More than at any other point in my life, it seems that people have been fighting and dying over some of the contents of their various major religious texts. This potentially makes using any of these texts as a source for literary inspiration a tricky proposition: will the author be branded evangelical and pushed to the fringe of niche publications? Might he be seen as taking a hard-line position in the currently boiling clash of civilizations? In his leviathan second novel "The Children’s Hospital," Chris Adrian dares to draw from the Bible in this time of highly politicized religion and comes away with a single story of persistence and humanity that triumphs beyond the trappings of self-righteous moralizing and preachiness that could so easily have marred it.
On the Earth of "The Children’s Hospitial," “the end of the world” does not really mean the total end. The apocalypse is one of the first things to happen in the novel, and where some writers might see global catastrophe as a difficult piece of exposition to top, Adrian hardly gives it a glance as it is happening. Within the never-named pediatric hospital that serves as the Ark for the characters, the Second Great Flood of Earth causes rumblings that could just as easily have been described as an earthquake or a blast from an explosion, except that they have the distinct impression that they are being lifted. By forcing his characters to note that the end has come but press on and continue with all of the work that they were doing before, Adrian forces himself to do the same as a writer. At the end of the world, the only thing left appears to be a children’s hospital floating atop seven miles of new ocean: you know that just from reading the back cover, Adrian concedes, so what next?
In his work to answer the thorny question of “what next,” Adrian tells us a kind of long fable, almost a sort of fairy tale, a story-behind-the-story that regards the end of the world exclusively in terms of the life of Dr. Jemma Claflin as the thread to which The End is tied and born. Six-hundred and fifteen pages of this rather whiny, almost unbelievably self-absorbed protagonist should by all rights become grating, but the considerable unpredictability of the plot keeps things moving fast enough that it’s easy to be distracted from whether or not Jemma Claflin is someone you’d ever want to know. In some ways, Jemma is one of the realest and most “normal” protagonists I’ve ever encountered, and this coupled with the sheer volume of things we learn throughout the novel about her rather abnormal life give her a strangely omnipotent humanity. The hospital holds 1,138 other inhabitants, many of whom play nearly as large a part as Jemma and who Adrian lends rich and distinctive voices. The author creates the necessary element of caring about the characters, and thus, the events that transpire among them.
I was 400 pages into the novel before I really noticed that it had taken a hold on me, and that I had some emotional stake in its conclusion. Some events can indeed come across as superfluous, tacked-on affairs that needlessly stretch the novel a couple of hundred pages beyond what seems necessary, though ultimately the author decides what is necessary for his purposes as a storyteller. I cannot deny that the book was easy to read in bursts of 100 or 200 pages because the weight of the plight of the characters—to survive for the sake of it in a new world that all along, they know, may hold no hope for them anyhow—is richly portrayed as the weight of our own lives as inhabitants of this not-yet flooded planet. The prose itself sometimes lack vibrancy, and there are more typos than are really acceptable in a widely-distributed professional publication, but these faults fail to detract significantly from the power of the mysterious, clearly constructed and executed plot.
It is unclear to what extent "The Children’s Hospital" might be a commentary on any of the events or particular components of our contemporary cultural world. With such fallible characters, though, Adrian avoids what would ultimately be the banal mistake of telling us so bluntly how we should live our lives. What is clear is that "The Children’s Hospital" has left me with the feeling that I have seen a rich and fulfilling picture of one unconventional view of the end of all things and beyond, and that through this picture I might come to love everything unpredictable and appreciate everything terrible in life and hold on even tighter to hope where it sometimes seems there is none.
No comments:
Post a Comment