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Mar. 18th, 2023 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI enjoyed reading Alice Degan's From All False Doctrine very much and I also found it tremendously frustrating -- structurally a very interesting and charming book that I think runs sort of thematically counter to itself. That said it is also very much a book about faith and specifically Christian faith, which I am obviously not the natural audience for per se, so others' minds may definitely vary!
From All False Doctrine is set in Canada in the 1920s and begins when two pairs of friends, two men and two women, end up spending the day together at the beach due to a meet-cute involving a stolen boat. Two of them promptly begin a romance that leads fairly shortly to an engagement; the other two have become obsessed with each other in a way that they each individually and immediately decide is vastly unproductive and to be avoided as much as possible, because one of them, Elsa Nordqvist, is an atheist Classicist who believes that marriage is incompatible with her academic goals and the other, Kit Underhill, is a hot Anglo-Catholic priest (legally allowed to marry! probably problematic however to marry an atheist).
The A-plot from here focuses on Elsa and Kit's slow romance and Elsa's attempts to reconcile her possible futures with her gradual rediscovery of her own faith.
Meanwhile, the B-plot involves a forged ancient manuscript and an evil cult focused on metaphysical self-actualization via shapeshifting on the astral plane!
The engine powering both these plots is the disappearance of Peachy, the antic Bohemian musician who is Kit's codependent foster brother and best friend, and after the beach day has also become engaged to Elsa's best friend Harriet. Peachy vanishes after blowing up all his relationships in a cloud of self-sabotage and insecurities which may be cult-linked. The resolution of the Peachy situation happens about 70% of the way through the book, is incredibly dramatic, and wraps up in more or less a single chapter that immediately and chaotically unbalances the entire book by revealing that a.) the literal devil is literally real; b.) Peachy has disappeared because he unwisely and accidentally used the cult's demonic teachings to self-actualize himself into a knockoff version of Kit and has been miserably trapped in an uncomfortable variant version of his best friend's body for a month; c.) this situation however can be resolved by Elsa's faith-Revivalist father casting the devil out of Peachy! BEFORE he ever has to confront Kit in his knockoff-Kit body, because Kit is busy at the cult fending off attempted seductions by the devil in a knockoff-Elsa body at the time.
My problems are these:
1. 'Peachy has been trapped and miserable as a knockoff Kit' is such incredibly delicious concept! I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS RESOLVES IN ONE CHAPTER AND KIT NEVER HAS TO FACE IT DIRECTLY
2. and more significantly, Elsa's delicate journey towards faith is really interesting when the book is carefully balancing it so that everything that seems metaphysical is in fact plausibly deniable, but as soon as the devil becomes absolutely and undeniably real I'm like "this would be vastly more interesting if she stayed an atheist throughout." not that fantasy can't be Christian-coded! I read Narnia and the Dark is Rising like anybody! but, you know ... a light hand really does wonders .....
(and 3. less significantly but other than Peachy's transformation into Kit the other two transformations we see in the book are both villains who turn themselves into women to commit pointedly-described-as-half-hearted seductions on men ... meanwhile Peachy's Kit-crafting centers around his feelings of masculine inadequacy because he didn't want to sign up for WWI while Kit did sign up and emerged a war hero ... there is sure SOMETHING going on with gender here and the book sure does NOT want to get into it)
Anyway. Charming book, lovely prose! MUCH to chew on ... perhaps too much to chew on ... but one does respect ambition, particularly when it's weird & unusual ambition, and certainly there are not many fantasy-adjacent books that are genuinely about religious faith in ways that are interesting at all and so perhaps worth it for that alone.
From All False Doctrine is set in Canada in the 1920s and begins when two pairs of friends, two men and two women, end up spending the day together at the beach due to a meet-cute involving a stolen boat. Two of them promptly begin a romance that leads fairly shortly to an engagement; the other two have become obsessed with each other in a way that they each individually and immediately decide is vastly unproductive and to be avoided as much as possible, because one of them, Elsa Nordqvist, is an atheist Classicist who believes that marriage is incompatible with her academic goals and the other, Kit Underhill, is a hot Anglo-Catholic priest (legally allowed to marry! probably problematic however to marry an atheist).
The A-plot from here focuses on Elsa and Kit's slow romance and Elsa's attempts to reconcile her possible futures with her gradual rediscovery of her own faith.
Meanwhile, the B-plot involves a forged ancient manuscript and an evil cult focused on metaphysical self-actualization via shapeshifting on the astral plane!
The engine powering both these plots is the disappearance of Peachy, the antic Bohemian musician who is Kit's codependent foster brother and best friend, and after the beach day has also become engaged to Elsa's best friend Harriet. Peachy vanishes after blowing up all his relationships in a cloud of self-sabotage and insecurities which may be cult-linked. The resolution of the Peachy situation happens about 70% of the way through the book, is incredibly dramatic, and wraps up in more or less a single chapter that immediately and chaotically unbalances the entire book by revealing that a.) the literal devil is literally real; b.) Peachy has disappeared because he unwisely and accidentally used the cult's demonic teachings to self-actualize himself into a knockoff version of Kit and has been miserably trapped in an uncomfortable variant version of his best friend's body for a month; c.) this situation however can be resolved by Elsa's faith-Revivalist father casting the devil out of Peachy! BEFORE he ever has to confront Kit in his knockoff-Kit body, because Kit is busy at the cult fending off attempted seductions by the devil in a knockoff-Elsa body at the time.
My problems are these:
1. 'Peachy has been trapped and miserable as a knockoff Kit' is such incredibly delicious concept! I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS RESOLVES IN ONE CHAPTER AND KIT NEVER HAS TO FACE IT DIRECTLY
2. and more significantly, Elsa's delicate journey towards faith is really interesting when the book is carefully balancing it so that everything that seems metaphysical is in fact plausibly deniable, but as soon as the devil becomes absolutely and undeniably real I'm like "this would be vastly more interesting if she stayed an atheist throughout." not that fantasy can't be Christian-coded! I read Narnia and the Dark is Rising like anybody! but, you know ... a light hand really does wonders .....
(and 3. less significantly but other than Peachy's transformation into Kit the other two transformations we see in the book are both villains who turn themselves into women to commit pointedly-described-as-half-hearted seductions on men ... meanwhile Peachy's Kit-crafting centers around his feelings of masculine inadequacy because he didn't want to sign up for WWI while Kit did sign up and emerged a war hero ... there is sure SOMETHING going on with gender here and the book sure does NOT want to get into it)
Anyway. Charming book, lovely prose! MUCH to chew on ... perhaps too much to chew on ... but one does respect ambition, particularly when it's weird & unusual ambition, and certainly there are not many fantasy-adjacent books that are genuinely about religious faith in ways that are interesting at all and so perhaps worth it for that alone.
