Byzantium,by Stephen Lawhead (HarperPrism/ Zondervan, 646 pp.; $24, hardcover). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.
The crossover novel—a work of fiction written from a Christian point of view, yet appealing to general audiences—is an uncommon thing in this century. Catholic writers like Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh have managed the trick masterfully, but their faith was so tormented by doubt that many believers, while admiring the art, may find the Christianity tortured out of recognition. Only a few Christian novelists have achieved notable sales while writing about a Christianity anyone would want to follow. (Susan Howatch and C. S. Lewis have done so in their very different ways, and Frank Peretti, too.) It is not easy to include God in a story aimed at a skeptical, materialistic audience, or to describe faith for those to whom pious is invariably pejorative.
Stephen Lawhead deserves notice in this context. He writes popular fiction, mostly found in the fantasy/science fiction section of your local bookstore. With his Pendragon series he became an undeniable commercial success, especially in the United Kingdom. Delving into the legendary history of early Britain, when Druids and Christians contested the future of the Celts, Lawhead wrote about people of faith and even showed the supernatural in a way that was not off-putting to unbelievers. He tapped the growing interest in Celtic lore, and, like all successful novelists, he told a good yarn.
Byzantium, Lawhead’s hefty latest effort, is something of a departure from his previous work in that it contains no fantastic elements (it is historical fiction), and most of the action takes place far from Britain. His protagonist, Aidan, is an Irish monk sent off to Constantinople with a party of monks conveying to the emperor an illuminated manuscript of Scripture. On the way they are attacked by Vikings, and Aidan is captured and enslaved. As chance would have it, Aidan’s Viking master sets off south on a raiding trip that leads through Russia to a far-off city that turns out to be Constantinople by another name. You might expect Aidan to reencounter his fellow monks there, but before that can happen, he becomes a spy for the emperor, falls in love with an Islamic beauty, is captured by an Arab army, enslaved in their silver mines, and …
But there is no need to give away more of the story. Through many twists and turns of plot, Lawhead keeps you turning pages. The book’s interest lies not in questions of faith (though religion is always present, as it naturally would be in that era) but in action, intrigue, and ancient lore. Many will read Byzantium, I am sure, without ever thinking to describe it as “Christian fiction.”
Yet it is very easy to imagine a reader, when he puts down the book, musing, “So that’s what that cross stuff means to Christians.” Aidan struggles with doubt throughout his long journey, and ultimately is reconverted (by his own Viking captors, whom he has more or less accidentally won over to Christianity) to faith in a God who suffered.
Byzantium is a crossover novel of a different kind. Lawhead does not hit you between the eyes with faith, as does, say, Howatch. In a gentle, almost casual way, his Christianity inhabits the book, unembarrassed. It does not seem to be the reason for writing. The plot, the adventure, the ancient atmospherics are Lawhead’s interest, and the reader’s. Yet they make a place where Lawhead and his Christian characters evidently feel at home. Maybe the reader who is attracted to this home will find the God who dwells there.
Short Notices The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of CreationBy Bill McKibben Eerdmans 95 pp.; $9, paper God’s words to Job out of the whirlwind have been read by countless generations as perhaps Scripture’s most powerful instance of divine speech. Notwithstanding the library of commentary already devoted to these passages, Bill McKibben thinks we have not yet plumbed their depths. McKibben (whose Christmas meditation appears on p. 18 of this issue) draws our attention to what he calls “the first meaning” of God’s speech to Job: that human beings “are a part of the whole order of creation—simply a part.” That cuts deeply against the grain of human self-centeredness, and never more so than today when, without cease, “we are assaulted with just the opposite message, the notion that our desire is of utter and paramount importance.” But McKibben is writing not only to scold and shake us into change but also to celebrate the “untamed joy,” the “rapture” of God’s creation in the natural world.
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