The Shack Review

Hey guys I read The Shack and now you guys get to hear about it! This is written more in the style of a Goodreads review, I think, because this is how my thoughts are going when I’m trying to put this into words.

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The Shack Review

[This isn’t about the movie. I haven’t seen the movie. It could be brilliant for all I know.]

From the point of view as a Christian, The Shack is heretical. From the point of view of a critic, The Shack is just another bad book.

So, for those not in the know: Mackenzie, or “Mack” as only his close friends know him but that’s how the narration and every named character refers to him so I don’t know why that detail’s brought up, is a man who grew up as a hardworking, self-sufficient man because he ran away from home and his abusive father at the age of thirteen. He eventually marries Nan, they raise a family, everything’s great UNTIL their daughter Missy (holy fudge will someone not go by a nickname in this book?!?) gets kidnapped by a rando child serial killer on a family camping trip. Ohes noes!

The kid gets killed, the killer isn’t caught, and Mack goes into a period of his life he calls The Great Sadness (the phrase is always capitalized and italicized in the book, despite there being no reason for it). His relationship with God is going down the toilet, because he feels as if it’s his fault or God’s fault that his daughter is dead, and in this emo phase we begin the book. Then, on an icy winter’s day when the mailman doesn’t even get on the road because it’s too dangerous, he receives a letter inviting him to come to “the Shack,” the place where they found his daughter’s bloody dress. And the letter is signed ‘Papa’! And whattaya know, that’s how Mack’s wife Nan refers to God!

So he goes and investigates, and he finds three people in the Shack. And they are God. Rather, one is God the Father, one is God the Son, and the last is God the Holy Spirit, who are incarnated as a stereotype of a middle-aged black woman, Jesus, and a philosophical Asian woman called ‘Sarayu,’ a name that means ‘wind.’ Also God the Father keeps being called Papa despite being a woman, which is a bit strange.

The rest of the book consists of conversations about theology and philosophy between God and Mack. It’s very boring. I kept thinking to myself that it was weird that I didn’t like this, when Platonic dialogues run on the same principle: a dialogue to explain a point. But I think it might because this was also trying to be a story, with fully developed characters and histories. Going into The Republic Plato doesn’t give Socrates a backstory of his past as a veteran to explain his views against war. The Shack though, does have a Plot, but it’s an excuse Plot so that the author, William P. Young, can insert his own thoughts about God into the story.

And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad; excuse plots are not, by nature, terrible things. But if maybe this book had stuck to one topic, like the Problem of Evil (why bad things happen to good people) then maybe we’d get somewhere interesting. And one could argue the entire book is about that, but it also veers into several other discussions about belief and God and love, which needn’t have happened if it was just a straightforward dialogue without the framing device.

Also the theology is pretty terrible. Many Christian reviewers take issue with the idea of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit being portrayed as people at all, and that’s fair; theologically speaking, God the Son is the Person of the Trinity that takes a human shape to interact with us. I’m finnicky on the details, but it’s generally frowned upon, in all three Abrahamic religions, to portray God the Father at all. The only people who got a pass on that were people like Michelangelo, and, well, William P. Young is no Michelangelo. Making God a woman is also frowned upon by traditional Christians, which is fair--God does call Himself a ‘He’ in the Bible, and I think one should use the pronouns another chooses to go by--basic respect, I think, when addressing someone, divine or otherwise. Still, I think these are relatively minor issues compared to the actual content of discussions; getting caught up on Young making God into three roommates is not the big issue with his theology. The novel’s God says that He’s in the shape He is because that’s what Mack needs, not because that’s how God looks. If so, I think the bigger issue isn’t gender but that apparently God thinks some people need a racial stereotype.

No, the points that Christians should take issue here is with the book’s flip-flopping on how it looks at the Bible. At one point God explains to Mack that there was a literal Garden of Eden with literal Adam and Eve, but Jesus and God the Father make the point of saying that the Old Testament just straight-up doesn’t count, for all its rules, because when Jesus died we don’t need to worry about rules anymore! Don’t sweat those Ten Commandments, they don’t matter anymore!

Which is problematic because if we’re using the Bible’s Jesus as a basis here, then Jesus Himself told His followers that they should obey the Commandments and the law of the Old Testament. Jesus’s role was not in changing laws; it was thinking that the law was the end-all, be-all of religious living. Essentially, that if you care more about the letter of the law then of the actual morality behind it, you’re not really living the way God wants you to. I get that nonreligious people might not care much about the distinction, but I should think that even if one’s not religious, the point still stands that Young claims that the God presented in his book is meant to represent the God of the Bible, all the while spouting things directly contradictory to Him. So even if you looked at this as a sort of mythological fanfiction, it’d be pretty shoddy work. It’s like if you said you were making a story based on the characters of the Iliad, but Odysseus is an idiot and Helen was ugly.

There is also this disdain for the idea of religion present in the book? Again, the God of The Shack claims that religion is only a human invention, and that God has nothing to do with any of them. And again, that directly contradicting the source of the inspiration. Jesus tells Mack that he doesn’t go for religion or for hierarchies, but that’s a pretty big stretch considering that Jesus tells Peter that he’s the rock on which he will build His Church, implying an organized religion with a hierarchy with someone at the head, or at the very least, the base. Young tries to get around this by having Jesus claim that his “church” is in fact, the whole of humanity rather than an institution, or those that act how he thinks people should or something? But that doesn’t make much sense; if the church wasn’t meant to be a specific group of people with specific teachings, why would Jesus of the Gospel go around giving teachings on how to live and how to organize and convert people, if they’re not meant to be an institution?

There’s this weird view of salvation; this idea that everyone is saved, no matter how much evil they’ve done. Christianity is all for the idea that everyone can be redeemed, but this book sort of skips that step by suggesting that nobody needs to be. Mack finds out that his abusive alcoholic father is in Heaven, but there’s no indication that the man had done anything to to turn his life around; so by Young’s story, men who domestically abuse their children and die unrepentant deserve Heaven just as much as children murdered by serial killers. I don’t want to get into a conversation about whether or not we earn Heaven, but we can at least agree that the condition that one be not an evil person to the very end to get past Saint Peter?

And I suppose when writing fiction, there’s nothing to say that one has to remain close to Christian doctrine; there are writers who talk about Christianity who aren’t Christians themselves and I usually don’t really take any issue with it. But this book finds itself passed around Christian circles, as if it is a Christian book, when it is, by its nature, promoting ideas that go against Christianity. It asks that we basically consider the Old Testament non-canon and that we reject the notion of an organized religion. It’s suggesting that everyone goes to Heaven no matter how much evil they’ve done because God is just that sweet of a guy. This being passed off as a Christian book is downright insidious.

I imagine if there’s a nonreligious reader looking at this review, he or she is probably wondering if I’m overreacting. Maybe, but The Shack is also not a very well-written novel. Like I said, there’s not a lot of action in it; the majority of it is conversations between Mack and God about different topics, and those conversations are just Young preaching at the audience what he thinks about God through dialogue. Using dialogues to make a deeper point can work, like in Plato’s works, but those attempt at least to try to think out every possible response to an idea. Young does no such thing, and because the person leading the conversation is God, there’s not much opportunity for an honest dialogue. I suspect that’s another reason having God as a character in the novel isn’t such a good idea.

There’s also the fact that nothing really resolves. There’s not much to the story other than that Mack is in a bad place in his life and his relationship with God. I was reminded of The Traveller’s Gifts, a book read to my 8th grade class, where the main character meets several people through history ending with a talk to an archangel, but in that book from what I remember the main character was having a near-death experience that may or may not have been a hallucination. Mack doesn’t have that; there’s no reason that God talks to Mack other than because he feels emo. Why God doesn’t sit down and chat with everyone angry at God for their lives’ woes isn’t made clear. The whole thing was just to get Mack to forgive God and move past his child’s death. All the action is doing mundane tasks around the house or the yard or such. It’s really boring action. I understand finding the amazing in the mundane, but this is really, really boring.

And his child’s death is just sort of… there. TV Tropes calls it a fridging, and rightly so; it’s a Plot Device to make Mack feel The Great Sadness (it hurts me to type that); at the end of the book, the killer is still at large, but that’s not touched upon because at least Mack’s at peace. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because Mack’s daughter Missy doesn’t matter, because she’s just the device to get Mack sad enough to be angry at God. Maybe it’s just me, but killing a child, and never resolving the murder, seems to me a really lame thing to do in a story. Yes, bad things happen to good people sometimes, and their families don’t get the closure they want; but in Young’s novel, their feelings straight up don’t matter at all. It’s just… there.

If you want to preach, write a pamphlet. And to be fair, Young has written nonfiction books that are for the purpose of teaching his beliefs. But that should have come first, long before the monstrosity that is The Shack ever reached publication. It’s not a good story, it’s not a good message, and it’s not good theology. It’s not a Christian book, it’s not a good book, and I’m not sure why this ever became a Thing. Don’t give it to your friends to change their lives; give them that’s not a chore to get through.

Now I have to figure out how this dratted book found its way into my house...

Soldier Son Review-Shaped thing

Hooray! I finished the family storyline on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey! Now I’m trying to finish up the rest and after that I think I’m going to get Legacy of the First Blade so I can see what happens next.

Also it’s been a weird week.

Let’s talk about the Soldier Son trilogy from Robin Hobb.

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The Soldier Son Trilogy Review/Talky Thing

I recently finished reading Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy. It was strange. I picked them up in the first place because I had read somewhere (I think TV Tropes?) that it was a fantasy novel that depicted a fantasy version of the American West, discussing in it colonialism and the subjugation of indigenous people. There was an American and a Native American analogue! It was cool idea to do with a fantasy novel in an alternate world, and I wanted to see how it was done.

Turns out, it was done in the strangest way possible.

The first book is, I maintain, very good, having only a few missteps. We’re introduced to our protagonist, Nevare Burville, who is the second son of Lord Burville, meaning that he is the Soldier Son (first son inherits, second son goes to army, third to the church) and destined to become a cavalry officer. There was a kerfuffle recently because the king of Gernia recently elevated several soldier sons in the military to lords, because they backed him when the old nobility wouldn’t; Nevare’s father is one of those that got elevated.

Thing is, a lot of Gernia’s territory is built on the plains, which previously belonged to the Plainsfolk. They had magic on their side, but the Gernians worked out that iron can cancel out magic, and started using iron shot in their rifles to take out mages. Now they’re a beaten down people, considered second-class citizens to the white Gernians, who insist that they’re teaching them how to be civilized.

There’s quite a lot of details that stuck out to me as interesting and worthy of potential. Nevare’s father seems like a good father, I suppose, but he’s also plainly sexist and racist from the first chapter, in which child!Nevare gets in trouble for defending a girl his own age that’s mixed race; his father doesn’t chastise him too much, but he’s quick to say that a girl on her own is just too much of a temptation for the boys in the settlement to help themselves, and that Gernians shouldn’t mix with Plainspeople because that makes them unclean somehow. And before sending Nevare off to military school, he lets Nevare go off camping with a Plainsman warrior for like a month to “learn from your enemy” making the man several promises he has no intention of keeping, and deciding to hunt the man down when it doesn’t go well.

Here’s a character who seem sympathetic to the main character, but as nice as he is to his family he’s still strictly upholding a very patriarchal and racist system without question. And of course it comes back to bite him. We can’t claim that Nevare’s father isn’t a racist, sexist douche because he’s nice to his family; the text doesn’t let us. I thought that was an interesting part of the book.

The Plainsman that Nevare spends time with, Dewara, is also quick to point out that all Plainspeople are not the same at all. He’s from a tribe called the Kidona, who generally don’t get along well with the others. It’s the Gernians that lump them all together as one people, and they’ve had to stick together in the face of a military trying to stamp them out. 

This all sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the thing though: most of this series isn’t really about that colonialist struggle between Gernians and Plainspeople. After the first book, that’s all mostly dropped. No, actually it’s mostly involved with another group of indigenous people, the Specks, who live in the forest at the edge of the Gernian Empire, who are using magic to infect the Gernians with plagues to keep them from invading. And then Nevare gets sort of infected with their magic, and their magic is trying to get him to act in their interests but he wants to remain Gernian? And also the magic makes Nevare very fat, because Speck wizards are morbidly obese,and also the aristocracy of their people, who have feeders to bring them food and do basic tasks like shopping and hunting for them? And also the feeders can be a harem too? Also there’s an old Gernian god of death to whom Nevare owes a debt to because Reasons?

Like what the fudge.

And the thing falls apart at the ending, because the story’s resolution was that the Gernians discover some gold and have a gold rush, and the queen of Gernia decides that the Speck sacred trees are also sacred to her, so they’re no longer concerned with expanding outward and everyone can go home now, isn’t that great?

There came a point in the third book where I knew that I wouldn’t be satisfied with the ending. Because the whole story has turned into this conflict within Nevare of having to help the Specks while also wanting to remain Gernian, and there would have to be peace for this to be any sort of conclusion. I thought that if somehow the two sides just sat and talked things out and worked out their differences it’d come across as a bit corny; like, “Hey, don’t worry! We solved colonialism!” as if all it took was a few level-headed conversations. That would be silly. But it’d be better than what we got, which didn’t even involve an actual peace treaty or conversation; just, “Oh, we’re having a gold rush, so we don’t want to expand anymore, it’s cool. We solved colonialism!”

Except it’s not solved at all! Are we really going with the ending where the problems are solved because of human greed? What happens when the gold runs out, as it inevitably will? Are Gernians going to give up a decades-long conflict because they just found one spot rich in gold? And what about the Plainspeople? They’re still second-class citizens who are having their culture systematically stamped out! The first chapter shows them being oppressed. And yet their status is such a non-issue.

The series ends with Nevare getting a happy ending, which, yay, I guess, considering all the terrible stuff he had to put up with over the course of the story. But we’re essentially being told that the horrible crimes being perpetuated on the characters suffering under an imperialist military’s heel are no big deal because at least our white male lead got a happy ending!

I feel bad about coming down this hard on this book too! The first had so much potential, and I was hoping that this would let me launch more into Robin Hobb’s work; it is, after all, past time I tried to oread more speculative fiction by female authors. But overall the story of this trilogy just wasn’t good and it didn’t make much sense. Structurally and thematically it falls to pieces and halfway through the third book it just became a chore to read.

Maybe read the first book. After that, feel free to skip.

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I'm Worn Out on Movies

I recently learned that there’s a rumor that the last third or so of Assassin’s Creed: Origins was actually re-written without the input of the lead writer of the series, and that is both not that much of a surprise, and also very upsetting! Because this means that the writing of the game could have actually been good, and tied into the rest of the series.

At least we have Odyssey. Which doesn’t fix the problems Origins made, but it is very good.

Here’s an essay about why I’ve been watching more Netflix.

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I’m Worn Out on Movies

So I think some time last year I did an essay explaining that I’m getting a bit tired of superhero films. And that still kind of holds. But right now I’m just sort of worn out on big blockbuster movies in general. I’ve seen a couple of posts on Tumblr echoing this statement bouncing around, but I thought I’d give my take on it.

I used to be really good at keeping track of what movies were coming out when. After college I started noticing that I sort of lost the knack over time; I suspect it was a heapload of depression that contributed to that. But this year it’s downright terrible, as I feel like every weekend I’m being blindsided by every new release. It’s like there’s a massive movie (or a movie that the attached studio is hoping will be massive) coming out every weekend, and I don’t have time to keep up. 

What really sucks is that theaters can’t really keep up either. Now if it’s not a big blockbuster that’s earning tons of cash it doesn’t stay at the box office for much more than a week. Which I don’t blame theaters for this, because they’re running a business, and if a movie isn’t making them money then they shouldn’t be forced to keep showing them. But it frustrates me because I’m not someone who feels like he needs to see movies on opening weekend, and yet now a lot of movies I feel as if I have to if I want to see them at all.

I knew Avengers: Endgame was going to be in theaters for a while, so I didn’t rush to go see that. I thought to myself one weekend, a couple of weeks after the new Hellboy had come out, “Hey, I guess I’ll go see it since it’s not doing so well the theater for that film won’t be packed.” So I looked at the theater’s website to discover that no theater in town, or anywhere near town, was still playing Hellboy. 

This wasn’t a huge disappointment, mind you, considering that it had gotten a pretty big critical thrashing. I don’t put all my stock on reviews, but reading through the reviews I did see, it looked as if all the problems I was worried the film would have from watching the trailers were there. I wanted to see for myself to make judgments (and I had enough points on my Regal Card for a free movie anyhow). But that wasn’t going to happen soon if it was out of theaters.

“Well alright then,” I said to myself. “I’ll go and see another movie that I’m interested in, Missing Link from Laika Studios.” Except guess what! It turns out that Missing Link was another film that was no longer in theaters. Which was a shame because this one actually got good reviews, and Laika has always done really stunning stop-motion animation films. This shouldn’t have been a huge surprise either; I had no idea when it was released in the first place, and despite being critical darlings and fan favorites, the Laika films had never actually been very good at making money. 

But surprise or not, the point was that it had gotten to the point that if I wanted to see a movie at all, it had to be one of the big blockbusters. And I didn’t want to do that. And now I’m finding myself just not caring about movies coming out which makes me sad because I feel like that hipster in one of my classes in undergrad who was like “I don’t really watch movies anymore, because none of them are good.” You know what tone of voice with which read that verbatim quote in your head. It’s obnoxious.

And it doesn’t help that so much of it is the same studio! Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm and Disney are basically owning the majority of the film industry by releasing more big budget films than any other studio. It’s weird because I encounter people saying they don’t go to the movies anymore except to see Marvel films as if that’s a completely normal thing, to have that sort of brand loyalty to a movie franchise. Nowadays there are a couple I’m excited for, but at this point it’s more like it’s an obligation, like if I miss out on what happened I’ll be out of the cultural loop and won’t understand conversations with people.

And out of Disney’s big films being released this year, three of them are remakes: Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King are all coming out over the course of five months; there’s hardly enough time for any of them to breathe! 

I missed when I wasn’t being inundated with big movies all of the time! I missed when there were movies I saw because I wanted to see them, not because they were part of a cultural movement and there’s some sort of obligation to see it to understand a later movie that I might like later on. I want to get excited for movies just on their own merits and ads. I don’t want to be exhausted by this anymore.

I want to stop feeling like every movie is a cultural event. I just want to have fun at the movies every now and then.

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Sherlock and Joan

I am not really doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month, I’m trying to sort of sit down and do editing work on the thing that was my project a couple of times back? Job hunting is pretty terrible, so I’ve got to do something, and by golly it’d be pretty sweet if I had a finished, polished novel on the resumeh, wouldn’t it?

There are a lot of posts I can cite about how Elementary’s Sherlock relates to the people around him, but there are less about his relationship with Joan, especially in view of the last season or so. And so I thought I could get away with writing this.

Maybe.

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Sherlock and Joan

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a crime procedural with two leads. One’s a man, one’s a woman. One of them (probably the man) is famously eccentric and kind of weird; hard to get along with except for his/her partner/handler and a bit of a jerk sometimes, if unintentionally. But he/she is also wickedly smart and an essential asset to solving mysteries at the local police department. Although the pair has their hang ups about each other in the beginning, over time they become closer than anyone could have expected.

What happens next?

If you said, “They fall in love,” then congrats! We’re no longer talking about Elementary.

There was quite a bit of conversation when Elementary cast Lucy Liu as Joan Watson about how gimmicky it was that the show was genderbending Watson into a woman (and particularly, an Asian woman). There was this assumption that Sherlock and Joan would become a couple; after all, the BBC series Sherlock thrived and pushing ship tease between Holmes and Watson, and in any given piece of media it’s assumed that if the two leads are a man and a woman, they will, at some point or another make out, unless they’re siblings or cousins or something. 

[Which won’t stop the fans from shipping it, and that’s just.. ew. No.]

Given that it was being made for CBS, a network with a reputation for being more conservative than others, people took it as pretty much written in stone. I don’t like using the phrase ‘enforcing heteronormativity’ because it tends to be brought up to complain when someone’s favorite ship doesn’t become canon, but in popular media it is a thing: male lead + female lead = seasons worth of sexual tension before a hookup. They must get together, or the Ancient Ones will rise from the depths of the earth and destroy this world for forswearing the ritual they demand.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find an article from the producers, before the show premiered, that insisted that there were absolutely no plans at all to write Sherlock and Joan into a romantic relationship with each other. And hey, look, we’re on the sixth and final season, and there’s not a sign of that happening.

[If we get to the finale and this changes I will eat my words. I will also be very, very angry and I’ll go to the writers’ office and sit on them.]

Sherlock and Joan are not an Item. They are not dating. They have never expressed the desire to become romantically or sexually involved with each other. There is ship tease, sure, but it’s almost played as a joke or to mess with expectations. For instance, when they first meet, Sherlock gives a monologue about love at first sight, only to reveal that he was memorizing something from a movie while ten other televisions are playing at the same time. At another point, Sherlock suggests that Joan’s going to sleep with his brother Mycroft, because deep down she must really wish to sleep with him and because this is as close as she’s going to get. Joan reacts with not a small amount of disgust at this hypothesis.

And yet they are very obviously two people who are very close. When one is threatened, the other is often on his or her feet to go deal with it. They talk out their problems whenever something comes up. When Joan is considering adopting and becoming a mother, she’s sure that Sherlock will have a major role in the child’s upbringing as a sort of ever-present uncle. The two of them share custody of their pet tortoise, Clyde. And Joan forgives Sherlock for constantly barging into her room and waking her up in increasingly annoying ways.

All of this culminates in the finale of season six, both Joan and Sherlock utter the words, in explanation for the lengths they’re going through to protect each other “We’re two people that love each other.”

HOLY FUDGE I cannot begin to explain how much this line shook me. Because here we have two leads in a television show that’s been running for six years, one male and one female, outright admitting that they love each other, but at no point is the notion of that love being romantic for even a second! They’re not “more than friends;” they’re friends, and that’s more powerful than most people, especially the show’s antagonists, could ever imagine. They are not related by blood, but they are family, and that’s what matters to their character dynamic.

The makers of the show very easily made their story some sort of romance, and they didn’t. They very easily could have made half the jokes in the show be about how there’s perceived sexual tension between the two, and they didn’t. Both of those would have been cheap ways to build a show. Instead they moved forward with this series thinking, “These two people live together and solve mysteries that no one else can, and what does that do to their friendship?”

Theirs is a glorious dynamic to behold, both fun and touching, and it’s one of the things that makes Elementary not just one of the best crime shows on television, but one of the most entertaining adaptations of the Holmes stories.

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