Left Behind (Paperback)

1. Confirm in the minds of many anti-Christians that all evangelicals are low-rent, unintellectual people who follow Pat Robertson and his ilk; and 2. Make the silly obsession with the "Rapture" a priority in many churches again. That idea was finally starting to fade along with Hal Lindsey before these books came along. True, other religions have silly sectarian groups - like the Catholics and the Virgin Mary sightings. But society is much less forgiving of evangelical Christians than any other religious minority, and I'm afraid these books will just provide more fodder for those who hate us. (They actually sell offensive parodies of the Christian Fish in stores...can you imagine anyone driving around with a bumper sticker making fun of Jews or Catholics? Anyone who did that would be pulled off the side of the road and beaten to a pulp in less than half an hour. But it's okay to make fun of us, for some reason.)

The authors haven't even bothered to do basic scientific research; in the opening pages they conjecture that Russia will invade Israel to steal crop fertilizer - any research into agricultural science will show that the Soviet Union has huge tracts of unused farmland in the Ukraine! Growing food is not Russia's problem. After that, the writing just gets worse. The Russians try to nuke Israel - why would they do that, when they want to steal Israel's food? It makes no sense, and the whole battle of Gog and Magog is rendered in about 3 paragraphs where the authors wipe out the Russian air force with a hail storm. (Curiously, the authors don't seem to be aware that they are putting the Battle of Armageddon at the START of the apocalypse, when the Bible has this battle at the END.) I'm a 30-year-old journalist myself, and I found the characterization of Buck Williams - the star-writer of Time magazine - to be trite and shallow. Who names a character "Buck?" Rayford Steele, the guilt-ridden flight pilot, is no better. The worst character by far is Hattie Durham, an idiot bimbo flight attendant whose only crime seems to be that she's 27 years old and attractive to middle age men. She has no depth, and the way the authors constantly bring her back just so they can ridicule her for being a silly, hysterical bimbo started to irk me around page 100. I'm hardly pro-feminist, but the depictions of Hattie became too misogynistic and mean-spirited to ignore. I'm determined to get to the end, but it's degenerating into boring tripe by the page.

On the plus side, this is THE most politically incorrect best-seller ever written. If you want a book that's willing to call Judaism "wrong," criticize bad (oops - I mean, "progressive") Catholics, slam the Vatican, depict women as weaker than men, and so forth, then these books have a certain appeal. For more serious, thought-provoking fiction with a spiritual theme, I'd recommend Stephen King's The Green Mile or The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. They both made me think a lot more about God than this shlock ever will.

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. *