Readers,
Tonight, I’m sitting on my couch, looking out at the sunset, with the windows open for the first time in several months. I’m listening to music, and reflecting on a thoroughly good weekend. Let’s just say, for me: life’s pretty good right now. The weather is coming back around to Spring here in Melbourne, and so I too come back to you – your long lost book critic. I doubt you missed me, but I’ll say that I missed you. The absence of writing this blog has made me realise how much I get out of it (isn’t that what they say? Absence makes the heart grow more disciplined? Something like that).
The book I want to write about tonight is on a topic near and dear to my heart. That topic is faith and the book is The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon. The premise is this: a young man named Will starts attending an elite college in the US, having transferred there from bible college after losing his faith. He meets Phoebe, a fellow-student who is into the party scene at the school. The two quickly fall in love. At the same time, however, Phoebe is turning away from the wild lifestyle that initially attracted Will and becoming increasingly committed to a cultish Christian group led by the mysterious John Leal. Things escalate from there. And I mean it, Readers – this book is not for the faint of heart.
Readers, let’s for a moment agree that one of the central purposes of literature is to teach empathy. Further, let us agree that this purpose is achieved, in great books, by allowing the reader to walk in the footsteps of a character's life for a short (or perhaps long) period of time, such that the reader learns of the character's motivations, fears and history. In the end, if the author is successful, the reader can understand, deep in their gut, what leads that character (however different from the reader herself) to act in the way that they do. By this criteria, The Incendiaries sets itself a monumental task. After all, it’s co-narrated by a former-evangelical teenager, a young woman in the process of being drawn into a violent cult, and the cult leader himself. The book is exploring, simultaneously, the intense pain of losing faith, the exhilaration of being young and discovering a newly opened world, the desperate need for anchor in such a world, and the maniacal desire of a dangerous few to control others. Like I said, Readers, not for the faint of heart.
But despite the odds stacked against it, The Incendiaries is a beautiful book, stunningly written, and perfectly crafted. The story unfolds effortlessly for the reader, but with phenomenal literary skill acting as a guiding hand. This is a good thing – when tackling characters like this, you need someone with sure movement to be in the center of the arena. R.O. Kwon is exactly the woman for the job.
Still, it becomes clear, by the time you reach the final pages of The Incendiaries, that we cannot really understand these characters. Nor can they understand each other. Will, try as he might, cannot understand what John Leal wants, or why his girlfriend Phoebe is abandoning her life for a faith she professes not to have. He cannot even understand his former self, the faithful child that he was just a few months ago. These characters’ emotional worlds, however much they are laid bare for us as readers, are not really accessible. Their motivations, however internally clear, are opaque to those who care about them.
This, I believe, is the great thesis sitting behind The Incendiaries: faith is, by its very definition, incomprehensible. Its irrationality makes it impossible to explain to another person, and sometimes even to ourselves. To the outsider, it is fundamentally untenable as a motivating force. I think this is why religious and non-religious people have so much trouble communicating with one another. For a person without faith, the idea of having it is literally inconceivable. On the flip side, people of faith, while they may remember a time in which they did not have belief or in which they actively chose faith, can often come to feel that their faith is irrevocable – something gifted or sprung upon them. For such people, faith is no more a choice than choosing a gender or race. It simply is.
In The Incendiaries these ideas are taken to their most extreme – the example of a cult mentality exacerbates and mutates the irrationality of faith, turning it into something we should NOT be able to rationalize. Will, who has lost his faith but misses it desperately, gives us a potent example of someone well placed to try to understand what is happening to his girlfriend. Yet even he fails, and then tries again, and fails again – each time worse than the last. We are like Will (albeit less motivated). We are trying too, to learn empathy, to understand faith, but we’re failing. Without that core of believe, there is no doorway in.
Does this mean that religious and non-religious people should just give up talking to one another? Certainly not. If anything, they need to talk more. Ignorance and separation won't fix the divide. But The Incendiaries teaches us that we need to be very patient in these conversations. We have to understand that there is a fundamental difference between the two parties. Those who have leapt over the chasm of faith are not the same as those who remain on the other side.
Readers, if we’re going to start having these conversations, and having them properly, then The Incendiaries is a good place to start. Here is Will, on his own persistence, as told by R O Kwon, with her gorgeous prose and uniquely sympathetic voice: “I kept asking questions; I’d knock until they let me in. This has been the cardinal fiction of my life, its ruling principle: if I work hard enough, I’ll get what I want.”