Recently, I wrote a really fun short story called The Parable of the Library, and you can read it here.
This story is a combination of a few ideas, and draws on a number of literary influences. I have recently read (and greatly enjoyed) John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and I now fully understand why it was one of the most influential books of the 17th century, and the second most widely translated and published book after The Bible itself.
Reading it in its original old-English style, it had a very charming and whimsical nature to it, whilst still being an unbelievably stirring and relatable account of the Christian journey through the strife of this world to eternal rest and company in the King’s house.
Bunyan’s novel is an allegory, where every character’s name is what that character is. For example, Pliable is the easily swayed friend of Obstinate, who is a stubborn man that does all he can to convince Christian to give up his pilgrimage. What is happening there is that the author is admitting something to the reader, saying, “Yes, this character may seem predictable and one-dimensional, but he will teach you something harrowing about the manifold wickednesses of this world and its fallen people’.
The drama in Pilgrim’s Progress is not riding on nail-biting and fast paced prose, like a Matthew Reilly novel, but rather on the devastatingly accurate insights provided to the reader by watching foil characters such as Mr Worldly Wisdom and Giant Despair with his Doubting Castle show the deep inadequacy of Christian and his friend Faithful, and their deep reliance on God’s word and Providence.
Before I connect that back to the Parable of the Library, a quick word on Children’s Literature. I had the pleasure of studying one unit in children’s lit during my time at Deakin Uni, and I actually learnt a lot about the surprising depth and maturity that children can handle–and perhaps even require–in their literature. In fact, whereas YA (Young Adult) prose tends to read like normal speech, or like normal storytelling (albeit with more love triangles, where the young lady always has to choose between the Nice Guy or the Bad Boy, than appear in real life), children’s lit has the multi-layered task of being a visual and textual medium, whilst also having a style of delivery that is markedly different from normal prose.
Though it is easy to trivialise or look down upon the rhymes and repetitions of picture-story books, there is truly a poetic quality to much of this writing–or at least the best examples of it. The writer of children’s lit has the freedom to repeat something in a manner that would be decidedly foreign to common parlance, or to sit and remain on one detail at such great length that in any other setting one’s editor would be going at it with her big red pen.
The final main literary influence to this story in terms of atmosphere and absurdity is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This classic has a frustratingly large number of characters who rant and rave, forsaking all semblance of logical flow or courtesy to go on and on in exhausting tirades of introspection. After a few hundred pages of characters at the end of their wits, constantly wringing their hands in shame and beating their chests in sorrow, the reader can start to feel a little loopy, like nothing in Dostoyevsky’s world makes sense anymore, or like none of the characters can be expected to act like normal humans. Dostoyevsky was masterful at creating and sustaining an atmosphere of sheer frenzy and absurdity, where everyone’s eyelids are pulled back and you feel as if you are staring right into their bones. It feels like the trials in The Crucible or the Jurors’ discussions in Twelve Angry Men, or perhaps Marlow’s terror in Heart of Darkness.
So, with the tastes of those books lingering in my mind, I found myself eager to write an allegory of my own. Due to a funny thing called Presuppositonal Apologetics (if you are a Christan, you simply must learn about this), I found it odd to watch non-Christians borrow concepts from the Christian worldview like Truth, Value, Meaning, Beauty and Justice and yet reject the Christian worldview that is solely capable of providing a rational and consistent basis for those ideas. I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be intriguing to discuss the borrowing of those ideas as if they were library books?’ With that, The Parable of the Library was born.
I would be greatly honoured if you, mostly highly esteemed reader, would read it. It was fun to write, and I hope it will be fun and provoking to read.
Distilled Orthopraxy 