By Michael O'Brien
Catholic-ometer: 3 of 5
Enjoyability: 0.5 of 5
It's finally time for this review to come to a close, but before I close it, there's a couple more things I want to address. The reactions to the book by other authors and by fans, and the problems that I had with the basic premise itself.
Issue 1; Accolades
Firstly, this book has gotten high praise from a number of well-known writers, and frankly, I'm still not sure why. I guess I can chock some of it up to the way the author of this book mentions Catholicism a bunch. That tends to win over some people who like to hear Catholicism mentioned. Me, I like to hear it mentioned too, but only when it's being faithfully-represented.
The recommendation by Peter Kreeft is one that I feel needs no explanation, for reasons of my own, but the others truly annoy and shock me. I admit, I may not completely understand the modern mind. In my experience, modern man feels more than he stops to think, and no one can understand you if you're not going to be rational. Still, I usually expect better than this from published authors.
If you think I'm being unfairly harsh to all the people who recommended this book, I have a proposition to make. I'll list a few things about the book that are good near the end. Aside from these, tell me one thing about this book which -objectively- speaks in its favor, and I'll lighten up. For now, I feel I should debunk some of the lies spread on behalf of this book by some of these famous authors.
Issue 2; The "Prodigal Son" myth
Lie number 1 on the agenda; that this book is a retelling of the Prodigal Son in modern times. It's not. At all. In the Prodigal Son, the boy leaves his comfortable home, and his rich father and hardworking brother to go waste money in some far-off land. He then eventually repents and returns home. In this book, the father's not rich and neither is the brother. Furthermore, it's the father, not the son, who spends the most time in a far-off land. This is -not- the way the story goes, and it loses its intended meaning in the process. There's simply no way to defend the claim that this book has anything to do with the Prodigal Son.
Issue 3; Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and so forth
It's also been said that O'brien's writing style is like Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. As one who knows something of these people, let me explain why this comparison has little real merit.
Tolkien had a fascination with fabricating fictional worlds; languages and lineages of strange peoples. He also loved to write his books as though they were real history books; a tendency which most often comes through in his battle scenes. His greatest accomplishments, however, were in creating scenes of magical wonder and putting them on display to be enjoyed by eager readers. The Father's Tale seems, by contrast, to have almost no imagination behind it at all.
Chesterton wrote few novels, but in the ones he wrote, he seemed to delight in creating characters to embody aspects of human existence, and having them face off against each other. The Father's Tale does nothing of the sort. Chesterton was also an upbeat, good-humored and amusing writer at times; especially in his nonfiction works. In this respect, he couldn't be more different from O'brien.
Lewis is like Tolkien to the next level in many areas, while shifting the focus from minutae to more wonder and miracles. His worlds are filled with supernatural power and strange creatures of all kinds. Even some of his more adult works (the Screwtape Letters springs immediately to mind) contain a strong, supernatural element. There's nothing of this to be found in The Father's Tale.
Dostoyevsky, in my view, was most remarkable in his intensely-dramatic character portrayals, and in his predictions of the future of society, and he was indeed remarkable in all those things. However, The Father's Tale contains no amateur predictions about the future, nor any strong drama of any sort. When its characters tell their life stories, they never do so for a dramatic reason, and when they reveal the nature of their problems to one another, it always makes them, and their problems look smaller and less significant, while the firm, dignified atmospheres designed by Dostoyevsky rarely allowed for weakness of that sort in a character.
Tolstoy I haven't read much of, because I simply couldn't stomach him. As I see it, he's closest to O'brien in most ways, and the two share much in common, but most especially a hatred of intense drama and a passion for trying to use God's word to legitimize pacifism. Still, one out of five is pretty bad.
I think this is the most I need to say on the subject. O'brien should certainly not be compared with most of the people he's being compared with, and that's that.
Issue 4; Consistent failures, and their impact on a story
A huge problem with the book as a whole is simply this; the main characters are consistent failures. Sure, it reveals their determination, but when that determination doesn't lead to victory, what precisely is the point of even having it?
As depressing as repeat failures may be in real life, they have an even worse effect on a story. Ideally, the main character should be the person with the strongest chance for victory; the hero who eventually pulls through, despite the odds. In some cases, heroes can be even more impressive when they have very little chance of winning, and still win. However a hero who doesn't win is no kind of hero at all.
The effect that this has on a story is, in better cases, to make the tale essentially unremarkable, since nothing particularly special happens in it. In worse cases, the book may come across as a total waste of time, as this book does. The problem, you see, is that sometimes, a story fails to properly-depict the relationship between good and evil; with evil being a self-destructive path that leads, ultimately, to failure and weakness, and good being a strong, healthy path which leads to power, wisdom and a good heart. To imply that this is not the case is to deny the existence of God and embrace naturalism. This whole idea of "grounding" a story that's founded in Christian values simply does not serve to promote or support Christianity in any sense; because a "grounded" Christianity is no kind of Christianity at all, which leads me to my next point.
Issue 5; "Grounded Stories," and why the very idea is flawed
I truly believe that no story should be "grounded."
The idea behind being "grounded" is that the story involves nothing particularly incredible, impossible or supernatural, and conforms almost precisely to how things could happen in our own world. This, I believe, is almost an abuse of the story format.
Stories provide us pitiful humans with the opportunity to express our dreams, fears, hopes, wishes, needs and imaginations. It does no one any good for a story to refuse to do any of this, and that's what a grounded story is. Stories, you see, are essential for encouraging us to think about certain aspects of ourselves that we often ignore. When we go to work, or when we eat dinner with our family, our dreams, fears and wishes don't matter much, because we have to deal with what's right in front of us.
However, when we read stories, we train our minds to remember our futures, and what we want from them. We remind ourselves that we are deathly afraid of certain things happening to us, and want desperately to prevent them from happening. We also remind ourselves that there are things we want; things that this world is not capable of providing us with.
Perhaps most importantly, we remind ourselves that this world is not all there is; there is a world beyond this one; a world where dreams can come true, and where fears exist only as a sort of thrill in wondering what wonderful thing is going to happen next. Then, too, there's the dark world; where all hope is banished, and fear and agony reign supreme. In short, Heaven and Hell; the most basic understanding of Christian dogma.
I'll level with you. It's been a long time since I've heard a priest talk about Heaven or Hell. Too long, in fact, and we certainly don't talk about it at work. Even if we happen to have the rare kind of family who likes to talk about this sort of thing over dinner, we really spend very little time dwelling on these eternal truths; much too little. If we banish discussion of eternal, transcendant things from our fiction lives, we banish it from our lives entirely. Our imagination dies a slow death, and then our faith does likewise.
The rest of the world can be "grounded," but if stories are "grounded," they lose the very thing that gives stories their appeal; the power to elevate the mind to higher things than those of this life. This is the reason why I say that "grounded stories" are simply conceptually flawed.
Final Issue; The Damage Report
Ultimately, what's the damage that this book did to me? Well, it wasted over a month of my time, for one. I admit, I probably could have put it down at any time, but by the time I realized what kind of book it was (it dawned on me that the whole book was going to be a real snoozer by about page 300 or so,) I was already far enough in, and had invested so much time, that I figured it would be a waste not to review it, and I never review books that I haven't finished, no matter how bad they are.
In addition, there were seriously times when I wanted to throw this book against a wall. Every time someone starts telling their life story, or every time the author tries to justify pacifism qualifies, I suppose, but I'm thinking particularly of the Yevgeny journal entries and Alex's "cryptic" story to a bunch of Russian children. These forays had even less to do with the plot than most, and went on for literally pages and pages each. I also thought that Alex's time being interrogated and tortured by Russians, then agonizing over the death of a kind soldier immediately after that was definitely the low point of the story. Nothing drives home the point that your story has the wrong main character, quite like showing him repeatedly being jerked around by irrelivent side-characters, and absolutely helpless to do anything about it.
However, I feel that I should take a few moments at the end here to say what this book did right, because there were one or two things that it did properly. It took the side of Catholic Church teaching, for example, against the evils of abortion, homosexual unions and even contraception; a rare and precious stand to take. Still, that's no reason why you should torture yourself by reading the other 1071 pages of the book.
Some people might attack this book for being pushy with its message, or might even call it propaganda, but I won't do that, because I've read enough books, that I pretty much understand that every author has some kind of message to deliver; either by being direct about morals and ethics, or by not being direct about them. This is also another problem that the book doesn't have.
Other than this, absolutely everything about the book speaks against it, and I suppose that's all there is to say. I hope you enjoyed this five part awfulaganza, so until next time, God love you and stay safe.
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