Searching for stories to live by
Posted: 03 Aug 2012 @ 00:22
Rachel Mann on a critique of two best-selling
fantasy series
The Gospel According to Twilight: Women, sex, and
God
Elaine A. Heath
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06661-2)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT225 - free postage on
UK online orders during August)
Harry Potter: A Christian chronicle
Sonia Falaschi-Ray
Book Guild Publishing £9.99
(978-1-84624-681-4)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT225 - free postage on
UK online orders during August)
IN THE past 15 years, young people's fiction has become a
phenomenon, drawing audiences from as many adults as children.
J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, focusing on the
epic good-v.-evil adventures of a young wizard, was the catalyst.
In its wake have come many fantasy series, supreme of which - in
the United States, at least - is Stephenie Meyer's Twilight
Saga. Meyer's is primarily a work of teenage romance, centred
on the dangerous love affair between the human Bella Swan and the
vampire Edward Cullen. Both Heath and Falaschi-Ray's books are
attempts, with differing degrees of success, to figure out what
place Twilight and Potter have in a world
searching for stories to live by.
Elaine A. Heath's The Gospel According to Twilight is
that very rare thing: a pop-culture book that is actually a work of
theology; and it is a delight. Especially helpful is Heath's
attempt to disentangle the troubling portrayal of young women in
Twilight from the saga's powerful representation of the
place of sacrificial and erotic love in sacramental relationships.
Heath is by turns witty, self-mocking, and insightful,
intelligently unpicking how it is that this series has hooked into
the fantasies of both young women and those of us who should know
much better. Admittedly, as theology this book is introductory; and
if its criticisms of Twilight rarely progress beyond
"Feminism 101", it makes its points with panache.
Heath's text contains a few minor factual errors about
Twilight; so, given the rabidity of the fan-base, I hope
she doesn't get hate mail.
Popular culture's love affair with all things "vampire" may be
passing, but this is still a timely book, worth reading if you have
the slightest interest in the power of fiction to influence the
world-view of young people.
Sonia Falaschi-Ray's Harry Potter: A Christian
chronicle is a huge disappointment. Indeed, given the richness
of the source material, it is a lost opportunity. Falaschi-Ray
wants to show that Harry Potter is a fundamentally
Christian narrative rather than the gateway to witchcraft and
anti-Christian values, as some have claimed.
Perhaps herein lies one of the problems: I don't sense that (in
the UK, at least) there is much of an "anti-Potter" Christian
caucus. So it becomes a book that, rather like Don Quixote, tilts
at windmills rather than targets. The structure of the book is
problematic. Falaschi-Ray divides it in two, trying to show how the
main characters resemble Christian figures, and also examining the
way in which the underlying world-view of the novels is
predominantly Christian.
But her delivery makes the book a dull and humourless, if
thorough, list. She takes characters in turn, and essentially says,
"Take Harry. He's a bit like Jesus, isn't he? Take Hagrid. He's a
bit like Peter, isn't he?" Falaschi-Ray doesn't convert her passion
for Potter into something that draws the reader along. Her
book is well-intentioned, but feels like a vanity project in search
of a decent editor.
The Revd Rachel Mann is the Priest-in-Charge of St
Nicholas's, Burnage, in Manchester.