skygiants | (no subject)

I 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.

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From:

osprey_archer

....Is Peachy kind of in love with Kit because WOW I'm getting that vibe from the fact that he trapped himself in a version of Kit's body... but depending how it's written I could definitely see it feeling less that way in the book.

So if the devil is real, do we also get confirmation that God is real, or is it more of a "well PROBABLY God is also real given that faith-revivalist exorcism worked..." situation? Might be difficult to keep Elsa an atheist if God is strutting about the place although you COULD definitely go the route of "God is real and he SUCKS," which is not atheism but also not any kind of orthodoxy.

From:

melita66

She has been providing her The Tenants of 7C stories to her newsletter subscribers recently. I have two on my kindle app but haven't read them yet. I find it interesting that on her pinterest she characterized the Alice Degan books as fantasy and the A.J. Demas books as romance. Hmmm, I feel a reread coming on...

From:

troisoiseaux

I've read and have such mixed feelings about this book, for basically the same reasons you identify.

From:

sovay

I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS RESOLVES IN ONE CHAPTER AND KIT NEVER HAS TO FACE IT DIRECTLY

I too cannot believe this development was not dragged out across multiple chapters of narratively and emotionally relevant weirdness and misunderstanding. Diana Wynne Jones might have had it go on for the entire book.

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 .....

I feel the reveal of "whoops, no, it's literally the Devil" works better in narratives which are not also effectively conversion narratives: I can tolerate it in a certain quantity of occult horror, for example, but in a story explicitly about reapproaching and reconsidering one's Christianity, it just feels like the author slamming their hand down on the scale. Proving the truth of Christianity by the works of the Devil rather than the immanence of God also weirds me out personally because it feels so Evangelical, but I don't assume that the author is.

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

What?

From:

davidgillon

So, she has an actual priest as protagonist and BFF of Peachy, but feels the need to bring in another preacher when Peachy needs rescuing from the devil? That sounds like a lack of faith in her own protagonist!

Also Elsa is estranged from her preacher father, but falls for a priest? Hmmm....

On top of all that, Kit Underhill seems like a bit of a loaded name, with both the implication he's a fox and the whole Fae aspect of Underhill - with potential add-on Tam Linn and Thomas the Rhymer when you bring in the devil.

Everyone else is transforming themselves to seduce people, but Peachy only does it to become a Kit-knock off? Honestly, we can do the math, and will. Even if it's possibly not the maths she intended.

Does this whole set-up leave Harriet short-changed? Because it seems like it should work with an A and a B couple, but instead sounds like it does A Couple and his bro and can't figure out where she fits.

From:

davidgillon

Proving the truth of Christianity by the works of the Devil rather than the immanence of God also weirds me out personally because it feels so Evangelical

Absolutely!

From:

chestnut_pod

Meanwhile, the B-plot involves a forged ancient manuscript and an evil cult focused on metaphysical self-actualization via shapeshifting on the astral plane! -- Now that's a spit-take line!

a.) the literal devil is literally real -- But more was yet to come!!

And then I laughed again at "MUCH to chew on ... perhaps too much to chew on ..."

From:

landofnowhere

It is a really charming book with lovely prose! The religious plot didn't really stick with me, though the gender weirdness certainly was weird!

The thing that I'm still bitter about is that: Elsa is not wrong that it's going to be difficult for her to maintain an academic career if she marries, in fact harder than she realizes because the Depression -- discrimination against married women was a real thing that happened, and marrying a clergyman is only going to increase the social pressures to be in a traditional wifely role -- and I didn't feel like the romantic resolution particularly resolved that issue! I wanted to see more of a commitment from Kit that he was going to stand up for Elsa and make sure that she gets the time to herself that she needs for her research!

From:

sovay

Kit Underhill seems like a bit of a loaded name

I would also expect to meet someone named Kit Underhill in a novel by Charles de Lint.

From:

qian

I found Elsa's wrangling with faith the most interesting thing about the book, so I was incredibly outraged about the 70%-point "Devil is real" reveal (though it also made me laugh at how outrageous it was) because it DOES undercut Elsa's entire journey to faith imo. Like why even struggle if the Devil is real and your dad really is capable of casting out demons.

I think Degan's other books are all m/m romance, which tbh makes sense. I started trying to articulate why it makes sense and it all came out more judgey than I intended lolol, but I think that's probably where her joy lives and you can kind of tell even from this book. Though I did love it and wish she'd kept writing extremely odd genre mash-up m/f fantasy romances.

Edited Date: 2023-03-19 11:54 am (UTC)

From:

nnozomi

This is a great review. I enjoyed it a lot too, stopped halfway through to say "...this is a Christian romance novel in terms of actual content, is it okay for me to be having so much fun with it?...oh what the hell, no pun intended" and went on enjoying it.
I don't think I had as much trouble with the devil suddenly becoming real as you and qian did, probably just because I'm terrible about reading for plot and wasn't thinking hard about it.

From All False Doctrine is set in Canada in the 1920s
While I'm not expert on the place and time, it felt very period-appropriate to me, mostly--I think the only thing that made me go ? was Elsa a) being immediately aware of the concept that a man could be raped and b) using the word "rape" for it. (I don't mean it would be unheard of in the period, just that I feel like it would be approached differently.)

Elsa's faith-Revivalist father casting the devil out of Peachy!
...the thing is that I lived in Minnesota for long enough that Elsa's father is a familiar image and I found him delightful :)

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
I think I was saying in my own journal that if this book were a large fandom it would be dominated by Kit/Peachy fic, there's so much going on between the two of them...and almost all of it happens offstage :(

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)
The devil-as-a-woman REMINDS ME of something else, I can't think of what. The Space Trilogy somewhere? Agree very much with your point about gender too. (Yuletide this year...?)

I've only read it once and I'm looking forward to going back to it; one way and another, flaws aside, it was just super engaging on various levels.

From:

aella_irene

I would be really interested in your take on the Gregor Demarkian novels, particularly Book 2, Precious Blood, in which vaguely Armenian Orthodox Gregor Demarkian is trying to solve a crime in a Catholic church in Holy Week, and Book 10, Festival of Deaths, in which the crime is theoretically connected to a prominent Jewish television host, and her majority Jewish staff, who are in town for Hannukah.

From:

landofnowhere

I don't think I had as much trouble with the devil suddenly becoming real as you and qian did, probably just because I'm terrible about reading for plot and wasn't thinking hard about it.

Me too! I recommended it to someone who was horrified by the theological implications, but I was just having fun with the ride.

From:

skygiants

Before learning that this author also writes exclusively m/m romance under another pen name I would have said that all of the vibes were entirely accidental, but this new fact has really shifted my worldview.

God does not appear in the book per se but it's also not really a question about whether God exists ... the thing that works against the devil is faith, but by the point in the book when miracles start happening Elsa has already come back around on faith so there's simply no question about it, which is one of the many ways in which the structure feels very off-kilter!

From:

skygiants

I only learned that she also wrote the A.J. Demas books about an hour after making this post and tbh I am still finding this an extremely wild fact!

From:

skygiants

I guess at least I have certainly thought and talked about it more since reading it than I would have if I thought it was 100% a home run!

From:

skygiants

There's a lovely little passage somewhere in the middle of the book where another thing that seemed unequivocally supernaturally weird has proven to have a perfectly plausible psychological explanation, and Elsa thinks really specifically about how important that is, that she has to choose what she wants to believe about it -- and then!! Alice Degan, it was such a nice passage!

The Literal Devil has the ability to turn into a knockoff version of Elsa and uses this to try and seduce Kit ... if this were all I'd be like, 'sure, classic the devil behavior.' But, also, it turns out that Elsa's evil graduate advisor who's been trying to woo her also has used his metaphysical self-changing abilities to create an alternate identity as a glamorous European noblewoman, who keeps meeting up with Elsa to have girls' chats and tell her how she really ought to date her evil graduate advisor, and also attempts to seduce Peachy and Kit but without real enthusiasm, and at the end of the book he gets stuck that way. MUCH TO UNPACK.

From:

skygiants

To be fair the presence of her preacher father is a total accident, he turns up unexpectedly to warn her about a weird vision he's been having and ends up staying at Kit's house where they spend a week having friendly theological arguments (while Elsa feels quite weird about the fact that her dad is her love interest's new houseguests). All this is honestly quite charming but would be MORE charming if nobody won an unambiguously literal fight against the devil --

Harriet and Peachy are reasonably cute but Harriet is definitely struggling to get a word in edgewise with regards to the plot; she is there for the big Peachy reveal towards the end but mostly her role at that point is just to figure out whether she's going to forgive him for his big disappearing act or not.

From:

skygiants

There is SO much more to come! Everything after about the 60% mark escalates really dramatically!

From:

skygiants

Yeah, it's cute that Kit is like 'I do not think we should get married until you get your degree!' but I also wanted more thought/resolution put into Elsa's ambitions ... her faith journey ended up kind of overwhelming her professional one imo.

From:

davidgillon

To be fair the presence of her preacher father is a total accident, he turns up unexpectedly

To everyone but the author, I'd argue ;)

From:

skygiants

Elsa has that whole bit in the middle about how important it is to her that everything that's happened so far technically could have a mundane explanation, why would you undercut that!!

Yeah learning about Degan's other pen name really turned the way I looked at this book on its head in some ways ... my sense is that this one came before the Demas pen name, is that right?

From:

skygiants

Honestly I was really charmed by Elsa's father and the friendly theological arguments between him and Kit, which is not what I was expecting! There's truly a lot to enjoy here and I did have a lot of fun reading it even if I left it feeling like I wanted to have a vigorous argument with it (but sometimes I have the most fun reading books that I want to have vigorous arguments with.) And you are absolutely right, it definitely has the potential to be incredible Yuletide fodder!

From:

skygiants

ooh intriguing, thank you for the rec!!

From:

skygiants

okay yes great point :P

From:

lirazel

This is so weird that I think I'm going to have to read it even though I think my theology will clash with it rather spectacularly. But I'm always looking for fantasy that actually deals with any kind of religious themes so!

From:

aella_irene

I am more fond of the early books in the series than I am of the later ones, but I am fond throughout of the Armenian community to which the hero has returned in his late fifties/early sixties only to discover that they have gentrified while remaining essentially the same. His childhood friends are exactly the same, they just wear Armani now! It is very odd!

From:

qian

my sense is that this one came before the Demas pen name, is that right?

Yeah, think so!

From:

qian

There is a sequel to From All False Doctrine, btw, about Charlie who's a teenager in FAFD. It's also weirdly structured and features a m/m romance between Charlie and an angel, with wings and everything. I also enjoyed it but found it less memorable than the first book.