Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The Untenable Missionary Position

There’s a John Grisham novel, (I won’t mention by name; it’s really not important anyway).
There’s a John Grisham novel, about a will left by the gazzzilionist richest man in the world, and his remaining family, what with having been bizarrely over-privileged all their lives, are a bunch of warped amoral parasites,

(I don’t actually hang out with any wealthy trust-fundy people and so I can’t comment on what they’re really like but I will say that Mr Grish paints a believable assembly of monstrously selfish relatives).

In contrast to this odious family; we have a recovering alcoholic lawyer and ‘the distant relative'; who's actually named as the beneficiary.

Alcho-lawyerman must go deep into the jungle and find her where she has been working alone as a missionary with the ‘Hoodafuckarday’ tribe for a number of years. I don’t know if a half-remembered plot from an old John Grish that I got for 50 cent in a charity shop qualifies as ‘a spoiler’; just in case it does, spoiler ahead.

Dipso-solicitor finds her living with the ‘hoodafuck’; apparently in blissful splendid isolation, away from the back-stabbing, double-dealing machinations of the material world. But soon it emerges that all is not as idyllic as it seems: she is caught in a dangerous theological war with the medicine men and their old ways: her position and respect have been bolstered so far by her ability to actually heal the sick, but cut-off and alone for so long she has finally run out of medicine and now when she is called for on for her healing abilities,she can only pray, so nobody is recovering any,ore and she's losing converts…

Oh Dear.

WTF? The family are presented as monstrous ‘Eddie Barzoom’ caricatures, even the Tippler-attorney is flawed, the whole flavour of the story is that this brave girl alone in the jungle is 'the-moral-paragon-untouched-by-the-evils-of-modern-western-civilisation' so honestly John, Mr Grisham, Grish me ol’ pal, ‘the Grishmeister’ WHAT THE BLINKING FLIP IS THIS MELON_FARMER?

Now look, if a person wants to be a missionary and go sell Jesus, I’m not sure I can stop them.( I do feel that there’s something akin to disobeying the main directive about it, but we had St. Patrick so: ‘what-the-hey?’)- But if you go off, to sell Jesus and prayer; then that’s exactly what you should be selling.

Using anti-venom and penicillin and taking advantage, of the understandable assumption (made by those who know no better); that your 'God' helped out in some way is a confidence-trick, plain and simple. It's not moral, it's amoral.

Why is Grish-boys' heroine such a wagon and a half? Well she's not. At least she's not meant to be, I don't think. I mean: It might have been the intention of this book to leave you feeling that ‘people they aint no good’ but I doubt it (says Croker).

I just don’t think 'the Ol' Grisharoo' noticed. That's just probably the way the man thinks'
‘Missionary = good/ Rich folk = bad’.

It's not the way I think, and that's probably why I wanted to throw the book against a wall, but I didn't. I kept reading....

I thought that maybe the ‘Hoodafuckarday’ would just snap and eat her eventually; but no…

That would’ve been to much like a happy ending.


2 comments:

  1. I presume(having never read it) the story is actually the story of the Lawyers redemption.

    So it may read like this,

    Capitalist = Corrupt

    Missionaries = Corrupt

    Lawyers = Saints

    So all parties begin as corrupt, the obviously corrupt capitalist kids, the not so obviously corrupt but tis there all the same, missionary lady, and the lawyer whose corruption is witnessed through his alcohol abuse - self corruption.

    I presume at the start of the novel, he is having one of those Dark Nights of the Soul that we all know that solictors an lawyers are prone to(ahem), then through his actions acting as an advocate/diciple of the Law he is redeemed and purified, coming out all apple cheeked and holy?

    I dont know, but perhaps thats the point, for Grisham's purposes, the law, or in this novel, the Law, resides above capitalism or religion, that is to say the physical and spiritual which are both found to be corrupt/corrupting.

    Actually, to add another level to it, it seems, from your discription, that the society of primitives that the missionary is preaching to might also be viewed as being already corrupt even before the arrival of 'civilization'.

    It is only the Law, in its disinterested purest form, that has the power to purify and instill righteousness in its advocates.

    Which would probably plant Grisham with Kant rather than Rousseau who knew?!

    (Well, thats a shot in the dark for all i know maybe the lawyer goes on a moonshine bender and comes to to find that he has smothered a family of ferrets in his pants and tops himself with remorse)

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  2. Uncannily accurate analysis and interpretation that,

    but they were hamsters not ferrets.

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