Book Review: A Children’s Bible
[unpublished: requested for a local publication in Glasgow that, unfortunately, shuttered]
The climate change genre has skyrocketed in popularity this past decade, no doubt growing alongside concern. Names such as Elizabeth Kolbert and Naomi Klein will be found on most respectable bookshelves, as will Richard Power’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Overstory. Also found on such bookshelves: biblical allegories and books where children teach us adults (Lord of the Flies comes to mind). I mention these stories, however different and however plentiful, because Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible sits squarely in their intersection.
But where Millet’s thirteenth installment is all these things, a story as big as God, nature, and humanity, it is also somehow none of them. It pulls on the most fertile literary aspects of climate anxiety (What will happen to myself and loved ones? How does humanity blend with crisis?) and arranges them more interestingly. It’s as if you’ve walked into a redecorated room and realized how big it truly was. It is consciously a remake of Lord of the Flies but avoids the tropes and cliches of retelling. It finds itself in constant reference to the Bible, hence the title.
A Children’s Bible treads on well-worn territory not as an interloper, but as a welcome addition to the classics. This book does something pleasantly new in so many old ways.
The basic premise, if there is only one, is that a handful of families have decided to spend the summer together at a lakeside estate. And while the children, led by the precocious Evie (a not-so-subtle cue), navigate a series of ballooning mishaps, the parents respond with alarming blasé.
This dynamic, that of careless parents and mature children, sets the precarity of the novel. A storm of historic proportion is coming, and the parents have concerned themselves with buying booze while the children have set to patching the roof. This dynamic also serves as the first of many worthwhile questions from Millet: who has the best ethical tools to address climate change? And if we adults are too stuck in our ways, what then?
As with all good stories, things get worse. The storm floods the home (hello again, Bible) and separates the parents from their children. And the children are launched into a surreal, man eat man world of the post-storm lakefront. The world becomes pre-historic, or at least pre-societal, and the children must fend for themselves.
It is difficult to speak much more about the plot without spoiling the strongest biblical elements, and vice versa. Suffice to say, there is a dead goat. One, maybe two, Jesus figures, depending on your interpretation. And a Moses, Cain, and Abel, among others. These figures work more as plot devices rather than plot itself, though. They are clever reflections of the Bible, today. So comes another good question: How would these world changing characters behave when the world changes?
Millet inserts herself most directly in the relationship between Evie and her younger brother Jack. Jack has been reading a children’s version of the Bible and comes to believe that “God is a code word” for nature. Deeper down the rabbit’s hole we go – apparently even Evie was too old to understand the truth of things.
There are occasional and thankfully short-lived blunders in the Bible allegory. Not in the veracity or faithfulness of the text, but in the ham-fistedness. Sometimes, as in the case of a crucifixion, it didn’t feel entirely necessary. Nor with the birth of a babe in a barn – did we really need that story?
But Millet’s strong prose and deft observations buoy any misgivings. She is sharp, subtle, and fast. The writing is spare and there are many breaks within the longer chapters, which creates a wonderful rhythm. You’re never too long into a subplot before the action becomes fresh again.
And that brings us back to Millet herself, who has a master’s degree in environmental policy and works for the Center for Biological Diversity. She is steeped in the world of climate change, so it is interesting, then, that this 13th book of hers is so unrelated to the science. A Children’s Bible is not worried about the specifics of our crisis, but an understanding of ourselves in dire circumstance and the moral ambiguities of living amongst a disaster we are both complicit in and utterly powerless to stop.
In the end – and this is not giving too much away, trust me – the children do not become our base selves, as in Lord of the Flies (where Jack might get his name) but embody what we should become. They offer perhaps Millet’s clearest answer in the book, an answer applicable to most current issues: us adults have put too few restrictions on pleasure and sin, and the children are left to clean up the mess.
There is a tug and pull for what this book is. Is it a biblical allegory or is it about climate change? Is it about what adults must learn from children? A Children’s Bible blurs the lines between its intentions not because there is an interesting overlap between its themes, but because we constantly make the mistake of believing those lines exist at all. Art and poetry and flowering trees? “It’s what they used to call God.”