A few days ago, having read up about all of the light fiction I had at hand, I picked up a book I had gotten in a grab-bag for a friend. LeHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind.
One of my favorite genres, by the way, is what is sometimes called "biblical thrillers" or "biblical fiction." Daniel Easterman has written a number of pretty good books in that genre, which also includes some very bad books.
As a reader of sci-fi and fantasy as well as biblical fiction, I am used to parking disbelief outside upon entering. Not a problem for a good read.
"Left Behind" is not that good a read. There are characters who you get to know on a simple one or two dimensional level and you want to read on and see what happens to them. That plus the fact that the books are labeled as "Christian fiction" is the appeal.
That they are "Christian fiction" is a mislabeling. Nowhere do the books state "WARNING: this series is based on Biblical interpretation by a fundamentalist Christian group called Dispensational Premillennialists." Unless the reader understands this, or is well-versed in Bible, he or she may think this is mainstream Christian thinking. It isn't.
I was taught Bible at a Church of Christ college, from a fundamentalist viewpoint. My prof attacked premillenialism sharply, and believed that much of the Revelation of John applied to the Roman world of the first century. More mainstream Christian interpretations differ even more from Dispensational Premillenialism.
So the Left Behind series is actually a way of indoctrinating those who are already Christians with Dispensational Premillenialist thinking. The series has no appeal to agnostics or atheists or those of other religions. It's a kind of intra-Christian cannabalism. ("Gosh, I never heard that at my church!" which makes one a target for Jenkins and LeHaye.)
My problem with "Left Behind" as a novel is --
(1) The shallowness of the characters, though the main two characters have some effort spent on development. Finding out what happens to a half dozen or so characters is 99.9% of the interest of the book.
(2) The fact that all is a preachment. If you want that, there is a better story in Pilgrim's Progress.
(3) Key events in the book do not follow. The most vital plot elements "just happen" with minimal logic to support them. For example, how the heck did all nations of the world go to one government, one currency, and one leader, without a long and bloody fight? The novel totally glosses over this development, only saying that the shock of the rapture unnerved everyone to the extent that they were all willing to turn to one charasmatic leader. That was enough to outweigh nationalism and sound economics?
(4) There is little real world detail, which is a characteristic of hurried or unskilled writers.
(5) All of those paranoid elements are here that you've been laughing at for years when brought up by your crazy neighbor, like suspicion of the UN, of peace movements, of yielding of national soveriegnty, of disarmament, that make such strange bedfellows with the Christian religion. Deja vu all through. If you've been around, you know this plotline before it happens.
(6) "Left Behind" is another pre-2000 attempt to exploit the fears of the coming millenium. Remember those?
(7) The writing style is poor. Compared to adult level novels on the best seller lists, Left Behind is junior grade. Why do I say that? What is good style? Let me list the ways that the writing --apart from irrationality or unbelievability of plot-- of Left Behind is badly done.
a. Often there is language that is vague or imprecise--or a word that is misused. Evidences of very hurried writing and minimal editing.
b. Absence of detail. Too much detail annoys the reader. Not enough leads to a sense that what is being read is a summary and not the book itself. So it is here. It is a wonderful thing when an author knows all about places and subjects, or when the author is able to fake it successfully. (An example of the latter was Len Deighton's first novels, when he faked the details about British intelligence and espionage in general.) But for the order of the apocalypse, Jenkins gives no impression that he has any special or technical knowledge about anything. All the scenes are cardboard, and if you lean against a wall, you are likely to topple over the set.
c. Is the reader spoon fed information from an all-knowing narrator, or allowed to draw his own conclusions from dialog or events? There is dialog in Left Behind, but it is stilted and unreal, and the reader is told what happens and what to think of it.
(8) Considering quality of book and paper, Left Behind ought to be sold for under $5 a copy. That it was apparently sold for $12.95 in the mid-1990s was a travesty. If the series sold as many copies as claimed, omeone made a lot of money off this.
Am I being too hard on these books? No. I bought a sack full of them a public library sale for $1, about .08 each, for paperbacks in hardly read condition. I wouldn't pay more.
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