Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days [Audio Cassette]

** If you start reading this, don't stop because the ending is a shocking suprise.

So I figured after nine years, it was time for me to get around to reading the first book in the bestselling Christian fiction series in history, Left Behind. I had always avoided it, not because of the subject matter, but by and large books that break records tend to be writ large by those with the wit, talent, and grammatical skill of overly enthusiastic six-year-olds. Dame Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Sandra Brown, you get the idea. Why should Christian fiction be any different?, I wondered. But despite all that, I dove into it.

Expecting the worst may not have been enough. To call the book naïve would be, perhaps, too kind. It uses the conventions of satire without being in any way satiric, treats its readership like total idiots, has all the spelling and grammar mistakes one could possibly want from a mass-produced piece of claptrap, and various other things, all of which I will attempt to make sound as tactful as possible below. But the bottom line, for those who would rather stop reading now, is this: plot's not bad, but execution is some of the worst I have seen outside self-publishing. Ever.

Without getting into the theological aspects of the book, it is impossible to write a comprehensive review of Left Behind without at least glossing over some of the more interesting (and less Biblical) assertions made by the authors, the most notable being the Rapturing (for lack of a better term) of everyone under the age of puberty. Hmmmmm. Including the ones in juvenile detention for murder? Okay, we'll drop the point. After all, our society is based (wrongly) on the idea that people can't make up their minds until they reach the magic age of eighteen. At least LaHaye and Jenkins dropped the magic age to twelve, for which they must get grudging respect.

But little niggling theological concerns are perhaps less galling than LaHaye and Jenkins' complete and utter inability to ascribe a mote of intelligence to any of their characters, and by inference any of their audience. Not being a Christian and a regular attendee at church, I can't say for certain what the average joe learns about the end times. But even without regular church attendance for the last number of years, I remember enough of the Revelation of St. John from Bible study back in the day to have seen all the major twists coming at least a hundred pages before they actually do. And yet his characters, including the wife and daughter of a fundamentalist, are completely oblivious. Writing a book like this as a mystery/thriller, it seems, was not the way to go. Or if it were, perhaps adding a couple of extras who might have looked like they, too, could be the Antichrist might have helped with the suspense angle. (They do attempt a move exactly like this, but way too late and way too ineffectively.)

I spent at least a hundred fifty pages of this book wondering, "where's the satire?" It was, of course, absent; LaHaye and Jenkins are deadly serious about approaching this series as novels mirroring the born-again Christian take on the end times. And yet despite their seriousness, they embrace the conventions of satire with open arms. Their businesses are thinly-disguised actual corporations with names that, in other circumstances, might be considered clever digs at those companies; their characters' names are ludicrous without being prophetic, a favorite mechanism of Dickens and Pynchon; the characters are often overwrought (and, really, it takes a good deal of mastery of the dime novel to make characters overact ON PAPER!); the aforementioned predictability in the mystery; you name it. It's all got the surface makings of great satire. Which makes me wonder how cool it would actually be if, after the series is finished, LaHaye and Jenkins called a press conference and yelled "April fools!" But I don't see that happening, and neither do you.

Fully addressing the spelling and grammatical horrors in this book would take a book-length review, so we'll just note their existence, sneer at them, and move on to the stilted dialogue, the characters (who are cardboard cutouts of the thinnest stripe) and their inability to relate to one another (aside from, one assumes, snickering at the silliness of each others' names in the background), the constant use of cliché, the stopping of the plot every once in a while to throw in some gratuitous moralization (but this being right-wing Christian fiction, I expected a three-hundred-page altar call; I was not disappointed), and all the other little pieces of amateurism that add up to this book being of such horrible architecture that its popularity is really worth weeping over for the lover of the English language. It is obvious, here more than anywhere, that people are more than willing to overlook fatal flaws in the language as long as they can understand the book's message. St. McLuhan has lost the battle once and for all, and sixty-two million copies of the Left Behind novels speak with the public's booming voice: the message is the medium.

It's enough to make a body want to give up reading. *