Alas, Babylon On My Kindle
(6/11/11) I paid $139 to find out whether I would use the Kindle to read books, and I do. So that's the Kindle review.
But the review of Alas, Babylon will take a little longer.
It was one of the books I could read on my Kindle and even though I knew nothing about it, the title caused me to load it and start reading. In the first chapter or so I saw it was an old book because it talked about segregation in the South; then I realized it had to be written in the fifties right in the middle of the fear of Communist nuclear attack on the USA because the scenario was too real to be science fiction. I lived that scenario as a grammer schooler who got mandatory Polio vaccine and learned to crawl under my desk and cover my head if the teacher said it was time.
And then bam--or maybe KABOOOOOM is more appropriate--I realized I was reading a 1950's post apocalyptic novel that obviously had spawned all the early Mel Gibson nuked world movies, etc.
Set in one of the small towns in Florida that survived the nukes even though the rest of the State had been wiped off the map since Florida was the home of Eglin and Moffett and Homestead and a long litany of other Air Force bases too important to avoid a nuclear strike, it is a perfectly believable story of how survivors would be forced to, well, survive. So, basically, anybody can imagine the scene and characters in the novel.
With a hook like that, it's no wonder that millions of copies were sold and that it still has buzz today.
What I found interesting though is how it handled the matter of God. Since the title refers to a quote from Revelation, I assumed the deeper I got into the novel, the more I would see the author put God and God's Will and God's Word in context, given that the context was the actual utter decimation of the world as we know it...or more correctly, as the people of 1959 knew it.
Scratch one more incorrect assumption. God is just not there in Alas, Babylon. Once the author uses God as the hook in the title, the author manages to ignore God for the rest of the book. So too do the characters. Oh, there are the points where the subject of God forces itself into the reader's mind, given the fact that death appears to be winning with life on the verge of becoming a vanishing species.
But the author manages to move quickly past that point, obviously realizing that no American reader or--perhaps more to the point--no American publisher in 1959, could be expected to actually try to put such a doomsday scenario into the context of the will of God.
And the author was right. Even as I read the novel this week, I felt myself sigh at the prospect the author might take me into the God thicket--the tangled and deadly central Florida swamp where the most dangerous reptiles and stingers and biters on earth not only reside but rule.
Not to worry! No author--not in 1959, just as not in 1999, and probably not in 2099 would be so dense as to think he--or most likely she--could get a book published that tried to bring God into the worst case scenario on earth.
God is just not needed, even there. Totally irrelevant. God is dead in Alas, Babylon.
And the moral of the story was clear to me: If that's the popular reading material in America in 1959, it's no surprise that the news headlines I remember reading in the early sixties reported: God is Dead.
Alas, Babyon indeed. Let me leave the Horsley imprimatur on this review.
I'm here to tell you that God won't be dead like the novel pretends when the next nuclear weapon is detonated on this planet. Call me silly, call me insane, call me what you will: we will enter the place where God lives on earth. Whether that place is swamp, upper room, or Holy of Holies is yet to be revealed.
Neal