, “Fault” is the latest in a number of works catering to the “young adult” reading market. It is in our teens when the burden of existence hits us with its most vehement force. We suddenly find ourselves thrust, in some aspects unprepared, into making choices between our happiness and others’, having to do without, perceiving the inequalities of life, and we are struck by the colossal, inescapable unfairness of it all. Our inadequacies and our urges impose themselves with soul-crushing ferocity. Some do not survive the impact. These first stirrings, we perceive, point to a hole within us that must be filled, and refilled, we think, for as long as we breathe. And so, we begin to make choices. Hazel later tells us that people often don’t understand the choices they’re making.

One of the great early realizations of my life came when a child my age died. Suddenly, I understood that it wasn’t just something that happened when you’re older. It could happen to me. And so, for years afterward, I would pray myself to sleep, pleading with God to let me at least live through the night. I didn’t want my parents to suffer my leaving them. And even though I believed in a heaven and eternal peace, I wanted no  part of it just yet. I wanted to live.

Hazel, however, does not believe. She later admits that she sees a belief in heaven as “a kind of intellectual disengagement.” Forever, she tells Augustus, is “an incorrect concept.” But the novel opens in a church, with a support group that Hazel tells us is “depressing as hell.” The group is led by a testicular cancer survivor who reminds them each week that they are meeting “in the Literal Heart of Jesus.”  Make of this what you will – at first, the leader Patrick seems easily dismissible comic relief peddling the lame consolations of the church. These show up later in the encouragements that decorate Augustus’ home – hung on the walls by his parents to keep their spirits up. “True Love is Born from Hard Times.”  

This is a recurring motif of the story, that “Fault” will be different from the usual life-affirming fictions we turn to about cancer patients fighting the disease with dignity and courage. What we will see is honesty, not sugarcoated inspiration.  But the more I thought about the story, the more I realized: Where else would the characters be but the Literal Heart of Jesus? And though we may feel encouraged to laugh with the angry, borrowed cynicism of a teen at an emasculated worship leader repeating easy catchphrases, but we are dismissing another victim, not only of cancer, but existence. And we are all, in some sense, victims of existence. A young person with cancer is only able to live day to day, but aren’t we all just doing the same? To paraphrase Philip Roth, life isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre.

Augustus lets us know from the beginning that he expects his life to be extraordinary. He confides to the group that his greatest fear is oblivion. It is his belief in a life beyond this one that makes him anticipate a purpose. “I was supposed to be special,” Augustus says when his cancer reoccurs, and he feels cheated when it seems he will be denied everything he has hoped for.

One can take the spiritual metaphors a step further. For example, cancer as sin. Augustus is killed by a cancer, which is in fact, himself. The cancer grows and cannot be escaped. “The Fault In Our Stars,” it seems, is that there is a fault after all. But this story isn’t interested in a cure as much as a diagnosis of the depression known to the sick and the whole. Augustus seems the step-child of the two philosophers Green mentions. He shares Kierkegaard’s love of metaphor and is his own individual. Though he has faith in his own personal immortality, he has been through enough to intimately understand doubt. Like Martin Heidegger, he has accepted the inevitability of death but knows the difference between what we think we know about life and what we understand through experience. It’s not necessary that the reader know these things, but Green keeps pointing them out, along with the gentle nudges in the direction of existentialism, such as a reference to “Waiting for Godot.” He wants this story to be more than what it appears on the surface.

And so we have just the sort of scenario ripe for teen ridicule – a couple of doomed lovers fated to die young, finding in their brief time together that one eternal truth the movies and pop music taught us – that through love they can briefly touch immortality and find peace. But just a second. Didn’t we start off talking about death? So we did.

Over the novel’s course, we understand that both Augustus and Hazel have a short time left on earth. And tucked into “Fault” is a devilishly post-modern device – a parable on the roles of the reader and the author. Grace begins her association with Augustus by recommending her favorite book “An Imperial Affliction,” by Peter Van Houten. We learn a few details about the story and the author through their conversation. The novel’s protagonist is a young girl dying of cancer. The book ends in mid-sentence, to mimic, we suppose, the interruption of life by death. The author is now a recluse living in Amsterdam. But Hazel Grace wonders what happened to the characters once the book is done, and would like to know before she dies. Augustus sets the plot in motion by eventually bringing her face to face with the author.

Do the characters in a book die when the book is over? We presume our fictional worlds go on, just as life on earth continues without us. But if we were to meet the author of our story, what would we ask him? That’s why one can look at Hazel and Augustus’ trip as a journey to meet God. They fly through the clouds to encounter the elusive man who gave them a kind of wisdom, the man who lives in a libertine city and set in motion the universe within the book they adore. And of course, he has no answers to give them, displays indifference to their pain, and ridicule for their condition. (Your mind can’t resist the connection when you see Willem Dafoe playing Van Houten, since one of DaFoe’s most notorious roles was that of Jesus.)

They instead move on to the home of another author, Anne Frank. Hazel, with weakened lungs and uncertain stamina, climbs the endless sets of stairs in the Frank house to get to a hiding place, one of the world’s most famous, where a little girl was able to transcend her own life by transferring it to the pages of a book. We can protest that Anne’s story itself is often lost in sentimentality, her humanity scrubbed clean by our need for a pure heroine, where we even divorce the triumph of her optimism from the reality of her death in a Nazi concentration camp.  But Anne still endures, partly through our devotion as readers and partly through the belief that she still has something to teach us.

A few moments stand out as we move to the story’s close. Like their earlier association with “An Imperial Affliction,” both Augustus and Hazel live beyond their lifetimes. Augustus gets to hear Hazel give a eulogy for him, and he leaves her a eulogy through an e-mail to Van Houten. After Augustus’ death, Van Houten reappears, to reveal that his alcoholism and anger come from the loss of his own daughter. The author called our young heroes “side effects of an evolutionary process that cares little for individuals,” but he told his dying child they would be reunited in heaven. Even God must deal with the loss of his child.  

Hazel perceives in herself, following a conversation with her father, that she has come to terms with some belief in eternity. When he tells her that the universe deserves to be noticed, she later says that we want to be noticed by the universe, each of us, as individuals. The Christian retort to that idea is that, the universe did show just such a concern, but in our never-ending need to be special, we disregarded that concern because it wasn’t on our terms.  After turning the idea around in her mind for a while, Hazel finally says, “Who am I to say these things may not be forever?” We have circled back to the Literal Heart of Jesus, looking for a message from beyond, and a kind of peace is made for the sake of peace of mind.  

“Some infinities,” the novel tells us, “are bigger than others.” This is a paradoxical way of saying a few things. We might feel something like infinity in a short time shared in the presence of a beloved other, based on our ability to elevate and venerate those moments. But there is an even greater infinity beyond our perceptions, an infinity we can only momentarily touch in this life, an infinity beyond death and the meanings we invest in life – an abundant infinity, the same infinity that hung the stars.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

What will the future of Christianity look like, God willing?

It’s a question that often gets lost among Christians in various debates over theology and the nature of the Second Coming of Christ. Among those who don’t believe, the more obnoxious contend that the faith will eventually die out as human beings become more educated and immune to, as Christopher Hitchens called them, “the sinister fairy tales of Christianity.” 

Most of the life of Christendom has been about defining the faith in the here and now, which might explain why Christianity sometimes gains a foothold in a culture without making any preparations for a long-term hold there. Witness the progress of the faith in Europe and Africa today, compared with those same continents in the 19^th century. 

Tucked away in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous With Rama” is an interesting character who might answer a few speculative questions about the church universal’s future. “Rendezvous” is a classic science-fiction tale about humanity’s encounter in our solar system with alien technology, but not with aliens themselves. It is a work of “hard” science fiction – in other words, the scientific concepts at times take precedence over the normal fictional demands of characterization and dialogue. Whatever people are mentioned in the telling seem to be defined more by their occupations – commander, engineer, medical officer, etc. 

“Rama” is a 30-mile long cylindrical spaceship that rotates its way into the solar system in the 22^nd century in Clarke’s work. (I have previously written about his novel “Childhood’s End” here.) At first mistaken for a comet, Rama is unmanned and has long been dormant. But a group of humans link up with the ship and begin exploring inside it, they find structures that look like cities with no citizens, seas and land with no biological life, and a myriad of questions without answers.

The book itself, like some of Clarke’s other works, draws on familiar images and stories from not only the Bible but world mythology. Even the name Rama, a figure from Hinduism, shares time among the pages with allusions to the myth of Icarus and the Book of Revelation. Early on, a reader may even get a slight shiver when a meteorite strikes the earth, destroying several Italian cities, on the ominous date of September 11.  And there is the significance within the craft of the number three, weighted with its own Biblical importance. 

Among the group exploring the craft is the enigmatic Lieutenant Boris Rodrigo, a quiet, dignified communications officer, Clarke tells us, who is a devout member of the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut. Though the church’s theology is mysterious, it basically begins with the belief that the Lord was an alien visitor from space, with its beliefs revolving around that one central tenant.

Clarke, incidentally, was various described as an atheist, a skeptic, an agnostic and a deist. He made various comments throughout his life on religion, including, "I do not believe in God, but I do not disbelieve in her either." He also carried on an interesting correspondence with C.S. Lewis. 

His creation of Lt. Rodrigo is interesting in several ways. Take his description – Rodrigo, like other “Cosmo Christers,” is “universally respected, and even liked,” a man of pathological honesty.  “Invariably, (the Cosmo Christers) were efficient, conscientious, and absolutely reliable.” Understand, for the novel, this is as close to a biography as any character in “Rama” can hope for. Why are Cosmo Christers so respected? Well, obviously, it’s because “they made no attempt to convert others.” How they managed to survive as a faith is left to the imagination. A slightly more cynical person might say that someone opposed to organized religion would naturally create a character who didn’t hope to convert you. 

The Cosmo Christers also have a certainty about their theology which leaves them self-assured, an added bonus in navigating the dangers of space. But there was “also something slightly spooky about them.” Commander Norton, the head of the expedition, doesn’t understand how men with advanced scientific and technical backgrounds can swallow some of the beliefs the Christers abide. Norton wonders what might happen if such a man, in visiting Rama, discovers something that confounds his theology, or confirms it. But Rodrigo isn’t alone. Part of the experience within Rama is one of constantly being swallowed up – both within it physically and mentally lost in all of its puzzles.

Clarke’s characters assume that alien civilizations capable of constructing something like Rama must be highly developed moral creatures – or else, they would have destroyed themselves. But Clarke’s humans, scattered on various moons and planets within the solar system, still show the usual human weaknesses for self-interest, mistrust, and violence, as the story unfolds. Each community, on each world, fears what Rama may mean. 

But not Rodrigo. He shares his thoughts with Norton that “Rama” may in fact be an ark sent by an alien race to “save those worthy of salvation.” Though Rodrigo has no idea who was controlling Rama, he suggests that “it could be a pure robot. Or it could be – spirit. That would explain why there are no signs of biological life forms.” Norton convinces Rodrigo to transmit his theory to earth, comforting himself that if he’s right, he just “increased his chances of being among the saved.”

If you’re waiting around within this novel to find out the secret of Rama, you will end the novel with much the same sensation. The story generates a respect not only for the fictional world created by Clarke but the scientific conundrums he stores within the story.  We aren’t necessarily meant to find answers in “Rama,” just awe and a respect for our insignificance in the cosmos

It’s an interesting decision CIarke makes in creating the character of Rodrigo, who figures out later how to diffuse a warhead which could destroy Rama or provoke the intelligence that constructed it. He creates a sympathetic character and in the process speculates that if Christianity is to survive into the vastness of space, it must embrace a new conception that takes in that vastness. 

“In the beginning was the Word” is the opening of John’s Gospel, which calls to mind the beginning of Genesis, opening with the world’s creation. By drawing back the curtain on his Gospel at the initiation of human reality, John places Jesus squarely within the Trinity at the side of the Father in eternity past.  “All things were created by Him,” John continues on. One wouldn’t have to associate Jesus with an extraterrestrial, since the original understanding of the Christ is as a figure “born from above.” 

But his belief in Christ also means Rodrigo is the most grounded character, the least likely to be consumed by the mysteries within Rama. He already understands there are certain realities beyond what we perceive, and a higher One than all. Because of this, he comes closest to Clarke’s conception that "the purpose of the universe…is the perpetual astonishment of mankind." The heavens declare the glory of God...

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.

Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.