Bliss

Prayer for Bliss, Serial Boogiemen

By John Taylor; 2006 April 13


Father of light and life! Thou good supreme,
O teach me what is good! Teach me thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity and vice,
From every low pursuit! and feed my soul,
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never fading bliss!

Not a bad prayer, stuck into the middle of 18th Century poet James
Thomson's meandering poem, "Winter." A bit of prophesy in it too,
"Meanwhile the orient, darkly red, breaths forth an icy gale that in
its mid-career arrests the bickering stream."

You can see it clear as day. He is predicting of course the present
world diplomatic situation. An angry cold wind from Iran blustering
its xenophobia and nuclear meddling, then freezing over all the other
crying conflicts in the West. The Americans are talking diplomacy but
you can see the club, slowly, silently being raised over the head of
this foaming at the mouth fanatic in Teheran. Events move like a train
wreck in slow motion, you know what is about to happen but cannot take
your eyes away. My only question is, will the persecuted believers in
the cradle of the Faith be able to crawl out, intact, from the
wreckage? Or will the engineers of both trains pick them up by scruff
of the neck and resentfully accuse them of being "the reason we
fight." It happened in the wake of the American Civil War to the freed
slaves, and it could happen to us.

Alternating a page at a time, Silvie and I read aloud the first two
novels of the Silverwing trilogy of fantasy novels about bats by
Kenneth Oppel. Ever since her teacher read aloud the first in the
series, she was hooked. She watched most of the television cartoon
version of the stories on Teletoon. Now if you ask her what she wants
to be when she grows up, she asks, "Can I be a cartoon character?" She
is enamored with Shade, the hero of the Silverwing series who starts
off as a runt who messes up "big time" but ends up a hero. She wants
to be Marina, Shade's mate, who also is heroic in the story.
With all the distractions of our busy lifestyle she twice lost
interest in reading the third novel along with me, so eventually I
gave in to curiosity and read it on my own. To six-year-old Thomas,
Silvie and I read several of his other series of short tales for
younger children, about a trio of young geniuses who hire out their
smarts for solving problems like ghosts, dinosaurs, and so forth. They
are gripping in their way, but for an adult it is poignant to read and
watch their reactions -- you could heave a hippo through the holes in
the plot, yet there is an innocence, an enthusiasm that sparkles in
the story and in the listeners.

Reading the longer Oppel stories was an unnerving experience for me.
When I was Silvie's age I never read children's novels, only classics,
decades old novels written for adults, then accepted as valid
children's fare. So these tailored for kid novels came as a
surprisingly profound shock to me. They are well plotted, suspenseful
and -- as the blurbs put it -- richly imagined, yet the diction is
phrased in the slangy, heated, narrow vocabulary of a teeny bopper.
Everything that an adult writer like me works all day long to avoid
was in your face, unavoidable. Things were "freaky" and "weird," and
one "could hardly believe it." Hackneyed language boiled over onto the
floor and I just wanted to get a mop and clean it up. I felt as if I
were watching an expensive Broadway play with top-notch acting and
writing, but in the background the props were tacky, glitzy, made of
Papier Mache, a retro cheap facade that would be rejected by any
public school theatre producer. It gave me the shivers, but I had to
go on. Utterly incongruous, yet intriguing. Plotting, excellent,
timing flawless, but all that I usually read a novel for was missing,
the clever turn of phrase, the apt simile, the unfamiliar but fitting
idiom. I had no idea that this could be done in literature, or that it
should be done.

Meanwhile we have been reluctantly edging into EBay. I had an account
but was not using it after a couple of bids failed. I had read that
Oppel had written an adult novel, a cops and serial killer potboiler
called "The Devil's Cure;" when I encountered a used copy on auction I
put in a bid. Turned out I was the only bidder, so I won it for 99
cents, plus eleven dollars shipping -- that is, in sum about what the
book would cost new in a bookstore, if I could find it. I suspect that
it only came out in the States, not to confuse his younger audiences
here.

"Devil's Cure" overall was a good read, as suspenseful as a
Michael Creighton novel, though minus the scientific interest.
Oppel started writing novels when he was a tween himself, and even in
the adult novel, it shows. His choice of words has not progressed at
all in spite of the peppering of profanity, but neither has he lost
his purity and innocence, what the Guardian called the "ardor of
youth." The story has its moments, parts are well crafted. The dialog
is too similar to his children's novels, conversations lapse into
arguments, confrontations, one party becomes irrational, stubborn,
unreasonable, and the conflict goes on just a little too long. Maybe
Oppel would do better with a collaborator, if he wants to continue in
adult fiction.

As so often happens with detective fiction, this is all about a serial
killer, albeit a religious fanatic, former cult type of serial killer.
For me, that is the biggest problem with this novel. Please do not get
me started about serial killers. Oh, oh. Too late.

Mid-twentieth century, novelists had Commies and Nazis, numbingly
scary bad guys, villains you could get your teeth into. Story tellers
could easily scare the bejesus out of their readers, they did not have
to make anything up, reality was terrifying enough. Look at the
greatest spy novel of them all, Casino Royal. James Bond was up
against "Death to Spies," a real mopping up organization created by
Stalin after WWII. It was already defunct and superceded by more
modern and remotely humane spy organizations when Casino Royal was
written, but that does not matter. Death to Spies was real, it was a
ruthless killing machine that puts the reader into a cold sweat just
thinking about being kept prisoner by them, as is James Bond. I hear
they are coming out with a new film version of Casino Royale. I am
very hopeful that it will not be the farcical fiasco that the 1968
version was.

Now that the World Wars are faded memories, what do novelist have to
scare people? Serial killers. That is it. Endless serial killers. As
soon as a serial killer enters a film or novel, you know that he will
be all-knowing, un-killable until the last reel, and that no matter
how much cops search and victims try to hide, he will always find
them. You get the feeling that if scientists could hook up wires to
the serial killers of the world, the energy crisis would be solved
forever.

But the thing is, serial killers are just not that credible a threat.
For awhile they may have been, in the 1980's police discovered to
their surprise that about 35 percent of murders were being done by
serial killers. So they clamped down on the problem, introduced new
methods and today the contribution of serial killers has dropped to
the point of being negligible. But that does not keep scriptwriters
from pounding them to death, for nothing else has loomed on the
horizon as a danger. The only really evil people are the ones paying
for product placements in the film, the corporate leaders who are
polluting the world and setting it aflame with the hellfire of global
warming. Nobody is going to bite that feeding hand, no matter how
credible the threat.

So for now, the only way to get serial killers off the silver screen
would be for murderers in prisons to get together, form a union and
start pumping millions of dollars in bribes into the corporate
interests that foster feature films. Not likely to happen. Even serial
killers are just not that evil; not even Death to Spies was that
malevolent in its worst days, since these corporate clowns are well on
their way to destroying an entire planet, the whole human race. And
nobody is scared at all.

Oh, I almost forgot, The Devil's Cure has a brief mention of the
Faith. It takes place in Chicago, and the divorced detective takes his
daughter on weekends to sample various religious ceremonies.
"Over the past year he had taken her to a synagogue, a Buddhist
monestary, a mosque, a Taoist shrine, the Baha'i House of Worship, and
various Christian churches." (The Devil's Cure, Kenneth Oppel,
Hyperion, New York, 2001, p. 80)

--
John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com

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