... is a children's fantasy: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville.
To get the gist of Un Lun Dun, picture this standard fantasy pattern: There's a parallel world (UnLondon) in which magic works, inanimate objects move and talk on their own, and so forth. This world is facing a crisis, but there are prophecies of a Chosen One who will save the day by performing a series of great ... oh, never mind.
Within about five minutes of the Chosen One's appearance, it's obvious that none of that is going to work. If the world is going to be saved, an Unchosen One is going to have to pick up the slack and make something up. And she's running out of time, so she's going to have to convince UnLondoners that they don't have to do things by the book, they don't need answers to all the questions they thought they needed, and they don't have perform the quests the prophecies describe. But they do have to get their act together and do something right away. And they're going to have to do it themselves, because the predestined messiah wasn't up to the job.
So inside a world of magic rich and imaginative enough to enthrall any 10-year-old runs the following message: We all thought we knew how the world was supposed to be and the way things were supposed to go, but that's not happening so we're going to have to think for ourselves now.
Even more subversively, the novel doesn't jump to the opposite extreme and support the anti-religious rants of Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris. One of the first allies of the Unchosen One is the book of prophecies itself -- which is animate, of course, and deeply distressed about its own failures. It turns out that the tales of the Chosen One, in spite of their overall wrongness, contain a great deal of useful information -- after you sift them through your common sense.
In other words, Un Lun Dun is a parable of liberal religion. In terms a child can understand, it models respect for scripture without subservience to it. After you challenge all the assumptions and throw out everything that isn't going to work, you still have something left. But what you have left is a useful member of your team, not an authoritarian leader.
So if you think of liberal religion as an insincere compromise between humanism and fundamentalism, or as an intellectual nuance that the rabble could never understand -- think again. It can be laid out in terms so clear and sensible a child can understand them.
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3 comments:
Well I am sorry to have to say so Doug but from where I stand liberal religion, as exemplified by the U*U religious community, is just plain insincere period. . . Far from being a "compromise between humanism and fundamentalism", I see U*Uism affirming and promoting "Humanist" fundamentalism to the detriment of genuinely liberal theistic religion. That liberal religion, as exemplified by U*Uism, may be an "intellectual nuance that the rabble could never understand" is a U*U conceit founded in the stunning hubris that is sadly all too prevalent within the U*U "religious community". BTW The term "Ivory Tower" takes on a whole new meaning when applied to U*Uism. . .
The "rabble" can and does understand U*U hubris and hypocrisy. These and other serious failings of the U*U religious community can be laid out in terms so clear and sensible a child can understand them. . .
So how come a book exemplifying the principles of liberal religion is "subversive?"
If only it was a little less tedious of a book....
I called the book "subversive" because it will introduce ideas into the heads of people who would otherwise screen those ideas out.
Tedious? Different tastes, I guess. I ate it up.
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