cking's Full Review: Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins - Left Behind: Ilu...
Some years back, I started seeing a bumper sticker that mysteriously stated that “In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.” Since this sticker was often accompanied by one of the Jesus fishes that started appearing in the late seventies, or even one of those nasty-looking Jesus-fish-eating-the-Darwin-fish stickers*, I assumed that it had something to do with fundamentalist Christianity. Whenever I have a question about fundamentalist Christianity, I ask my friend Doctor Dave, who was raised in a fundamentalist home and is now rather shall we say secular. Some Christians, he explained, believe that the end of days will by heralded by this Rapture. Jesus will return, but it will not be His Second Coming. That comes later. In the Rapture, Jesus will appear briefly and sweep up all his real followers. Things on Earth will quickly take a major turn for the worse as the AntiChrist appears and all manner of nastiness unfolds as was prophesied in the Book of Revelations. Kindly Doctor Dave went on at great length about this and other issues, but when he started using terms like “Premillenial Dispensationalism,” I changed the subject. But at least the sticker finally made sense. In my naivety, I had assumed that the car was male and that the rapture would do terrible things to its genetalia. Just kidding. The driver was telling us that at any moment, his car could careen off to the side killing pedestrians or taking out mail boxes because he was being swept up. Not to put too fine a point on this, whenever I see one of those stickers, I find myself hoping that the drivers are not involved in any carpooling programs with non-believers.
Time passed. Then I heard of a novel titled Left Behind that used an interpretation of the Book of Revelations as its plot line. This sounded interesting; I like to read science fiction now and then, and thought that a dystopic look at the future from a scriptural bent could be interesting. Oh how wrong I was. This book is absolutely dreadful. And not dreadful in an amusing way, like an Ed Wood movie or the Republican national convention. Just plain awful. I hesitated for a long time about weighing in on it here on Epinions. Since it deals with some people’s religious beliefs, I stood a fair chance of offending people. On the other hand, this book is just another entrant into the marketplace of ideas. Just because the authors are religious, why should that inoculate them from criticism? Why should their piety excuse them from the duty of writing a decent book? So here I go. If this book matches your religious beliefs, please understand that it is the book I dislike, not your theology.
In the last paragraph, I wrote that LB was not at all funny. Actually, it does have its moments. The funniest to me is the names that the authors have cooked up for their characters. Two of the main male characters are Rayford Steele and “Buck” Williams. I’m pretty sure that the authors swiped these two monikers off of the jacket of a porn video.
Some have described this book as a page-turner, but I had a lot of trouble getting through it. The narrative passages, while necessarily farfetched, aren’t bad. The dialogue, though, is pretty pathetic. Partly it has to do with the fact that the authors use dialog to instruct us on the finer points of theology. So two people can’t really have a conversation without one of them busting out into pretty heavy-handed exegetics. This following quote was taken nearly randomly from the middle of the book:
Bruce looked Chloe in the eyes. “There is no doubt in my mind that we have witnessed the Rapture. My biggest fear, once I realized the truth, was that there was no more hope for me. I had missed it, I had been a phony, I had set up my own brand of Christianity that may have made for a life of freedom but had cost me my soul. I had heard people say that when the church was Raptured, God’s Spirit would be gone from the earth. The logic was that when Jesus went to heaven after his resurrection, the Holy Spirit the God gave to the church was embodied in believers. So when they were taken, the Spirit, would be gone, and there would be no more hope for anyone left. You can’t know the relief when Pastor’s tape showed me otherwise.”
Ok, maybe your friends talk like that, but mine don’t. This sort of thing might work from the pulpit, but to stick it inside the mouths of people who are supposed to be having a conversation makes it truly deadly.
The authors must also assume that their audience is pretty stupid. The evidence of this disdain is on nearly every page. Do you remember the first year of foreign language you took in Junior High? Remember having to read and translate dialogues between two characters who already knew each other? They would tell each other things that they should clearly already know. You may have encountered a married couple telling each other the names and ages of their own children and similarly preposterous things like
Maria: And we live in a house.
Carlos: Our house is in Madrid.
Maria: Yes, and you are a lawyer.
Carlos: Yes, and you are a teacher of English and our children go to school.
Doesn’t this bring back fond memories? When the dialogue in Left Behind is not in longwinded teaching mode, it tends to be this simplistic, unreal, English-for-non-English-speakers drivel.
There are many small irritating things about this work. One particularly grating one involves the character who will eventually become the AntiChrist. Sorry for the spoiler, but he stuck out like a skyscraper in the desert. His name is Nicolae Carpathia. This name rubbed me the wrong way instantly. While Nicolae is an actual Romanian name, Carpathia is part of an English word that describes a chain of mountains that is in Romania, the Carpathian mountains. Only even if old Nicolae was named after the mountains, his name still wouldn’t be Carpathia, it would be something like Carpaþii, which should be pronounced, as far as I can tell, kar-PAHTS-ee. Aren’t Romanian names devilish to the average American eye and tongue? The Romanian Prime Minister is named Mugur Isarescu, and other Romanians in the news include Catalin Dumitrescu, Marcel Cobuz, Gabriel Ispas, and many still remember the miniature antichrist Nicolae Ceausescu. I know almost nothing about Romania or Romanians, but I trust that you can read the foregoing without your head exploding or your lips getting tired, which is more than Messrs. LaHaye and Jenkins can say. If the authors were determined to use a Romanian as their Bad News Bear, they could have given him a real Romanian name and trusted their readers to puzzle it out. Instead, they dumbed it down, since they believe their reader isn’t up to it. Or perhaps the authors are just lazy. I found out the above information about the Romanian in about 3 minutes on that new-fangled internet thing.
My ultimate question to readers of this book is this: why not just read the Bible? It’s not that hard to find a translation that you can read and understand. If you find parts of it confusing, your local library has truckloads of books on interpretation. And most important, you would be reading one of the most influential books in history, and not one of the worst ones in English.
Almost as irritating as the book itself are the reviews of it on this site. There are over 300 of them last time I checked, and most of them are at least as awful as the book itself. Many are just a rehash of the first few pages, followed by a gush about what an amazing series it is with precious little else. How do I know this? I read them. Heaven help me, I read them all. ”So, Mr. Critical,” you ask, “Why bother reading the darn things if they’re so bad and you seem to hate them?” It’s a good question. I cannot truly explain my fascination with this wretched book and its fans. But I do know I can’t help it. The only product review alert I have set on this site is for Left Behind. I get this funny little frisson each time the email shows up with the subject heading “A new opinion on Left Behind: A Novel!” My best attempt to come to grips with it is this: remember when you were a kid and one of your baby teeth was coming loose and you kept pushing it around with your tongue? Even though it was kind of icky and at least a little painful, you did it anyway. It’s like that.
For a while, I was rating them, maybe adding a comment or two, but it’s a losing battle. Most people don’t want to hear about how their book review isn’t really a book review. So I think I’m going to change tactics here and start giving people a number based on the following score chart. Let me know what you think…I’ll keep adding new scores as I think of them, or as you send me one I like.
Under 200 words: 2 points
Uses some variation of "Don't get left behind" or "I won't be left behind" in title: 5 points
Most of the review is a plot synopsis of the first 4 pages: 2 points
Mentions that it would make good reading for Christians and non-Christians alike: 5 points
Mentions that the reviewer does not typically like to read: 10 points
.25 points for each spelling or grammatical error
Mistakes authors' interpretation of scripture for what will actually happen: 5 points
Points out that it is just interpretation: -2 points
Gloats about the fact that they will be swept up in the rapture: 8 points
Gloats about the fact that they will be swept up in the rapture and you won't: 20 points
Specifically targets a person or group for eternal damnation: 9 points
Doesn't really talk about the novel, but about other things: 5 points
* Note to believers: many non-Christians find these stickers creepy and menacing.
In one cataclysmic moment, millions around the globe disappear. Vehicles, suddenly unmanned, careen out of control. People are terror-stricken before ...More at Christianbook.com
Best of the Best. Only one series will take listeners to the end of the world as they explore eternal truth--the bestselling Left Behind series by Tim...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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