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.