Alvin Maker

I am almost through reading Card's first book in the Alvin Maker series. In my last post I suggest that I might be more craftsman than artist. I like building stuff, putting things together, mending things, I cringe under the epitaph "everybody needs a (my name)", so now I am wondering if there is a bit of "maker" in me. Mind you, only about as much maker as Uncle Andrew was a true magician.

The Alvin Maker world is overtly laced with "folk magic". I am OK with this as fiction but it looks a bit too much like Card is proselyting Mormonism. In her excellent dissertation Alma Jean Porschet goes so far as to say "without Joseph Smith there could be no Seventh Son". She sees Alvin as a representation of Smith and identifies things that happen in the novels as suggestive of Mormon history and doctrines. Which begs the question - by continuing to read will I end up wanting to become a Mormon?

Lost boys

I have just finished reading Lost boys by Orson Scott Card. Incidentally I was struck by similarities between Card's description of the Mormon faith and our own church beliefs. And yet we would not in any way align ourselves with Mormonism. The plot is, of course, infinitely sad with eight boys mutilated and murdered by a seemingly harmless and neighbourly old man. Card manages to cut right through the inhibitions which prevent most of us even voicing things associated with sexual perversion, exposing the weakness of our bodily appetites at the same time as upholding common decency and the strength of character required to control the same. Card's blunt descriptions are the opposite of euphemisms and that is a main reason why I like his writing style, why I was drawn to Ender's Game even though the bluntness almost offended me. We do much harm in covering things up, in not being willing to talk openly when open talking is needed. And I point the finger at myself - I suppose I am frightened of doing so because of what people might think. Indeed one raison d'être for this blog is so that I can try to express things that I find hard to talk about.

After setting the book down we are left agreeing, of course, that the old man must never be allowed to molest again, but not hating and condemning him so much as beginning to understand what drove him to do those terrible things. We are left feeling sadder for him than for his eight victims. Because the same 'Boy', or alter ego, that controlled him, or at least similar weakness, is found in each one of us. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?