[ — Karen Myers — ]

An Irritated Review™, sort of.

I was reading a Western Christian Romance (yeah, yeah, I know — serves me right) based on its blurb and (as often happens) it was bad enough in a particular sort of way that I was compelled to finish it just so I could use it as an example to hang my rant upon.

I will pass over the surface indicators of quality problems (misunderstood phrases [“cut and dry”], hypercorrectives [“give it to Fred and I”], and agreement issues [plural vs singular]) to focus (as I usually do) on storytelling failures.

I don’t generally look for Christian stories, but I am adequately sympathetic that it’s not an automatic problem for me. (I was raised Catholic, but (let’s say) it didn’t “take”.) I mention this Christian issue because I think the story fails to satisfy for both ordinary reasons (lack of consistency – reality – plausibility) and also for particularly Christian reasons, indirectly — not the underlying message, but the form of the story.

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The premise of the story is that an East Coast father (now an impoverished drunk after the death of his wife) has answered a mail-order bride advertisement on behalf of his younger teen-age daughter in order to reduce his cost of living. His older teen-age daughter arranges to make the trip instead, taking her sister’s name. She is lame (frozen knee joint) and thinks to spare her sister the indignity of the arrangement by assuming her name.

The bridegroom Western settler is a widower with a pre-teen son. He used to be a drunk, but almost killed a man and was shocked into reform (saved by the Lord and his local congregation). He conceals his disreputable past from his newly arriving bride, as she has concealed her substitution for the bride he thought he was getting.

The two primary characters (in fact, all of the characters, after reformation) mean well. They are haunted by their particular lies/concealments, until circumstances (in the form of the very heavy hand of the author) force the revelations out into the open so that they can be mutually forgiven.

Let’s get the usual authorial clumsiness out of the way:

Reality/plausibility failures:
* The decision to skip milking a cow in the morning if there are other things to do (the lack of persistence/reality of bit characters like animals).
* The frozen knee joint that can’t remember it’s there. (It can somehow (without explanation) allow for long walks, chair/carriage sitting, horseback riding, jumping into streams, emergency running).
* The wildfire that, with precision (or the hand of God?), stops after burning just the newly-built bedroom extension without harming the rest of the cabin.
* The arrival of the younger sister from the East with her new husband who (amazingly) just happens (there’s that hand of God again) to be the fellow that the Western settler almost killed as a drunk. (They fall upon each other in mutual forgiveness.)

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Parables vs fiction:
What I really want to focus on is where I think that some of the storytelling suffers because it confuses the rules of parable with the excellences of fiction. Without actually addressing the reader directly, this story is nevertheless didactic. It assigns just enough people to its parts to demonstrate how good people can fall, how they can reform themselves, why they shouldn’t conceal the truth from each other, and how God’s hand moves to redeem them from their errors. It deals in archetypes and explicitly forbidden or encouraged behaviors, to make a point.

This is what parables do — they present a religious truth or assertion in the form of a story, and the story itself is rather threadbare, lacking the ruffles and quirks of human behaviors and the arbitrary accidents and spur-of-the-moment decisions that change lives, in favor of reasoned moral choices.

That’s not what fiction does. Fiction presents a human experiential truth in the form of a story, and often uses unusual situations and accidental encounters to demonstrate how human behaviors are responsive to a variety of stimuli and not necessarily focused on moral principles at all times.

These are not the same thing, at least not in our modern definition of fiction. There was a time when we played with the rules of parable in our fiction — classical and Renaissance comedies are full of implausible circumstances, either at the hands of explicit gods, or with the overt connivance of the author, proud of his extravagances. It fell under the general concept of “there’s a rule to our universe, and this is how men should live, this is how they fall short, and this how they can redeem themselves (or fail to)”. Note that phrase “redeem themselves” — the gods may (sometimes capriciously) present choices and situations, but the humans have to choose. The tenets of Christianity come with an explicit choice that’s somewhat different — believe, in order to be saved; you cannot be saved without belief.

The consequence of this parable/fiction conflation in a story like this example is that the hand of God is everywhere, creating all the implausible coincidences, and remaking fundamental characters (every drunk is reformed, even the father of the sisters). “To know all is to forgive all” may be an admirable ambition, but human psychological experience tells us it isn’t necessarily true — it requires a religious foundation. The same happy ending may occur in a particular story, but the motives and mechanisms are different. Human experience is a universal background to human behavior, but religions may not be, or may differ significantly.

I am not incapable of enjoying a significantly religious piece of fiction, whether explicit (Ben-Hur) or cultural (the Brother Cadfael mysteries) or even subtle (The Lilies of the Field comes to mind). In all of these, the human experience rings true.

In a story like this one, however, the human experience seems to be shoehorned into a clumsy simulacrum whose blatant implausibilities interfere with acceptance. The story is threadbare, like a worn handkerchief.