Book reviews - Reading of Redemption
Mike Riddell - Even Realer Than The Real Thing
After I had finished Michael Riddell’s novel The Insatiable Moon my immediate reaction was to go and bury it so far beneath the earth that none of my friends would ever get a chance to read it. Riddell has been prophetically provocative about how the Church should deal with the coming of post modernism and I knew that most of my peers would have ample excuse to dismiss him after a novel of such scandalous proportions as Insatiable Moon was. It was the most outrageous tale of a community of mentally disintegrated alcoholic misfits who take the symbolic place of the disciples and Christ and show the sane upright Christian folk a thing or two about spirituality. There is one classic moment when a young enthusiastic Christian goes on some “outreach” around his Church falls in with one of the motley crew who in his drunken stupor teaches the naïve kid more about the Bible than the local youth leaders ever dreamed. In the end the dishevelled down and out becomes a bit of a guru to the boy.
I will tell you no more and spoil the story. However, enough to say that after a few days of reflection I realised that this book was not to be hidden but to be heralded as the most profound parable as to how the Gospel was before we hid it beneath our sanitised middle class interpretations. What really should be buried from my peers if the obscenely scandalised accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; God revealing himself in an illegitimate birth and picking a bunch of unbelieving bad tempered losers as the rock on which to build a Church! I still do not think that my comrades in the Church should read Insatiable Moon. Not because of any quirky left field heresy but because of its right down the line accuracy. I am not sure that the modern Church is ready for the truth of the Gospel.
If they are not ready for Insatiable Moon well then Masks and Shadows needs encased at the earth’s crust! Again it is not because he strays towards inerrancy but because it is so close to the truth that we are just not ready for it. This book put me in a bad mood. It tore at my anger and drove me to fears that no other book has ever conjured. It made me want to turn away and ignore it but gripped me with its revelation of honesty and the stark reality of the state of man and the innate weakness at the heart of us all. If you saw the movie Shawshank Redemption you will remember the little moment of light in the dark and bleakest places. The prison scenes in Masks and Shadows makes that film an obvious comparison but here the setting is full of light, people being good parents and children and seeking hard after God and love and a better world. Into such light the darkest imaginable shadows fall.
It is easy to understand why Riddell gave up his pastorate when he felt the need to write novels. He has of course written spiritual books none better than the inspirational God Zone but his novels are maybe a bigger challenge to the believer. For a minister to write such stuff would be preposterous and never allowed. Again an artist has to step outside the Church to say prophetic things about the scandal of the Gospel and the obscenity of the reality of this life on earth. In Insatiable Moon we are brought face to face with who Jesus concentrated his ministry around and the shock of the Christ story. In Masks and Shadows we are brought face to face with the most uncomfortable truth that no matter how well you seek God and pray you are always a hairs breadth away from being a victim or a criminal of the vilest and cruellest events of a very fallen world.
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