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ghoti_mhic_uaitWe watched Evening last night. Very beautiful, very emotionally draining. It's about memory and mistakes, and love. It's a brilliant film, but not easy.
Similarly, I am currently reading The Fionavar Tapestry series by Guy Gavriel Kay. I am moved to wonder whether atheists have the same reaction to Kay that I have to Egan - obviously the books are very good, but it's hard to read more than one at a time because of the relentless religion (in Kay's case, Christianity; in Egan's case, evangelical atheism). In any case, the starkness of the spirituality is something which I find difficult, again, very beautiful, very draining.
Similarly, I am currently reading The Fionavar Tapestry series by Guy Gavriel Kay. I am moved to wonder whether atheists have the same reaction to Kay that I have to Egan - obviously the books are very good, but it's hard to read more than one at a time because of the relentless religion (in Kay's case, Christianity; in Egan's case, evangelical atheism). In any case, the starkness of the spirituality is something which I find difficult, again, very beautiful, very draining.
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Date: 2007-09-26 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 10:01 am (UTC)In fact, it's less overpowering than many cases. A lot of fantasy has manifest gods who clearly exist and have obvious, tangible and often large effects on the world and on the plot. I'm thinking of Eddings in particular here, but he's by no means in a class by himself: Feist's gods are fairly tangible even if people don't actually meet them most of the time, Pratchett and Gaiman are both big on gods of various stripes really existing, even Pullman has real gods even if he clearly doesn't like them very much. By contrast, most of Kay's gods – particularly Jad, who appears to be consciously the Christian God with the serial number filed off – are presented solely as a set of beliefs in the heads of some of the characters, and the reader is never given any evidence of whether or not they actually exist at all.
There are exceptions. The gods in Fionavar are manifest (but hardly Christian, unless you're thinking of the unseen Weaver himself; also Fionavar can't be taken as representative of Kay's work in general, since it was his first effort and is markedly different from the rest); Rian in A Song for Arbonne exists to the extent of endowing her priesthood with a few very limited mystic powers; in the Sarantium books we're given no evidence for Jad but ample evidence of one of the pagan "old gods" whose worship was superseded by Jaddism. But more often than not, the tangible supernatural in Kay's books takes the form of non-god-oriented magic, and tends to be pretty much orthogonal to the characters' religion if any.
Meanwhile, the portrayal of many of the religious people in the books is hardly sympathetic. Jaddites in particular tend to be unpleasant fanatic zealot types who kill and plunder in their god's name, fall out with each other to an excessive extent over fine points of theology, and generally display little consideration for real people and their well-being in favour of following sets of arbitrary commandments they believe to have come from their god. And the fact that the author consistently (and, in at least one case, explicitly) refuses to confirm that their god even exists and isn't just something they made up has always appeared to me to be making a case against the real-world religion to which Jaddism alludes.
So I'm not entirely sure on what grounds you describe Kay's religion as "relentless" – I've seen much worse in fantasy – and I'm particularly surprised that you characterise it as Christian in particular. Can you elaborate?
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Date: 2007-09-26 11:36 am (UTC)Eddings's gods can get a bit much, in that they're so powerful and so constantly intervening that one begins to think that it hardly matters what the humans do because the gods can always undo it or do it better if they feel like it. So that impinges on the enjoyment of the human-level plot, to an extent; particularly in the Malloreon, the humans are clearly just pawns of the gods/prophecies/Necessities, and their role to a large extent is limited to either meekly doing what they're told or finding they can't avoid doing so anyway. But I wouldn't have thought of that as an atheist viewpoint in particular; it's just a question of whether the plot creates adequate tension, and in any given book it can just as easily fail to do so for non-godly reasons as for godly ones.
I suppose that if a book were describing a fantasy world on the surface but was clearly intended to really be making points in favour of theism in the real world, then I'd consider that to be excessive religion and find it impaired my enjoyment. But Kay certainly doesn't fall into that category, for the reasons I've mentioned in my previous comment; in fact I think the only author I've encountered who does would have to be the obvious one, i.e. Lewis writing Narnia.
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Date: 2007-09-26 02:29 pm (UTC)The thing about fiction that contains an explicitly present Christian God whose presence within the universe of the book is inarguable is that it throws the philosophical problem of evil into particularly sharp relief, and in ways for which I don't think there's a win condition; if one wishes to present God as all-knowing, omnipotent and well-intentioned, that does not gel with said God in the universe of said book permitting one's protagonist to be in any real jeopardy, which kind of destroys narrative tension.
I suppose that if a book were describing a fantasy world on the surface but was clearly intended to really be making points in favour of theism in the real world, then I'd consider that to be excessive religion and find it impaired my enjoyment.
I recommend you avoid Stephen Lawhead then, as he does exactly that in ways that really grate on me. Mind you, he also has ancient Celts eating potatoes, so he may well grate for other reasons than religion.
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Date: 2007-09-26 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 02:23 pm (UTC)It's worth bearing in mind that Kay wrote Fionavar coming off a fair amount of time spent working with Christopher Tolkien on the masses of material his father left behind, and while some of the shape of Fionavar seems to be in reaction to that (what he does with female characters, having the Dark Lord on screen) other bits, like the religious shape of explicitly present gods with a greater God in the background, are very much from Tolkien, and from Tolkien in ways that lots of less-good derivative modern fantasy does not do.
I should read those again, it's been ages. There are a couple of ways in which Fionavar does not work for me, but they are odd ways and not anything I'd care to call flaws, exactly.
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Date: 2007-09-27 08:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 03:25 pm (UTC)Yes, there's the theme of sacrifice and so on, but that's a general religious theme.
So, in summary, I thought it was Christian because I'm Christian, and that's how I relate to the world, and I thought it was Christian because I'm barking mad.
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Date: 2007-10-01 01:11 pm (UTC)One of the things great things I think Kay has done is write fantasy with religion but without intrusive gods. The reverse seems to me to be far more common.
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Date: 2007-10-01 06:01 pm (UTC)Actually, I think the single most unusual attitude to religion in fantasy is that taken by Mordant's Need, which I managed to get all the way through before I noticed that it was completely secular – the only mention of any kind of god at any point at all was in the curse-words of characters from Image-worlds. Fantasy is normally so dominated by manifest gods and politically ascendant priesthoods that it was a refreshing change to see purely mechanistic magic and no religion whatsoever.
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Date: 2007-10-01 10:19 pm (UTC)Maybe I should read more :)
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Date: 2007-09-26 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 12:19 pm (UTC)I suppose a lot of his stories explore the nature of conciousness, and these generally have the assumption that what people think is a concequence of biochemical reactions in the brain (or silicon, or whatever). That could be taken as advancing an athiest viewpoint. However, advancing that point of view further, you could say that cat-scans [1] were also evangelically athiest, which I'm not sure that I see.
I suppose that, being athiest, I may be missing huge tracts of evangelising because I broadly agree with it. Which bits am I missing?
[1] They're the ones people do of your brain, aren't they. If not, substitute the correct word.
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Date: 2007-09-26 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 11:29 am (UTC)