Warning: This discussion of Tom Pawlik’s Vanish will spoil a few of the surprises inherent in the book, so if you’re planning to read it (taking into account that several CSFF blgogers have classified this book as “horror,” but without gore, grossness, and gratuitous violence), you may want to skip this post. For now.
As I mentioned yesterday, I had a few issues with the ending. First, I felt it was undeserved — although many of the early details DID come together to make the ending a tight explanation of all that had gone before. Perhaps what I objected to was the role and depiction of God. For most of the book God is a distant person the characters ignore, belittle, or actively oppose. In the end, He is presented as Savior and Judge and Lord — but for that depiction to be really convincing, I would have liked to see Him as a more present character throughout.
Of course, it’s not easy to write about God as a character. That’s why I haven’t written a “Christian novel” yet. I find it so hard to write about God without being trite or unconvincing — unless I transport Him to a fantasy world. In that case, I’m not writing about God at all, but about someone who represents God — as Aslan does. In my Seventh World books (Worlds Unseen and Burning Light), Christ is represented by the King. A fantasy setting creates distance for the reader, so when the King says or does something, it’s clearly my interpretation of what God would say or do, not meant to be taken as a record of His actions the way scripture or a real-life testimony can be.
Becky Miller’s post from yesterday addresses some of these concerns:
There’s also a theological issue that comes into play. It’s one of those tough things to sort through when writing Christian speculative fiction. How much must we pay attention to theology if we are using our imagination? I’ve said before, when we write about what is real, even if it is real in the spiritual world or in Biblical history, we are obligated to stay within the bounds of that which has been revealed. Within those bounds, I think we can speculate. (For example, a story about angels must be true to what the Bible says about angels, but a lot has been left unsaid, so I think we can speculate as long as we aren’t contradicting what the Bible says).
This question of how much we can use our imagination in regards to God and what He has revealed is a question all writers must struggle with. Personally, I hesitate to set a story in the “real world” and have “God” speak in that story. All fiction is fantasy in a sense, but setting fantasy in the real world makes it more difficult to discern the difference between truth and illusion.
Near the end of Vanish, (SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!) Conner Hayden discovers that nothing he’s experienced has been really real. Chicago is not empty. No one has vanished. Aliens have not invaded. The flashbacks he experiences are brought on not by mind control but by his own memory and guilt as his brain slowly lets go — for Conner, like Mitch and Helen, is dying. They have been existing in a strange world between worlds called Interworld, where demons lurk in the shadows to drag away those who cross from “dying” into “death.”
This is very much fantasy in the real world. Could such a place really exist? If so, do dying Christians also go there — haunted and hunted by demonic creatures and their own pasts — or are they whisked away to some more paradisical version of Interworld? Had Pawlik created Interworld within a fantasy setting, I would have no trouble with it, but in our own world, I find it unconvincing and outside of God’s created order.
As Christians, we spend much of our lives battling Satan’s illusions and trying to distinguish human fantasy from God’s reality. Paradoxically, fiction can help us do this. But where are the limits? How much should we create fantasy in the real world — how helpful is it to do so, and how much might it just confuse people further?
I don’t have answers to this question. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think?
One thing I do not believe is that all books serve the same purpose and should follow the same rules. When this month’s novel for review arrived in the mail, all misty and mysterious (it has a really cool cover), I pounced on it, mentally overjoyed, and exclaimed “Popcorn!” I was busy and tired and really didn’t want a book I had to think about. Thrillers do provoke some thought, but not the exhausting literary kind. They are best at inspiring adrenaline spikes and obsessive page-turning, but they don’t generally require much from their readers.