Walking Disaster, Chapter 22

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Content warning: Stalkery behaviour, non-consensual kissing, alcohol being encouraged as a coping mechanism.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Not Good For Anybody

The title is a callback to Megan’s comment to Trav at the end of the last chapter. I’m going to hazard a guess that the ratio of ‘angst over this’ vs. ‘try to do something constructive about it’ will be extremely high. Speaking of which: no, there is no mention of anyone having a word with Trav after his not-so-little outburst in the lecture, either to tell him off or to ask him whether he needs help.

Abby spends the next week staying out of Trav’s way, to the extent of missing her classes, which sounds like it sucks for her. America and Trav both decide it’s best if America stays out of this, so she spends her time in the dorm until Friday, when Shep tells Trav America is coming over and he is not allowed to bug her about Abby. He also advises Trav to eat something and take a shower, so it seems the breakup was even enough to hit ‘pause’ on the Incessant Showering.

We find out that Trav’s door still doesn’t close properly after he kicked it off his hinges and repaired it, so that keeps reminding him of the time Abby left him but came back to him, which I bother mentioning only because this sentence ends ‘…she came back to me not long after, leading to our first time’ despite the fact that she left and came back after their first time. Seriously, why can McGuire not keep track of basic stuff about her own plot?

Anyway, America comes round and when Travis is on his way back from the bathroom, having actually had the shower Shep advised him to have, he hears America’s phone go with Abby’s ringtone and starts eavesdropping. America offers to pick Abby up and take her somewhere for dinner and Trav seizes on the idea of going to the cafeteria to see whether Abby’s going to get dinner there. FFS, I am out of ways in which to say that stalking your ex is a terrible idea. It just… it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea, all right?

Travis hangs around outside the cafeteria and, yup, Abby turns up and Travis emerges from the darkness where he was lurking. So, Abby is faced with her violent ex suddenly turning up late at night. Holy rape alarms, Batman, do not do that to people.

“Jesus, Travis! You scared the hell out of me!”

“If you would answer your phone when I call I wouldn’t have to sneak around in the dark.”

No, Travis, having things turn out the way you didn’t want does not somehow compel you to be an inconsiderate dick to the woman you’re claiming you love.

Abby tells him she’s going to get something to eat and will call him later, and he insists that they ‘have to talk’. And, although I would have loved to see her telling him ‘No, Travis, we really don’t’ and walking off… other than that, I was astonished to find myself really liking the way Abby handles things over the next couple of pages. She does stay and talk to him (and I suppose that’s understandable; he’s made it bloody clear he’ll keep stalking her), but she’s clear about not wanting him back. It doesn’t matter that he tells her he’s told Benny no, that he begs her, that he starts crying. She sticks to her guns.

A couple of gems:

“We are dysfunctional, Travis. I think you’re just obsessed with the thought of owning me rather than anything else.”

“That’s not true. I love you more than my life, Pigeon.”

“That’s what I meant. That’s crazy talk.”

I know, ablist insult… but great call-out otherwise.

“Okay . . . so what exactly is the order for you? Is it money, me, your life . . . or is there something that comes before money?”

Niiiiice.

It is also worth noting this response from Travis:

“I realise what I’ve done, okay? I see where you’d think that, but if I’d known that you were gonna leave me, I would have never . . . I just wanted to take care of you.”

Yes, if Travis had had the sense to realise he was pushing it far enough for Abby to leave over it, he wouldn’t have pushed that far. But what this shows us is that he was willing to override and brush aside her concerns and wishes as long as he believed he wasn’t going to lose her over it. And that means that he was fine with doing something he knew she really didn’t want as long as it didn’t have an impact on him.

Travis, having started crying, tries forcibly holding and kissing Abby because of course he’s back to his old playbook of trying to force something on her that she doesn’t want. She won’t go along with it:

Abby kept her mouth taut, but her body was lifeless. If I let her go, she would have fallen. “Kiss me!” I pleaded. “Please, Pigeon! I told him no!”

This is called sexual assault, Travis.

Abby pushes him away and shouts at him to let her go, and he grabs her wrist as she’s trying to walk away and keeps begging her on bended knee (literally). Abby pulls her hand away and walks off. YAY, ABBY.

Travis eventually manages to get himself up off the floor and back to his motorbike.

My mother’s words echoed in my ear. Abby was the girl I had to fight for, and I went down fighting. None of it was ever going to be enough.

If only his mother’s advice had instead been to treat the woman he wanted with enough respect to take her opinions seriously, he’d have been so much better off right now.

Trav’s brother Trenton pulls up and gets Trav to come with him for a drink instead of trying to drive his bike when he’s in that state. We find out that someone heard Trav hassling Abby and called Shep who called Trenton. Trenton proceeds to get Trav thoroughly drunk, but then does at least get him back to his apartment and onto the couch when he passes out drunk, so that’s… something? Trav wakes up and Shep tells him to get himself showered because they’re going out to get a new door for his room, then they’re going to study for Finals and get a takeaway. Can someone from the US tell me whether a college would have Finals at the end of the winter term? I’m used to them being a summer thing, but I don’t think even McGuire would make quite such a glaring mistake, so I’m guessing this is a US thing.

(We also get another time marker; it’s coming up to Thanksgiving. Since we know we’ve had Hallowe’en, that must make it November. I’d have called that autumn, but there’s legit wiggle room for opinion on that one, so for once Maguire has managed two timeline markers in a row that are actually consistent with each other.)

The days go by. Shep keeps studying with Trav to distract him. It’s an interesting, and probably realistic, contrast to the way that female friendships get portrayed in novels as involving a lot of emotional venting and verbal sympathising; Shep and Trenton are being there for Trav in their own ways, but those ways don’t involve Trav talking about how he’s feeling or the other two encouraging him to do so. The reason I noticed this is because, last year, my sister wrote a really thought-provoking book covering this subject. What she points out is that men actually are not socialised to talk about/vent about their feelings in the way that women are, and this is a very significant disadvantage to them. In one blog post she described it as ‘like some kind of soul compromising bargain from a Greek myth’ in which men get the power in society, but at the cost of something as fundamental as simple human connection. So, for once, the flaw here isn’t actually in Maguire’s writing; she’s accurately representing a flaw in society.

Anyway, Trav is avoiding telling the rest of his family about the breakup (and has got Trenton to promise not to tell them till after Thanksgiving), which gives him a problem; they’re expecting Abby to come for Thanksgiving and help Trav cook a turkey. Initially I assumed that this was something that had already been mentioned and that I’d blanked from my mind out of sheer lack of interest, but, on comparing the account in ‘Beautiful’, I realised that he’d asked her on the plane back from Vegas and she’d agreed at the time (and this had then been left out of ‘Walking’ because it was part of the conversation in which Travis was blatantly refusing to listen to Abby about not working for the Mob, and Maguire apparently didn’t want to repeat that conversation from Trav’s POV).

This raises the question of when he told his family about the plan, since Abby split up with him later that same evening before he’d had any chance to see them, but I suppose he could have texted them from the arrivals lounge in the airport, so at least this one time McGuire gets plausible deniability on screwing up the timeline. Anyway, for whatever reason, Trav’s family doesn’t know what’s happened. And he wants to keep it that way at least temporarily, as he can’t face the prospect of his dad giving him a hard time over how badly he screwed things up. So, they’re still expecting Abby to turn up with Trav.

You guessed it; Trav wants to persuade Abby to come for Thanksgiving and not tell anyone about the breakup. (He’ll tell them afterwards! Honest!) So, he meets her outside class the day before Thanksgiving and pours on the emotional manipulation:

“[…] Thomas is flying in, and Tyler took off work. Everyone’s looking forward to seeing you… We haven’t had all of us there for Thanksgiving in years. They all made an effort to be there, since I promised them a real meal. We haven’t had a woman in the kitchen since Mom died and . . .”

“That’s not sexist or anything.”

“That’s not what I meant, Pidge, c’mon. […]”

And yet, Travis, it’s still what you said. Somehow we still have a situation where the grown-up parent in the family hasn’t been able to figure out a Thanksgiving meal in all these years, and nor have the various offspring who are now grown men themselves, but they’re all expecting their 18-year-old guest to cook a massive meal for them. I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that they’re all male and Abby’s female.

Anyway, Abby begrudgingly agrees, though she does have the sense to make him promise first ‘that this isn’t some stunt to try and get back together’. It’s not clear why she does agree, other than Because Plot; I checked ‘Beautiful’, and, once again, we get Abby’s description of what’s happening but little in the way of internal reaction. Does she feel bad for Travis? For his family? Is she secretly tempted to spend one more day with him? Is she torn between that and worrying about whether this’ll just give him fresh encouragement and make it all the more difficult to get rid of him again? Any of these would be plausible, but we don’t get to find out.

She and Travis then somehow get themselves into a wires-crossed situation. She says she’ll have to get the turkey into the oven by 6 am (really? I have managed to get through my life to date without ever actually cooking a turkey, and I do know that they take several hours, but surely they don’t take that long) and that’ll mean him picking her up at 5. Travis eagerly offers to take her round the same night so that she can stay overnight. She makes it clear that that’s a hard no… and he still somehow manages to misunderstand when she says ‘See you at 5’ and turn up to pick her up at 5 pm that same day. It doesn’t even seem to be a ‘misunderstanding’, or at least not the way McGuire wrote it; he genuinely does not seem to have realised what she meant.

Anyway, you can probably guess where this one is going. Trav is reluctantly about to tell his father that they won’t be round till the next morning after all, and Abby gives in and goes along with him ready to stay overnight. I assume this is going to be an ‘only one bed’ scenario. Siiiggggghhhh. Anyway, chapter ends there.

 

 

 

 

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 6

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

While this is the sixth (and last) post addressing this chapter, it’s the third of three posts on the specific topic of Josephus’s mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ in the middle of an incident related in Antiquities 20. I’d recommend reading all three posts in sequence, so, if you haven’t already done so, the first on the ‘Jesus called Christ’ topic is here and the second is here.

In wrapping up and summarising the previous post, I pointed out that by far the most likely reason why Josephus’s works contain the mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ is because this is indeed what Josephus wrote, and that the various alternative explanations that Price tries to give are, for one reason or another, highly unlikely. That being so, why is Price so reluctant to accept this phrase as being genuine to Josephus?

Of course, the obvious reason is that if Price can’t find a way to explain that phrase away it puts a huge hole in his theory. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to theorise that perhaps that’s his main reason for trying so hard to believe in improbable alternative explanations. However, for completeness, I’m going to go through the reasons he’s actually stated and give my responses.

Nothing in this chapter or the passage has any relationship to “Jesus Christ,”

… you mean, apart from the literal relationship that the passage states that one of the people mentioned has to Jesus called Christ? The James mentioned is being identified by his relationship with his brother, Jesus called Christ. What part of that does Price feel doesn’t have any relationship to Jesus called Christ?

and the use of “Christ” as an identifier is quite odd, for Josephus never explains what this term means.’

Price seems to be completely misunderstanding identifiers. Identifiers were the equivalent of our use of surnames; they were ways of specifying which of many possible people of a given first name was the one to which the speaker or writer was referring. As such, writers would no more expect to have to explain the backstory of identifiers than we would expect to explain the meanings of people’s surnames when we introduce them. (Hands up; anyone here found it strange that in my many mentions of Price, it at no time even occured to me to explain that the surname ‘Price’ derives from ‘ap Rhys’? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) In fact, we see this elsewhere even in Josephus, when at the end of the first chapter of Antiquities 20 he refers to ‘Joseph called Cabi’ without ever explaining what ‘Cabi’ means or why the Joseph in question was called this.

One argument against this being authentic is that Josephus doesn’t use the term Christos anywhere else, so it does not appear likely that this is original.

Why? Phrases can be quite identifiable (such as ‘called Christ’ appearing almost nowhere in Christian literature other than quotes from non-Christians, meaning that the use of that particular phrase indicates a strong likelihood of a non-Christian author). However, the most likely reason why Josephus wouldn’t use the word Kristos anywhere else is because no-one else at the time was well-known as being called Kristos and so the need never came up. (To go back to the previous example: Joseph also never elsewhere uses the term Cabi, but I don’t believe this has led anyone to conclude that his mention of ‘Joseph called Cabi’ is an interpolation.)

There are also no other examples in the works of Josephus of identifying someone in the manner that is used here if “who was called Christ” were talking about a different person from Jesus son of Damneus (i.e., mentioning the person being related first, and then the subject after, with an explanation of who the person being related is in between).

Since there are also apparently no examples in Josephus’s works of using identifiers in the bizarre way Price is trying to claim (either using an identifier only on the second mention of someone rather than the first, or using two different identifiers for the same person without clarifying that they refer to the same person), the ‘Josephus never does this elsewhere!’ argument doesn’t hold up the way Price wants it to. It did, however, make me realise another thing that Price doesn’t seem to have considered; that the argument that a Christian scribe changed the line here also works perfectly well for explaining how a sentence that did originally contain the phrase ‘Jesus called Christ’ could have ended up in the form we had today.

Let’s hypothesise, for example, that Josephus’s original text did have this mention, but written with the more expected ordering of ‘and brought before them James, the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others’. A Christian scribe copying this, his mind on the importance of Jesus, then unthinkingly changes the order to put Jesus first: ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ, James by name’. Hey presto; a scenario that solves the problem of why Josephus would put Jesus’s before James’s, does so without requiring us to hypothesise that Josephus did something more unlikely, and does so using an mechanism (change made by a Christian scribe) that Price himself thinks could easily have happened.

Or, alternatively, the suggestion of a marginal note. Maybe Josephus only knew that one of the executed people was the brother of that strange rabbi who started a cult years back, and thus the line he originally wrote was ‘and brought before them the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others’, and then, some years down the line, a Christian scribe (or even a non-Christian scribe who happened to know the story) added ‘James by name’ as a marginal note that another scribe later copied into the text. Since Price is happy with the idea that a marginal note could have been copied into the text, why not hypothesise that it was copied into a text that originally included the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line?

Price, of course, is not going to want to consider either of those possible suggestions, because he’s only interested in explanations that let him conclude that Josephus wasn’t talking about Jesus the founder of Christianity. He wants to be able to explain this line away and go on with claiming that no historians of the time ever mentioned Jesus so that he can further claim that this supports mythicism. But, unfortunately for Price’s argument, the evidence does still point to this being an original line from Josephus that most likely referred to the person that Price is trying to claim never existed.

The other arguments against this being original deal with the structure of the sentence, the subject matter of the passage, the fact that even if Jesus Christ existed he would be an odd person for Josephus to use as an identifier for someone else, especially by brotherhood, and the fact that if this were talking about “James the Just” (which it almost certainly isn’t for reasons we shall see), then this James himself would have been more famous than Jesus at this point in time, so this association would have made no sense, as James himself, according to Christian legend, was a community leader and well-known person, though there is no reference to him in the non-Christian literature (unless this is a reference to him).

I’m quoting this sentence in its entirety because I cannot resist pointing out the irony of arguing that Josephus wouldn’t have used a cumbersome sentence. Yes, clearly we can work from the assumption that writers would avoid using cumbersome sentences… oh, wait. Anyway, let’s break it down:

The other arguments against this being original deal with the structure of the sentence,

As above.

the subject matter of the passage,

I think this is another attempt on Price’s part to claim that Jesus had nothing to do with the subject of the passage apart from, y’know, the fact that he was apparently the brother of the main person executed and very plausibly the indirect reason why this group was in trouble in the first place. If so, it’s about as logical as asking why the second Jesus was identified as Jesus ben Damneus when Damneus had nothing to do with the passage. Jesus’s name is being used as an identifier of one of the people who is involved in the subject matter of the passage, and this was a normal way for people of that time to write.

the fact that even if Jesus Christ existed he would be an odd person for Josephus to use as an identifier for someone else, especially by brotherhood,

Why?

and the fact that if this were talking about “James the Just” (which it almost certainly isn’t for reasons we shall see), then this James himself would have been more famous than Jesus at this point in time, so this association would have made no sense, as James himself, according to Christian legend, was a community leader and well-known person, though there is no reference to him in the non-Christian literature (unless this is a reference to him).

James would have been known for being Jesus’s brother, and he was a community leader in the community founded by his brother. Identifying him by his brother makes perfect sense; for those of Josephus’s readers that knew of him, it would have been in the context of being Jesus’s brother.

The real question, however, is if this is James “the brother of Jesus Christ” of the Gospels, and Christians claim that the Gospels are true, then that would mean that this James would have to be in the line of David as well, and thus, if anything, it would have made more sense to qualify James by his father, Joseph, who would had to have been in the line of David, and thus would have been seen as prestigious name worth mentioning.

Oh, come on; this doesn’t even make sense from the Christian point of view. Supposedly Jesus was not only in the line of David but also the culmination of it as the awaited king; identifying James by him would have made perfect sense. It makes even less sense from the skeptic point of view, since the whole highly contradictory claim to the line of David is pretty clearly a retcon by people already convinced of Jesus’s messiahship.

Likewise, if this was “James the Just,” then why not identify him by his supposed prestigious position in society, instead of a link to being the bother [sic] of Jesus?

Because his prestigious position a) seems to have existed only within the nascent Christian movement and b) was because of being the brother of Jesus.

Anyway, that seems to exhaust Price’s attempts at explaining why he doesn’t think the phrase could be genuine. He goes on to put forth the arguments for alternative sources of the phrase that I covered in the previous post, and then to the conclusion of the whole chapter:

 

Chapter conclusion

…in which he makes one of his typical leaps from claiming something might have happened a certain way to declaring that it definitely did:

With all of this, we can see that there are certainly no solid independent attestations to the existence of Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature. Modern scholarship recognizes that the Testimonium Flavianum is the only reasonably possible independent witness to Jesus Christ in the non-Christian literature, and there is nothing else aside from that one passage that could even claim to confirm his existence.

This is, quite frankly, absolute rubbish. Modern scholarship certainly has not discarded the Tacitean passage or the ‘called Christ’ line, and, whatever shade Price tries to throw, the idea that these passages aren’t even claims to Jesus’s existence is just plain silly. What we have is what we’d expect for someone who was a real figure with some relatively minor influence two thousand years ago; a couple of mentions by historians. I realise that’s inconvenient for Price’s theory, but, since he can’t produce anything solid by way of alternative explanations, he’s stuck with the fact that, within decades of the time Jesus is said to have lived, non-Christian historians are at least mentioning his life. Which is hard to explain under mythicism, but about what we’d expect to see from a Jesus who actually existed.

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 5

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

This post follows on from the previous post, which discussed the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ in Josephus, and I thus recommend reading that post first. This one addresses Price’s attempts to explain this line away.

Although Price doesn’t reference them, the suggestions he makes are for the most part not originally his; nearly all of what he writes was in Earl Doherty’s ‘The Jesus Puzzle’ from the late ’90s, and has been further publicised by Richard Carrier in his books and in a journal article. Anyway, here they are.

As per my last post, at the end of the passage Josephus mentions a Jesus identified as ‘Jesus ben Damneus’ (Jesus son of Damneus), who is elected high priest after Ananus is deposed. This is far less of a coincidence than it might at first seem; the name translated here as ‘Jesus’ originated as the extremely common Jewish name ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Yeshu’. Price points out that Josephus himself mentions something like fourteen different people with Iesus as a first name.

However, Price’s (well, Doherty’s) argument is that the mention of a second Jesus in this passage isn’t a coincidence, but another reference to the same Jesus. According to this theory, the Jesus referred to as the brother of the executed James was actually Jesus ben Damneus, who was mentioned twice in the passage, first as an identifier for the James who was executed and then as the next high priest. As for the ‘called Christ’ part of the phrase, Price suggests that this could have ended up in there in any of the three following ways:

  • As part of Josephus’s original text. In this proposed scenario, Josephus initially refers to Jesus ben Damneus as ‘Jesus called Christ’ and then a few lines later as ‘Jesus ben Damneus’, without bothering to clarify that these two mentions of apparently different Jesuses were in fact different ways of referring to the same person.
  • As a marginal note from a Christian reader. In this proposed scenario, the original line about Jesus and James simply read ‘brother of Jesus, James by name’. A Christian reader then mistakenly thought that this referred to the Jesus and James of Christian stories and accordingly scribbled the words ‘called Christ’ into the margin next to Jesus’s name. Since marginal notes were how people indicated to scribes that a correction needed to be made when recopying, a later scribe took it as such and added the words ‘called Christ’ to the main text.
  • As a later mistake by the Christian writer Origen. This scenario is similar to the last, but in this theory the mistake came about because of a citation Origen made of Josephus’s ‘Antiquitities’ as referring to the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’. According to this theory, Origen was misremembering and quoting this line from another Christian writer but wrongly attributing it to Josephus, following which a Christian who had read this in Origen and noticed it wasn’t in Josephus assumed this was an error in their own copy of Josephus and added ‘called Christ’ in the margin of the text to indicate that it should be there.  The words then got copied into the text as above.

The first major problem with all of these scenarios is that they all require Josephus to use identifiers in a confusing way that would have been completely atypical for him.

‘Identifier’, here, refers to anything used as the equivalent of our use of surnames; something that specifies to which of many possible people of the same first name the text was referring. The formulation ‘ben ____’, meaning ‘son of ____’ was the most common, although it was also possible to identify someone by their place of origin or – as seems to be the case for the mention of Jesus here – by a note that they were ‘called’ such-and-such.

Josephus (as was normal for his time) regularly used identifiers of this sort. Apparently his practice in so doing was just what common sense would suggest:

  • He would use them for the first mention of a person’s name, thus letting the readers know which Jesus or James or Alexander or whoever was being talked about.
  • Following that, when he made further references to that person within the same passage, he would simply use the person’s first name.
  • The exception to this was when, having done the above he brought up someone else with the same first name (whom he would again initially refer to with the first name and another identifier and then by first name only, as above), and, having discussed that person, went back to talking about the person with the same first name that he’d been talking about earlier in the passage. On doing this, he would give the person’s name with identifier again in order to make it clear that this was the previous person named [Firstname] rather than the second person, referring to them as the ‘forementioned’ [Firstname] [Identifier].

All of this information comes from the second part of this post on the History for Atheists blog, where it’s illustrated with examples for anyone who wants to get a clearer idea.

The first major problem with Price’s suggestions, therefore, is that they involve scenarios that don’t fit Josephus’s typical use of identifiers at all. Price’s second and third suggestions both require Josephus to have initially identified whichever Jesus this was by only his extremely common first name, giving the identifier only on the second mention. As for Price’s first suggestion, this would require Josephus to have taken the even odder step of identifying the same person by two different identifiers without clarifying that he was doing so. And, unsurprisingly, it seems that neither of these options fits with how Josephus actually did use identifiers. As Tim O’Neill puts it in the above-cited post:

Nowhere in any of his works that I can find does Josephus refer to someone by their name alone when introducing them to his narrative for the first time (e.g. “Jesus”) and then refer to them by their name and an appellation a few sentences later (e.g. “Jesus, son of Damneus”). This is for the very obvious reason that it would be highly confusing to do so.

Jesus Mythicism 2: “James, the Brother of the Lord”

Price does suggest explanations:

Why wouldn’t Josephus put the “son of” identifier in the first reference instead of after the fact? Well, for the very reason that “brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James,” seems odd—because it’s a double qualifier and a cumbersome sentence. In addition, the strong point of the passage is the naming of Jesus as the high priest, thus Josephus uses the formality of identifying Jesus by his father when he states that he was named the high priest.

But if this James was indeed the brother of Jesus ben Damneus, then, unless he was actually a maternal half-brother, he would have been the son of Damneus himself, and could easily and without the extra subclause have been identified correctly as ‘James ben Damneus’. Again, Price thinks he has an answer to this:

Why didn’t he identify James by his father instead? Because if James is related to Jesus son of Damneus, then this is implied, and Jesus is the more important figure—he is the one who becomes high priest.

So, Price is, in effect, hypothesising a situation in which Josephus simultaneously wanted to avoid cumbersome sentences and to identify someone in an inherently more cumbersome way, and was prepared to use this atypically botched identifier in order to manage these two contradictory aims. As usual, we’re expected to accept Price’s explanation instead of considering the rather more obvious explanation that Josephus did indeed write ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’.

It’s worth noting, here, that Price makes no attempt to back this up by referencing any potentially similar passages in Josephus’s work. (This is in stark contrast to the ‘History for Atheists’ post I quoted above, in which O’Neill quotes multiple examples to illustrate and back up his statements both about the way Josephus uses identifiers and about his use of the term ‘called’.) Did Josephus normally try to avoid lengthy multi-clause sentences? Did he have a habit of using identifiers at ‘the strong point of the passage’ even if that wasn’t the first time that the name had been introduced? Are there other places where he identifies people by the most important figure connected to them even where this makes a sentence more cumbersome rather than less? If Price can show examples of these points elsewhere in Josephus’s work, that would be good backup for his theories here. Conversely, if there are no such examples, that gives Price a problem. But we’re left not knowing, because he doesn’t address it at all. That’s the behaviour of someone who isn’t trying to find the explanation that best fits the actual evidence, but the explanation that best fits his own theory.

Anyway… having looked at the general problem with Price’s attempted explanations, let’s look at what Price thinks about the various ways in which ‘called Christ’ might have made its way into the text.

 

Price’s first hypothesis: Josephus himself used the phrase

This section is, by the way, the only part of Price’s suggestions regarding this phrase that doesn’t seem to have originated with Doherty or Carrier. Price does in fairness consider this the least likely of his suggested explanations, but he still thought it plausible enough to include, so let’s look at it. Why would Josephus have identified Jesus ben Damneus as ‘Jesus called Christ’?

Price assures us that it is ‘actually quite possible’ that Josephus would have referred to Jesus ben Damneus in this way:

“Christ” is just a transliteration of the Greek word Christos, which is a translation of the Hebrew Mashiah, which simply means anointed, or one who is anointed. Jewish kings and high priests were called anointed ones, and this is used many times in the Hebrew scriptures.

Now, this much is completely correct. The reason that the term the Messiah became used for the Davidian king prophecied in Jewish scriptures was because Jewish kings were ceremonially anointed as part of their coronation ceremony and thus ‘anointed one’ became a term used for ‘king’, in much the same way that ‘His Majesty’ might be used today. Hence, when discussing the unnamed Davidian descendant who was king in the Jewish prophecies of an amazing future, Jews started talking about him as ‘the anointed one’, which in Hebrew is ‘Mashiach’ (hard ‘ch’ sound on the end as in the Scottish ‘loch’) and in Greek is ‘Kristos’. The former became anglicised to ‘Messiah’ and the latter to ‘Christ’. But ‘anointed one’ could still be used as a general term for ‘king’, because the kings were literally anointed. And at some point anointing with oil also became a part of the induction ceremony for priests, so any priest could be referred to as ‘anointed’ and the term would be technically correct.

However, the problem with Price’s theory is that it would make no sense to use ‘anointed’ as an identifier. After all, the entire point of identifiers is to identify the person of whom the author is speaking, out of many other possible people with that first name. Using a term that could be used just as easily of any high priest would be no help at all for this. It would be as if I mentioned, say, King Henry of England, and, instead of using a numeral to specify which I meant of many possible King Henrys, I instead referred to him as ‘King Henry, called His Majesty’; it would be completely useless.

On top of this, it also completely contradicts Price’s above attempt at explaining why Josephus would have made such a peculiar botch of using an identifier. Price, you will recall, claims Josephus was just trying to avoid ‘a cumbersome sentence’ by not identifying this James as simply ‘James ben Damneus’ (as would have been the obvious way to identify him if this James had in fact been the brother of Jesus ben Damneus). But the Greek for ‘called Christ’ here is ‘tou legomenos Kristos’… which is, of course, longer and more cumbersome than ‘ben Damneus’. So, going with this scenario would leave Price without any sort of explanation of why Josephus would use identifiers in this way.

To be fair, even though he seems to have glossed over all these glaring difficulties, Price at least isn’t arguing too strongly for this particular hypothesis:

All in all, though, this was probably not the case

Ya think?

Price does also briefly throw in a couple of other theories at this point, so I’ll take a moment to address them, but they both make so little sense that he seems here to have been using a ‘throw anything you can at the wall and hope something sticks’ approach.

This passage could simply be saying that Jesus son of Damneus was considered a great person, or an already holy person

…..no, it couldn’t, because the term wasn’t used as a general synonym for ‘great’ or ‘holy’.

This could also simply be using a description of Jesus son of Damneus that he
was later called. This event supposedly happened around 62 CE, which is
getting very close to the First Jewish-Roman War, and this is a term that was even more heavily used in relation to “war priests,” or high priests during a time of war, or priests who, in the Jewish tradition, actually acted as generals.

Citation needed, please.

Jesus son of Damneus was not a high priest during the war,

…so in fact this also won’t stand up as a theory even if Price does give a citation for his claim about war priests being referred to as ‘anointed’.

but Jesus son of Sapphas was the son of a high priest and a general in the war; it could be talking about him.

Why would the son of a high priest be referred to as ‘anointed’ when he wasn’t the one who’d been anointed? And how are we supposed to account for Josephus identifying James by his brother rather than his son in this scenario, when Price’s argument elsewhere is that Josephus is deliberately trying to identify James by the most important person to whom he’s connected? If James was the brother of Jesus son of Sapphas the high priest, then he’d be the son of this high priest himself, and by both common sense and Price’s own argument we’d expect Josephus to refer to him as ‘James ben Sapphas’. Again, this doesn’t stand up at all.

Anyway, this is about all Price has to say on this particular hypothesis, so let us set it behind us and move on to the next.

 

Price’s second hypothesis: that ‘called Christ’ was a later accidental interpolation

To recap: In this theory, Josephus is still referring to Jesus ben Damneus both times, but identifies him as such only the second time, using just his first name the first time. Following this:

A Christian reading the work may have seen the names Jesus and James together and jumped to the conclusion that this was “Jesus Christ” and then made a note saying so. A later scribe would have then just incorporated it, assuming it to be true, in order to clarify the passage.

There are two problems with this (apart from the problem with the identifier use which we already discussed). The first leads us back to a point we encountered while discussing Paul: why would a Christian be making that assumption if not for the fact that their Jesus was already believed to have an earthly brother called James, and why would Christians believe that Jesus had an earthly brother called James if Jesus himself was thought to be an entirely heavenly being with no previous earthly existence?

The second problem is that it’s unlikely both theologically and practically that this hypothetical Christian reader would put the word ‘called’ in this hypothetical note. Theologically, there is the obvious fact that people who believed that Jesus was Christ (i.e. the Messiah) were unlikely to refer to him as called Christ, but simply as Christ (or possibly Lord, or Saviour, or similar). Practically, the Greek term for ‘called’ used here – ‘tou legomenos’ – is a long word to add when it’s an unnecessary extra in a marginal note.

In short, this hypothesis is also pretty implausible.

 

Price’s third hypothesis: Origen made the mistake

In this part of the hypothesis, Price is still going with the theory that Josephus’s line originally read ‘brother of Jesus, James by name’ and that the ‘called Christ’ phrase was a later addition. However, in this theory the phrase originates with Origen.

Origen was a theologian writing in the first half of the third century who, at three different points in his writing, cited Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’ as containing a mention of the death of Jesus’s brother James, in each case using wording very similar to the phrase that we have in Josephus:

James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ

Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Book 10 chapter 17

 

James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ)

Against Celsus, Book 1 chapter 47

 

James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ

Against Celsus, Book 2 chapter 13

 

At first sight this looks like evidence for the phrase being authentic to Josephus. However, Price points out that we have a reason to doubt this; one of the things that Origen also says about this Josephan mention is clearly incorrect. On each of the above occasions when Origen cites Josephus, he also claims that Josephus attributed the fall of the Temple as being punishment for James’s execution… despite the fact that Josephus says nothing of the sort. Here are fuller versions of each of the passages above:

Flavius Josephus, who wrote the ​”​ Antiquities of the Jews ​”​ in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. And the wonderful thing is, that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James.

Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Book 10 chapter 3

Now this writer, although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless— being, although against his will, not far from the truth— that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ),— the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.

Against Celsus, Book 1 chapter 47

 

… for the siege began in the reign of Nero, and lasted till the government of Vespasian, whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem, on account, as Josephus says, of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, but in reality, as the truth makes clear, on account of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

Against Celsus, Book 2 chapter 13

 

Price’s argument on the matter (or at least the unattributed argument Price uses here, which, again, seems to have originated with Earl Doherty) is as follows:

  • Josephus clearly does not say what Origen claims here that he said.
  • Therefore, Origen must have been confusing his sources and in fact citing a different writer rather than Josephus.
  • Therefore, Origen’s attribution of the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ to Josephus is also incorrect.
  • Therefore, Josephus’s manuscript didn’t originally contain this line.
  • The ‘called Christ’ part of the line was probably added to Josephus by a scribe who’d also read Origen and therefore well-meaningly made a correction of the Josephan passage in accordance with what he believed it was supposed to say according to Origen.

The first point of this, at any rate, is clearly correct, so it’s worth thinking about whether the rest of it stands up. If Origen really was citing the Josephan passage, why did he claim that Josephus had said something that Josephus hadn’t?

One explanation I’ve seen for this is that Origen was simply reading things into the text that aren’t there and making assumptions about what Josephus was trying to say. While that’s certainly a possibility to consider and I’m not going to rule it out, the line ‘yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James’ is specific enough that it has the ring of an indirect quote. On balance, I think that line does go better with the idea that Origen was unintentionally quoting someone other than Josephus.

However, Price’s explanation is also a bad fit for the observed facts.

Firstly, Origen makes this reference to Josephus three different times in two different works, using very similar wording each time. That’s an unlikely degree of consistency for someone who was thinking of the wrong writer in the first place.

Secondly, the phrase ‘called Christ’ was a rare one for a Christian writer to use, for the obvious reason that Christians believe that Jesus was Christ and so wouldn’t tend to refer to him as ‘called’ Christ. As far as I know, the only record we have of it being used spontaneously by an early Christian writer is Matthew 1:16; the handful of other examples we have in Christian writings all seem to be quotes from non-Christians. That in itself doesn’t prove the phrase came from Josephus, but does suggest that Origen almost certainly got the phrase either directly from a non-Christian writer or from a Christian writer who was himself quoting a non-Christian writer.

And finally, of course, Price’s explanation still gives us the problem of having to suppose very atypical identifier use from Josephus.

With all that in mind, this is my personal theory on the matter. It’s fair to point out here that I’m not a historian (and don’t play one on TV…), so, if anyone with actual familiarity with the works of Origen and/or ancient documents generally is reading this and spots any obvious flaw in my reasoning, please let me know.

What I suspect is that an earlier Christian author whose work has since been lost did indeed cite the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line from Josephus, but also added his own opinion about the righteousness of James and the popular belief that his death was the cause of the fall of Jerusalem/the destruction of the temple, and inadvertently wrote all this in such a way that it looked as though this opinion was also being attributed to Josephus. (Given that it was the norm in those days to use indirect quoting rather than direct quotes with quote marks, this seems something that could plausibly happen.) Origen then used this unknown writer as his source rather than using Josephus directly. This resulted in Origen correctly reporting the Josephus quote, but then incorrectly attributing the writer’s follow-up lines to Josephus as well.

That is of course speculation, and for all I know someone who has a better idea of what they’re talking about will come up with some obvious argument against it that didn’t occur to me. However, it strikes me as at least being a more plausible explanation than the string of oddities required by Price’s theory.

 

So, where does this leave us?

While Price assures us blithely that there are many possible alternative explanations for the appearance of this phrase in Josephus, he’s overlooked the small issue of whether these explanations are at all likely. No matter how hard Price tries to explain this line away, we’re still left with the most likely reason for the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ showing up in Josephus’s work being because Josephus himself wrote it.

 

 

‘Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed’: Chapter 10, part 4

‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.

The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.

 

Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus

On to the other possible reference to Jesus discussed by Price; the passing mention of ‘Jesus called Christ’ in Book 20 of Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’. I had intended to cover this in a single post, but it got ridiculously long, so I’ve split it into three. This post focuses on general discussion/explanation of the quote, the next will discuss the various theories Price gives us as to how that line might have ended up in Josephus’s work, and the last one will discuss why Price doesn’t want to go for the most obvious explanation (namely, that Josephus actually wrote the line and was referring to Jesus).

In the context of the mythicism debate, the first two things to say about this quote are that it’s a) one of two quotes in Josephus mentioning Jesus, and b) not the one that’s known to have been tampered with. This is worth mentioning because commenters in mythicist debates do sometimes confuse the two (usually because their total knowledge of the subject comes from having skimmed the occasional podcast or post) and say something about ‘the Josephus mention’ clearly being a forgery. I think the little band of commenters I’ve got here actually do know the subject matter better than that, but in case anyone new turns up I’ll start out with a clarification of the basics:

  • The first Josephan mention of Jesus is a short paragraph in ‘Antiquities’ Book 18 generally known as the ‘Testimonium Flavium’, which is clearly at least partly forged and possibly entirely so. It is thus not much use for this debate. I’ve discussed this briefly here.
  • This post is going to discuss the second mention, which is also in ‘Antiquities’ but in Book 20. Unlike the first quote, this one is accepted by almost everyone in the scholarly world as genuine, for the simple reason that in this case there’s no apparent reason why a forger would go to the bother of inserting it.

Having got that out of the way, let’s take a look at the passage itself:

And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus. Now the report goes that this eldest Ananus proved a most fortunate man; for he had five sons who had all performed the office of a high priest to God, and who had himself enjoyed that dignity a long time formerly, which had never happened to any other of our high priests. But this younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed; when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity [to exercise his authority]. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent. Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

Josephus, Antiquities 20, chapter 9

So… a newly elected high priest by the name of Ananus decides to go for a power play before the newly elected procurator gets there, and arranges to have some people sentenced and executed without getting official permission first. This backfires on him when some people are rightfully concerned about this and speak out against it, resulting in Ananus getting kicked out as high priest and replaced by someone else, coincidentally also called Jesus but identified as ‘Jesus, son of Damneus’. And it so happens that, in the midst of this juicy anecdote, Josephus mentions that one of the people executed was ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’. In other words, Josephus knows of a Jesus who was called Christ. Yes; now you come to mention it, we think we might have heard of that guy as well.

 

Why would Josephus bother mentioning this?

Why would Josephus bother telling us that one of the people executed was this particular Jesus’s brother? On this we can only speculate, but there is one obvious possible answer: it’s plausible that, by this point, this tiny but spreading cult was well enough known that Josephus would expect many of his readers to have heard about this pesky group of troublemakers that had been started by someone by the name of Jesus whose followers referred to him as Christ. If so, then this reference would clue people in to the reason why Ananus put James and co. up for execution; because they were among the followers of this Jesus called Christ.

Price doesn’t accept that this could have been the case:

In addition, since this is something that is occurring around 60 CE, it would seem quite odd to identify James by his association to a person whom the Jews had supposedly killed as a criminal some thirty years prior to the event, and sixty years prior to this writing.

Christians argue that this was done because Jesus Christ was so well known that it makes the passage make sense, but as we have seen, no one prior to Josephus had even written about Jesus Christ aside from some Christians, so it certainly does not seem that he was well known at all.

Price seems here to again be falling into the trap of assuming that the small proportion of writings that have been copied often enough over the intervening two millennia to be preserved for us to read actually equate to the amount of information that was available at the time. In reality, of course, information would also have been passed on by word of mouth and by writings such as letters that nobody thought to copy and preserve over the centuries.

It’s worth noting here that Price himself has made a claim earlier in this same chapter that requires us to believe that people were hearing about Jesus and his followers in other ways; if you recall, Price was quite happy to assure us that claims about this ‘Christ’ being executed under Pilate ‘would have been common knowledge by 109’. Well, if so, then that leaves us with the possibility that this same piece of information would have been at least somewhat known by the mid-90s CE when Josephus was writing this, thus making it plausible that Josephus might have expected many of his readership to have heard of this group who referred to their leader as ‘Christ’ and followed this Christ’s brother as a temporary replacement leader.

It’s also worth revisiting this comment of Price’s from Chapter 5:

Furthermore, if Jesus had been executed by the Jews during the reign of Pilate due to being a seditious rabble rouser, then wouldn’t followers of his that continued worshiping him in the years after his death have been seen by Jewish leaders as criminals or threats?

Why, yes. Yes, they probably would. And, more to the point, they would have been seen by Romans as criminals or threats, meaning that people would have remained aware of his followers and we can expect that there would have been at least some talk in elite Roman circles about this troublemaking group. I can’t see it being that big a topic of conversation, but it seems the sort of thing likely to get the occasional passing mention, in a ‘those pesky Christians, what are they up to now? <eyeroll>’ sort of way. That is exactly what we’d expect to happen, by Price’s own argument as well as by common sense. And so, once again, it makes absolute sense that Josephus might have expected his readers to be aware enough of this group that they would pick up on his passing reference to them.

 

Is it even helpful to the debate?

This wasn’t in fact a point made by Price, who’s focusing on attempts to claim that Josephus never said this in the first place, but as it’s a point I’ve sometimes seen raised in other mythicist discussions I’ll address it for completeness:

Josephus wasn’t even born at the time that Jesus supposedly died, so he cannot possibly have ever met him or have first-hand knowledge of him. Which is, by the way, completely normal for historian authors and is not normally considered an issue for dismissing everything they have to say on a subject. However, this is Jesus mythicism, and so now and again a Reddit commenter or the like will start in with the claim that as Josephus never actually met Jesus he can’t provide any evidence of his existence.

Now, I know I keep citing Tim O’Neill, but he made a really good point about this: Josephus was around for this whole incident with Albinus and the unlawful execution. We know from his own autobiography that he would have been a young man living in Jerusalem at the time (the early 60s CE) and that he was from a priestly family, meaning his own social group would have been rocked by this incident and it would have been a major topic of conversation at the time. And while this wouldn’t have told him anything whatsoever directly about Jesus, who was decades dead by then, it would have put him in a good position to know whether this James was in fact being referred to at the time as ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ’.

In other words, Josephus is another good witness (along with Paul, who actually mentions meeting James) to the fact that James, a human on earth, was known as Jesus’s brother. And, as previously discussed, humans aren’t generally referred to as the brothers of mythical beings who had only a heavenly existence; the term ‘brother’ when applied to a human being, whether literally or metaphorically, normally means that the brother was also human. Josephus’s single passing comment tells us that a real human man was referred to as this Jesus’s brother, and thus gives us yet another piece of solid evidence that Jesus was also a real human.

Which, of course, is not at all what Price wants to think, and so he tries hard to give other possible explanations for this quote. The next post will discuss those.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 20

(Oh, bother! It looks as though I might have managed to post this while it was still in draft stage and needed tidying up. My apologies to anyone who read the slightly mangled version. This one will, I hope, be at least marginally better.)

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty: You Win Some, You Lose Some

EDITED AGAIN because I forgot the content warning: Physical violence with fights. Gambling. Casual racism.

The four of them pack and fly out to Vegas with Abby hardly saying a word the whole way. America checks them into the hotel ‘flashing her fake ID, as if she had done it a thousand times before’, which makes Travis realise she’d probably done precisely that and this is probably where they got the fake IDs in the first place. Which raises several questions:

  • The implication here is that Mick arranged the fake IDs so that Abby could win him money. Why on earth was he also paying for a fake ID for America, and why on earth were her family allowing some sleazeball to take their underage daughter off to casinos on a regular basis?
  • According to this post by Das Sporking, Vegas casinos are really strict about not letting underage people gamble, and they’re careful about checking IDs, especially if paying out on any big win. So… are we meant to believe that Mick was regularly taking his very young teenage daughter to these casinos without anyone ever at any point thinking ‘hang on, that girl looks like she might be underage; better be extra careful about checking that ID?’
  • Also, wait a minute… a couple of chapters back, one of Travis’s family mentioned that Mick gave interviews to ‘all the papers’ (implying national papers, if Travis’s family read them in another state) about his luck changing at midnight on Abby’s thirteenth birthday. So Mick made it clear in national papers that he was taking a child as young as twelve to gamble regularly (and at least once stay up past midnight doing so, during term time), and no-one from the casinos he attended regularly noticed? (Or CPS, for that matter?)
  • Now that I think about it, why on earth did multiple national papers care enough about the gambling woes of some metaphoric as well as literal loser that they were running articles about it?
  • As much as I love Das Sporking, could they make it any more difficult to find things in their archives?

Anyway, Travis checks in with Abby as to how she’s feeling and she just says she doesn’t want to be here. They go up to what turn out to be two separate rooms (one for each couple) in a very posh-sounding hotel, so, for a trip that’s meant to make money, they seem to be spending quite a bit of it up front. Travis is trying to be supportive to Abby (and for once he really does seem to be trying), but she doesn’t want to know, and doesn’t want him along when she goes to start gambling.

“If I’m going to win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend, I have to concentrate. I don’t like who I’m going to be while I’m at those tables, and I don’t want you to see it, OK?”

I can’t get past this whole ‘win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend’ plan. I mean, I know that if you’re good enough at poker it’s possible to make enough profit overall that you can make a passable living from it long term, and I know that occasionally you can get lucky enough to have a huge win. But, however good you are, you can’t expect to make $7000/day, because a significant part of it is always going to depend on literal luck of the draw.

Anyway, Travis actually respects what Abby says and backs off, which is almost as unlikely as winning $14,000 in a weekend. Yay, Travis! He and Shep go to check out the Strip while Abby plays. They see the Fountains of Bellagio, though Trav doesn’t know what they’re called (this has nothing to do with anything; I just think the Fountains of Bellagio are awesome and wanted to have an ‘I remember those!’ moment) and some other stuff and head back to the casino, where Trav sees Abby at one of the tables but still stays out of her way.

Before I can start liking the new and improved Travis too much, however, he sees a man holding her arm and is on the brink of charging over there with violence in mind before Shepley grabs him and points out that it’s one of the casino workers and if Travis goes off on one he’ll just get them all kicked out. Travis gets closer and hears the man tell Abby that it was good to see her again and that he’d see her tomorrow at five. It turns out that this is Abby’s former boyfriend; the one who wanted to be a youth minister, who is apparently now working at a Vegas casino instead. It seems Jesse (the former boyfriend) knows Abby is underage and is arranging to meet her tomorrow in return for letting her play till midnight without telling anyone.

Travis isn’t happy about this and Shep spells out to him that she can’t just go to another casino because they’d spot she’s underage and… apparently people here know her and let her get away with underage gambling? Despite it being highly illegal? Anyway, this brief conversation apparently takes up all the rest of the time until midnight, since next thing Trav and Shep are meeting the girls at their table.

So, it’s midnight, Jesse won’t let Abby play for any longer, and she still hasn’t won enough. Trav and Shepley offer her their winnings as well; apparently, in what was supposedly half an hour of playing blackjack to pass the time, the boys won $900 between them. Abby says that even with the money from the boys she’s still $5000 short, which would mean that in the few hours since she got here she’s won $8100 plus whatever four flights to Vegas and two rooms in a swish hotel cost. So, having made dangerous levels of alcohol abuse sound fun and sexy in this book aimed at people in their teens and twenties, McGuire is now making gambling sound like an easy way of earning money. Any other great messages you want to pass on to today’s youth, McGuire? Drug abuse is an exciting pastime, maybe?

Anyway, comes up and tells her he can’t give her any more time. Then he drops kisses on her hair and the corner of her mouth before leaving, so looks like he’s not planning for tomorrow’s dinner to be just an ‘old friends catching up’. Shep physically holds Travis back from attacking Jesse. Abby protests to Trav that she had to agree to have dinner with Jesse because the guy to whom her father owes money is Mob and is going to have her father killed if he can’t come up with the money:

‘Have you ever dealt with the Mob, Travis? I’m sorry if your feelings are hurt, but a free meal with an old friend isn’t a high price to pay to keep Mick alive.’

I’m open to correction on this one by any of the very many people who know more about the Mob than me, but would they actually kill someone for not paying off a debt on time? I would have thought it would be more along the lines of breaking some important bones and telling you you now had X further days to come up with the money before they came back to break more. Lather, rinse, repeat for as long as they think there’s any chance whatsoever of you coming up with any of the payment, which a dead debtor can’t do. Am I wrong?

Oh, well. It is fair to say that Abby would probably not be hugely comforted by the thought that her father is only in line for significant injury rather than actual death.  And I also realise that, while she would be entirely within her rights at this point to tell Mick to eff off and deal with the consequences of his own actions, that’s somewhat emotionally difficult when said consequences will involve maiming. So, yes, I can see how she actually would feel obliged to go along with Jesse’s demand for an evening out in order to keep him quiet.  I was going to say that nothing was stopping her from telling Jesse not to kiss her and/or introducing Travis as her boyfriend to make the situation clear, and then realised that actually she does still need to stay on Jesse’s good side at least until she’s collected her winnings and got out of there, since he could still blow her cover on being underage. So, since we seem to be ignoring the fact that this is all too illegal for the casino to pay out anyway, I suppose this bit of plot makes some sense.

America tells them they’ve got to get to Benny’s, and they head over there. I guess McGuire either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you don’t get automatically handed the money as you win it; instead, you win piles of chips which you then have to cash in (with, once again, your ID getting carefully scrutinised to check for anyone who’s underage). I’m mildly amused by the image of them handing this mobster a pile of casino chips. Anyway, they walk to Benny’s house, which is nearby. The door is opened by a huge intimidating doorman. Apparently part of the intimidating aspect is his skin colour:

He was enormous – black, intimidating, and as wide as he was tall

Because apparently ‘black’ goes with ‘intimidating’ in McGuire’s mind.

Benny is also there, standing next to the doorman. Psychologically speaking, this seems like an odd choice; I would have thought his expected approach would have been to have the doorman keep them waiting with the tension building up before ushering them into the inner sanctum. Practically speaking, I can’t see how he’s supposed to be standing next to someone that huge without having to peek out from behind the doorjamb.

Anyway, Benny tells the others they need to wait outside and Travis insists he’s coming in, which Benny seems to respect. Trav makes sure he keeps himself between her and the doorman because he sees the doorman as ‘the biggest threat’. He’s not going to attack Abby randomly, Travis, and Benny’s not going to arrange any attacks at least until he gets his money.

Abby begs Benny to take the amount she’s got and give her tomorrow to get the rest. Benny correctly picks up on the fact that she’s doing this because she doesn’t think she can get the rest. They’d have done better to say ‘Here, take this now so that we’re not carrying $20,000 around Vegas at risk of any muggers’, which would have sounded more believable. Benny decides he’s going to arrange for his goons to attack Abby:

“I’m considering teaching Mick a lesson, and I’m curious just how lucky you are, kiddo.”

Travis has something to say about that:

“I hope you know, Benny, that when I take out your men, I mean no disrespect. But I’m in love with this girl, and I can’t let you hurt her.”

Nice. Gotta say, I like playing-it-cool Travis a whole lot better than gratuitously-violent Travis. Benny, by this point, is finding the whole thing amusing. He tells Travis what to expect fight-wise from each of his goons (one’s got a knife, the other’s never lost a fistfight). The goons attack, and, of course, Travis takes out both of them because he is Just That Good and apparently fighting his brothers as a child fully qualifies him to take out a best-of-the-best Mafia fighter.

Benny promptly sees an opportunity for a deal; if Travis takes Goon 2’s place in the fight he was meant to have the next day, which he’s now in no shape for, Benny will forgive Abby’s father the rest of the debt. Travis is totally up for this. They go out, meet Shep and America, and go back to the hotel where Travis showers off the blood and they get the other two caught up on events. America points out the obvious:

“This is ridiculous! Why are we helping Mick, Abby? He threw you to the wolves! I’m going to kill him!”

But Travis still wants to go ahead with the fight, having found that the one he’s just had was a superb outlet for his anger. He is, apparently, going to be fighting someone called Brock McMann, of whom both he and Shepley have heard:

“No way. No fucking way, Trav. The guy’s a maniac!”

Travis is fine with the plan as he’s doing it for Abby. Abby doesn’t want him to, but Trav retorts that he doesn’t want her going to dinner with her ex-boyfriend, so

“[…] I guess we both have to do something unpleasant to save your good-for-nothing father.”

And we’re at the end of another chapter. Nice to have some plot moving along finally, even if it did contain some pretty massive holes.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 19

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Nineteen: Daddy’s Home

Well, that sounds ominous.

Friday, the day of the date party, three days after Abby smiled about the new couch and then minutes later turned to whiskey over my tats.

That sentence took me a minute to decipher. As far as I can make out, it’s McGuire’s attempt to skip through some stuff from ‘Beautiful Disaster’ without having to go to the trouble of writing the scene, and either it hasn’t occurred to her that some of her readers won’t have read ‘Beautiful’ or she just didn’t care. The last chapter of ‘Walking Disaster’ did mention Travis buying a new couch (I forgot about his habit of having his five-minute stands on the old one and thus missed the fact that this was meant to be a New Start for the New Travis and skipped it), but I have no idea whether ‘turned to whiskey’ is meant to be some bizarre version of ‘turned to mush’ or whether it’s that she turned to drink over the stress of having Travis swear undying love to her in a gushy tattoo. Look, McGuire, if you want to write a different-POV version, write it; don’t just skip chunks when you get bored.

(five minutes later…)

Oooookaaaaay, just checked out the corresponding bit in ‘Beautiful Disaster’…

(several days later)

and have thus given myself a lot of extra stuff to type. Since the best answer to ‘Where do I start?’ seemed to be ‘By leaving this hot mess for another day; indeed, for many other days’, I went to bed.

Working through this:

1. Somewhat to my surprise, since it involves someone actually having an appropriate response, my latter explanation was correct and Abby did in fact turn to whiskey over the stress of Travis’s lovey-dovey tattoos. Not only does she recognise this is a bad idea when they’re so early in their relationship, she’s also worried over the fact he did this right after finding out who her father was and thus might be more interested in Mick Abernathy’s daughter than in Abby. Good for you, Abby!

2. Travis, unfortunately, is determined to brush Abby’s concerns aside. He also tries telling her that he was just passing by the tattoo place and decided to go in and get it done, which we flat-out know is a lie since we know from his conversation with Shepley last chapter that he planned this in advance.

3. For those curious about what the tats actually were; he got ‘Pigeon’ tattooed on his wrist (you know, the nickname he invented for Abby that she hated, so now she’s stuck with looking at it every time she sees his wrist), and ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’, (a line from the Song of Solomon in the Bible) tattooed along his ribs in Hebrew. The latter is the tattoo that he referred to in the last chapter of ‘Walking’ as ‘What I always said I would do if I met the right girl’. Uh, nice attempt at a retcon, McGuire, but I haven’t actually forgotten that back in Chapter Three he was insisting he wasn’t ever going to get that hung up on anyone, not to mention all that vile misogyny in the early chapters; I’m not buying this retcon of Trav as always having secretly been a romantic at heart. The romance in this gesture is, of course, also rather thoroughly negated by his determination to disregard Abby’s wishes or feelings in the matter, so, alas, I cannot get any warm mushy feels from it.

But alsooooo….

4. In the process of looking this up, I found that McGuire had once again left an entire chunk out of the story when writing up ‘Walking’. This involved Abby challenging Parker over the fact that he’d been trying to shit-stir between her & Travis with the openly declared intention of getting her to come back to him. Parker isn’t even embarrassed about that and just makes a slut-shamey joke about Abby clearly not being so shiny and new any more.

5. Oh, yes, and Abby and Trav are busy being the get-a-room couple in lectures, and after the showdown with Parker skip a lecture to screw in an empty lecture hall, and As Foretold By The Troutian Prophecy this is treated as all just so cuuuute and romantic.

Great. I started hoping I could get through this more quickly, and it’s taken me forever to get past the first sentence. Though I suppose that’s only because McGuire left so much stuff out, so if she’d put it all in then I’d probably have taken even longer over it, so small mercies.

Aaaaanyway, where the hell were we…

The girls were gone doing what girls do on the day of date parties

Because they’re girly girl girls whose actions all fall into the same category, obviously, because they’re giiiirrrrrrls. Travis, meanwhile, is really nervous about something and doesn’t know what, so he’s had a couple of drinks because apparently he hasn’t learned anything about maladaptive coping skills. (To be fair, he is a nineteen-year-old student so this bit’s realistic.) He’s also waiting on the steps in front of the apartment for Toto to do his business, so nice to know McGuire’s remembered Toto again. Toto produces, and Trav picks him up and goes back inside, so I guess scooping up the dog muck that has just been left right outside a (I assume) shared apartment building is not a thing Travis does. Lovely.

Travis spells out for us that he’s still anxious Without Apparent Cause:

The date party would be my first, yes, and I was going with my girlfriend for the first time, but the knot in my stomach was from something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As if something terrible was lurking in the immediate future.

Y’know, I kind of like my foreshadowing without the anvil, but whatever.

Travis and Shepley have arranged for the apartment to be filled with bouquets for the girls, thus fitting the traditional toxic relationship pattern of making big grand romantic gestures without underlying healthy romantic patterns. As we see a few minutes later, when Travis complains again about Abby’s skirt being too short and her dress being too low-cut in the back. Though on this occasion she actually manages to persuade him to let her keep it on for the evening, so… that’s actually something.

They go to the party. Somebody called Brad Pierce notices Travis’s wrist tattoo:

“Dude, you got your girl’s name on your wrist? What in the hell possessed you to do that?” Brad said.

He doesn’t have Abby’s name on his wrist, he has the word ‘Pigeon’. Bit odd that Brad’s jumping straight to assuming it’s Abby’s name.

Travis and Abby dance. She tells him she’s hopelessly in love with him and he makes a speech that would indeed have been beautifully romantic if we hadn’t already seen all the toxicity.

After a few songs and one hostile, yet entertaining moment between Lexie and America

(sigh) All right, all right, I’ll bite… (back to copy of ‘Beautiful)

[Abby and Trav are groping each other while dancing]

“I guess we know what the appeal is,” Lexie sneered from behind us.

America spun, stomping toward Lexie on the warpath. Shepley grabbed her just in time.

“Say it again!” America said. “I dare you, bitch!”

Lexie cowered behind her boyfriend, shocked at America’s threat.

“Better get a muzzle on your date, Brad,” Travis warned.

One, thanks for that lovely bit of misogyny in the last line there. Two, anyone remember America’s ‘Vegas threw up on a flock of vultures’ sneer and how nobody seemed to object to that? But heaven forfend Lexie say that Abby and Trav’s attraction seems to be sexual. Can’t have anyone suggesting that perhaps their attraction is sexual even when they’re making it beyond obvious that it is.

Anyway, back to ‘Walking’. Trav and Abby go upstairs and out onto the balcony, where they catch Parker with his hand up a girl’s skirt. Parker gets his hand out quickly and they all do the awkward ‘so, how’ve you been?’ thing, and the girl (Amber, in case it ever comes up again) looks disgusted at meeting both of them because of course we have to establish that all other women except America are Abby’s enemies. Bleagh.

Anyway, Parker and Amber get out of there in a hurry and Abby and Travis stand there chatting, and Travis, referencing his new tattoo, says this:

“If it feels this good to have this on my arm, I can’t imagine how it’s going to feel to get a ring on your finger.”

“Travis…”

“In four, or maybe five years,” I said, inwardly cringing that I went that far.

To my genuine surprise, Abby actually responds sensibly to this.

Abby took a breath. “We need to slow down. Way, way down.”

“Don’t start this. Pidge.”

“If we keep going at this pace, I’m going to be barefoot and pregnant before I graduate. I’m not ready to move in with you, I’m not ready for a ring, and I’m certainly not ready to settle down.”

Excellent. Abby’s spotted what a bad idea it is to rush into assumptions about marriage at this point – even apart from Travis’s issues, they’re 19 and 20 and have only known each other a few months and are still in full on NRE! – and has set a clear-cut boundary about it.

So, of course Travis apologises for rushing and reassures her that he sees what she means and will back off and allow this to develop at a more sensible pace reacts like a pillock.

I gently cupped her shoulders. “This isn’t the ‘I wanna see other people’ speech, is it? Because I’m not sharing you. No fucking way.”

No, Travis, it’s the ‘You’re rushing far too fast and I’m setting some boundaries’ speech. Rather than respond to what Abby’s actually saying, you’re objecting to something she never said. This is an example of derailing. Oh, and strawmanning.

Abby insists she doesn’t want anyone else, and Travis asks her ‘What are you saying, then?’ because actually taking what she’s clearly saying at face value would obviously be too much to accept of him. Abby reiterates it, and at least Trav doesn’t try to strawman it this time, but he’s still not happy:

“It seems like we take one step forward and two steps back, Pidge.

No, Trav… you both took one step forward and then you tried to lunge about ten more steps forward without checking what she wanted and now you’re complaining because it turns out she doesn’t want to lunge forward with you.

Every time I think we’re on the same page, you put up a wall. I don’t get it … most girls are hounding their boyfriends to get serious, to talk about their feelings, to take the next step …”

“I thought we established that I’m not most girls?”

Because, as always, it’s vitally important to establish that Abby is Not Like Other Girls ™ and this is far more of a priority than questioning whether Travis is even right here. I mean, not that we have any reason to suspect that a raging misogynist whose contacts with women have consisted almost entirely of having quickies on the couch and then kicking them out might be wrong in his assumptions about what ‘most girls’ think, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty of nineteen-year-old college students of any gender who actually aren’t in a hurry to settle down permanently with one person.

Also, I’m now picturing Abby putting up a wall on a page, and thus have images of one of those 3D pop-up books.

Anyway, Trav asks where she sees this going and Abby says that when she thinks about her future she sees him, which is enough to placate him. They stand there and share a pleasant moment which is interrupted by America bursting in to warn Abby that her father now knows where she is. It seems he kept pestering Abby’s mother, who wouldn’t tell him, and he eventually got the idea of phoning America’s family, whereupon America’s father decided that he had ‘a right’ to know and told him. Many thumbs down for America’s father. Do not do this, people. If someone’s hiding from a family member there’s probably a very good reason why.

Abby panics at the idea of her father turning up. Travis promises to protect her. Abby runs out, desperate to get away from the party.

I had only heard about Mick Abernathy’s accolades as a poker player from my father. Watching Abby run like a frightened little girl made me hate any time my family wasted being in awe of him.

And thus I am actually in the rare position of approving wholeheartedly of something Travis thinks. Despite having grown up hearing about how awesome this guy is, when he sees how upset Abby is over this he does a 180o on the subject straight away. No ‘but he can’t be that bad!’, no ‘surely you should give him a chance…’ no ‘but what a cool poker player he is!’; just straight into believing and accepting Abby’s word on the matter. I honestly think this is the first time Travis has done something I actively like.

Anyway, as they’re charging out, America spots Mick Abernathy, who is described as ‘an older, slovenly man, unshaven and dirty to the point where he looked like he smelled’. He’s showing a photo to a group of people who are nodding at it, so the implication apparently is that he’s looking for Abby and they’re confirming that she was at the party.

Abby promptly changes tack on the whole trying-to-avoid-him thing and instead storms up to him to ask what he’s doing there and tell him to get out. The answer to the first question is, apparently, that he’s trying to hit her up for money. Despite that, the first thing he says to her, while looking at her dress and making disapproving noises, is “Well, well, Cookie. You can take the girl out of Vegas – ” Am I reading that wrong or did he just start out by slut-shaming the person he’s about to ask for a colossal favour?

It transpires that Mick owes $25,000 to someone called Benny, who is apparently the sort of person you really don’t want to be in debt to if you want to keep all your limbs, and he’s come to get the money from his teenage daughter, because, hey, let’s stay classy… and he can’t even manage to be polite to her or her boyfriend while he’s doing this:

Mick’s eyes rolled over me, from my face to my shoes. “Who’s this clown?”

To which Travis responds with ‘I can see, now, why a smart guy like yourself has been reduced to asking your teenage daughter for an allowance’, thus doubling the occasions so far in this book in which I have liked something he’s done. Travis, you are on a roll here; keep up the good work.

Abby admits to having $11,000, which she apparently made by betting on Travis’s fights. When? She went to one fight that we heard about. I looked back and Travis mentioned having a couple more fights in the time Abby was staying at the apartment for the bet, so she could have bet on those. Since Travis is supposedly superb at fighting, the odds on him wouldn’t give her a huge return for each sum of money she bet. To make $11,000 in three fights, wouldn’t she have had to have massive amounts of stake money to start with? Also, how much is Adam taking in entry fees in order to be able to take bets with that kind of likely payout?

Anyway, Mick reckons she’ll be able to double that in a weekend (by playing poker, I assume), and thus bail him out. Abby makes the mistake of trying to argue a rearguard action instead of just giving him a hard no:

“It’ll clean me out, Mick. I have to pay for school,” Abby said, a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“Oh, you can make it back in no time,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

Father of the year, clearly. On the plus side, it makes a very nice change for the slimeball to be the designated slimeball rather than the designated love interest.

Travis continues his run of actual likeability by pointing out to Abby that she doesn’t have to give him anything. Mick tries some shitty guilt trip about how it’s the least Abby can do because, supposedly, he wouldn’t be in this mess if not for her:

America slapped his hand away and then shoved him. “Don’t you dare start that shit again, Mick! She didn’t make you borrow money from Benny!”

Mick glared at Abby. The light of hatred in his eyes made any connection with her as his daughter disappear. “If it weren’t for her, I woulda had my own money. You took everything from me, Abby. I have nothin’!”

Abby tells him she’ll get him the money by Sunday, but this is the last time; from now on, he’s to stay away from her. Yup, I’m sure he’ll listen to that the next time he’s got himself in too deep with the wrong people. They head to the car, and:

America sighed. “Pack your bags, boys. We’re going to Vegas.” She walked toward the Charger, and Shepley and I stood, frozen.

“Wait. What?” He looked to me. “Like Las Vegas, Vegas? As in Nevada?”

(I now want someone to say ‘As in the ‘threw up on a flock of vultures’ analogy from the first time you all went to the Red together.‘ Sadly, no-one does.)

“Looks that way,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets.

“We’re just going to book a flight to Vegas,” Shepley said, still trying to process the situation.

“Yep.”

So, they get in the car ready to make tracks for Vegas, the implication being that Abby’s going to try to win the money playing poker. I predict that this plan will work perfectly well and make her look even sexier to Travis into the bargain, because McGuire does not care what lessons she gives young people about sensible behaviour. Wait, no; the next chapter is called ‘You Win Some, You Lose Some’, so maybe Abby’ll just lose all her money. Anyway, chapter ends.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 18

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter 18: Lucky Thirteen

My word, it has been a while. I had to look back to find out what had been happening in the book at the point where I was last reviewing it (it involved Abby standing up to Trav and calling him out, so that actually managed to be briefly enjoyable). Let’s see…

Travis is taking Abby home to meet the family. The place reeks of everybody smoking and of ancient carpet, and one of Abby’s brothers calls Travis an asshat the minute he’s through the door (to be fair, I cannot actually disagree…) but Trav is confident Abby’s going to love his family anyway.

There’s a bit about how Thomas has made it his job for years to ‘calm potential storms’ in the family by being ‘always on the lookout for someone that could potentially rock our already rickety boat’, because they all recognise that ‘Dad can’t take it’ if there are problems. So, major dysfunction and parentification going on there.

Trenton eyes up Abby and gets slapped on the back of the head by his father for it. Abby, meanwhile, recognises someone called Stu Ungar from a photo. (Famous poker player, in case anyone else was wondering, but I had to look that up because McGuire doesn’t really explain it. Is he famous enough in the US that McGuire could reasonably have assumed her readers would have heard of him?) This scores her major points with the family, who are about to launch straight into a poker game, including Travis. Great welcome for a guest there; if Abby hadn’t been a poker fan, she’d have been left twiddling her thumbs through multiple games. (This scene could have been rather better done if the mention of Stu Ungar had led to the boys finding out that Abby loves poker and asking if she wants a game, rather than clearly being about to launch into one regardless.)

Fortunately, it turns out that Abby’s brilliant at poker and wipes the floor with them all. Thomas then recognises her surname and puts it together… Abby is the daughter of Mick Abernathy, a poker legend. This makes her an out-and-out celebrity in the family’s eyes, and they go wild for her. We now get our title grab; it’s a press nickname of Abby’s. Apparently her father gave an interview saying that his luck ‘ran dry’ at midnight on her thirteenth birthday and hers picked up instead. And she grew up playing poker with her father’s friends, who were mobsters.

Abby is looking mortified by all this and Travis and family think she’s the best thing since sliced bread. Travis finds this so hot he makes excuses to his family and heads home with her straight away, where he finds out Abby’s worried she’s mad at her for not telling him. When she finds out he’s actually starstruck, she’s not much happier with that; she left Kansas to get away from being Mick Abernathy’s daughter, which sucked for her. Travis actually does the decent thing for once and promises her he won’t mention it again and won’t tell anyone else.

Later, after Abby’s asleep, Travis gets texted by ‘Jason Brazil’. That clears something up; ‘Brazil’ is clearly his surname, not his first name, so at least that’s less improbable than having two characters with unusual country first names. I do wonder in passing whether that fact gets a mention in ‘Beautiful’, or McGuire put it in only after everyone pointed out to her how unlikely it would be to have a Brazil and an America in the same friend group. Anyway, Brazil is texting to tell Trav that Parker is ‘talkin smack’ about him. Apparently Abby is still calling him and Parker is waiting in the wings to get his chance when Trav screws up… oh, great, sounds like Parker’s going full-on Nice Guy. Brazil also tells Trav:

Sd just now that she told him the other day she was really unhappy but u were kinda crazy and she was worried about when to do it.

Trav, being Trav, immediately jumps straight to wanting to wreck Parker’s car, rather than wanting to speak to Abby and find out whethr she is unhappy and whether there’s anything he can do to make her feel more comfortable. However, he at least manages to keep this under control, so… some character growth has happened! Yay, McGuire! Shepley spots this as well, the next day; he thinks Parker planned this to wind Trav up to send him into a jealous rage that would convince Abby to break up with him. (Sadly plausible.)

Trav then tells Shepley he’s on his way to get a new tattoo, and…

“What are you doing, Trav?”

“What I always said I would do if I met the right girl.”

So it sounds like he’s about to go get the sort of Abs-&-Trav-4-evah tattoo that everyone tells you it’s a terrible idea to get when you’ve just started going out with the person. Shepley tries to talk Trav out of this in case it freaks Abby out, and Trav not only refuses to listen, he tells Shepley he’s going to the jeweller’s store next, to ‘have it. For when the time is right.’ So apparently he’s planning to buy Abby an engagement ring to have at the ready. When he’s nineteen, she’s eighteen, and they’ve only known each other for what seems to be a few months, although in McGuire Time it’s difficult to tell.

Shepley tries talking some sense:

“No time anytime soon is right. I am so in love with America that it drives me crazy sometimes, but we’re not old enough for that shit, yet, Travis. And . . .  what if she says no?”

And, of course, Travis has no intention of listening; he’s on his way to get that tattoo and buy that ring. I’m going to hazard a guess that Abby will, in fact, see all this as super-romantic and not a red flag at all, but we do not find out at this point as the chapter ends here. Huh; that means I actually made it through a chapter review in fairly short order. Amazing what you can do when the dysfunction reduces. Maybe the rest of the book will be like this and I can whiz through it? I’m a completionist and do want to finish it, but I don’t want to devote my life to it. We shall see.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Six

This is the last of a multi-part series reviewing the 1994 anti-abortion novel ‘The Lost Child’, in which protagonist Caz reacts to her mother’s abortion by constructing an elaborate lifelong fantasy about the younger sister she imagines she would have had. Part One is here and contains links to all the other parts.

At this point in the book, Caz has finished writing and publishing her book, in between a rapid and intense romance with her next-door neighbour Will, to whom she is now engaged.

Content warning: Talk of child death, life support cessation decisions, ablism (though this is presented as wrong in-story), inappropriate pressure from the medical profession, description of callous treatment of a body after death, and suicide plans.

 

The highbrow despair

Having ended the previous chapter (the conclusion of the book-within-a-book) on a positive note, with Caz looking forward to the future, Atkins starts this one with Caz in the depths of despair. In a very highbrow literary way, to the point where she actually lampshades it; ‘Oh, Caz, can’t you even watch your heart break without quoting effing literature?’ she writes after quoting Macbeth and rambling about how Laurence Olivier managed to howl effectively on stage when required by learning it from trapped minks.

The next several pages are Caz a) lamenting how awful she feels and b) telling the Greek myth of Cassandra because Atkins wants this for symbolic purposes which I’ll get to shortly. One slightly odd thing here (which will be relevant in a few minutes, so bear with me) is that Caz claims that, as part of the curse, Cassandra knows her prophecies will be believed just once in her life, on the day that she dies.  This would be a brilliantly effective addition to the curse (imagine not only never being believed, but knowing that when it eventually happens it won’t be a relief as it’ll be a sign of your own imminent death), but it isn’t one that I can find in any version online, nor could I find anyone who’d heard of it when I asked on Reddit. I’m not sure whether Atkins took liberties with the story deliberately, whether she actually had heard this version somewhere herself, or whether she simply got it wrong.

Anyway, we eventually find out what all this is about; her lover Will has finally told her the full story of his child’s death, and it turns out that he gave the doctors permission to turn off the life-support machine, which Caz finds unacceptable.

Will’s story (as told by Caz)

Late in her pregnancy, Will’s wife was hospitalised and unconscious with severe pneumonia. The baby was delivered by emergency Caesarean and put on a life-support machine. The next day, the paediatric team came to Will (his wife was still unconscious) and told him that ‘there was a considerable possibility of brain-damage to a greater or lesser extent’. We’re not told what sort of level of brain damage the doctors were suspecting here, but Caz implies that it’s on the level of ‘won’t get qualifications or go to university’. The consultant’s response to this level of uncertainty was…

Their medical opinion was that the continuance of life-support for the foetus was strongly contra-indicated.

As before, Atkins apparently doesn’t know that ‘foetus’ is a term specifically used for the stages of development prior to birth and thus no-one would have been referring to a child after birth by this term. However, that’s far from being the worst plausibility problem with this story. We’re told that the consultant not only recommended switching off the life-support machine, he wanted a fairly quick answer from Will about this because…

[…] as there was no knowing how long the machine would be needed … well, suffice it to say that Will would have to make up his mind while there was still the choice.

… and so the consultant was going to come back to Will at the end of the ward round, forty-five minutes later, and get his answer then, the clear implication thus being that this was framed as ‘switch off the life support right then or risk being saddled with a brain-damaged child which will, of course, be too awful a prospect for you to even consider it as a possible option’.

Aaaaand no, Atkins, that is not how decisions about switching off ventilators are made in real life.

There are rare and tragic cases where brain damage is so severe and the predicted quality of life so poor or non-existent that doctors will advise that life support be turned off. Typically, in such cases, the medical staff will do everything they can to be sure that the prognosis really is that bad. They will sit the parents down for a sensitive conversation about it. They will give them time to think about it. And, above all, they won’t make the suggestion in the first place unless they’re sure that the prognosis really is hopelessly dire.

This idea that a consultant would railroad a parent into making this sort of decision about a child who was already showing enough signs of improvement that they anticipated her shortly being able to breathe independently is just so far away from the reality of these sorts of situations that I’m flabbergasted that Atkins had the brass neck to write this. This is deeply insulting to all the doctors who’ve had to guide parents through these horrible decisions with sensitivity and professionalism. While I disagree with Atkins’ views on abortion, at least with abortion she’s objecting to something that actually happens and not to some strawman she’s invented.

Oh; we also get told a few pages later that the baby’s body was thrown out with hospital trash after death. Again, no. I get that Atkins is probably trying to make some sort of point about how much she disapproves of fetuses being treated this way after abortion or miscarriage, but that isn’t what happens when children die after birth. (For that matter, it’s also not what happens with stillbirths after viability or even with late miscarriages.) Both parents would have been given a chance to hold and say goodbye to their child and then a chance to plan a funeral and choose either burial or cremation. Atkins is arguing against a strawman.

Caz’s reaction

So, Caz has told us this heart-wrenching story of Will, left alone and without guidance under this sort of pressure while his wife is still unconscious. She tells us about how he desperately tries to get through to someone he trusts with whom he can discuss this horrible decision, and can’t manage it within the short time he’s been given, and how he prays for an answer and doesn’t get one, and eventually, after forty horrible minutes of this, tells the doctors that he’ll ‘be ruled by them’, because he just can’t think of any other way to make the decision. Regardless of what you think of the rightness or wrongness of the decision itself, it’s very hard to read this without your heart going out to anyone faced with such a horrible situation and so little support.

Well, except apparently for Caz. She writes in her diary that he ‘murdered his child’ and that he ‘must be a monster’ who ‘destroys everything I’ve ever lived for’. That’s the level of compassion she’s able to show for the man she supposedly loves so much.

And that’s completely in line with the way Atkins has written her character. So far, through the book, we’ve seen a judgemental woman with rigid views on right or wrong, whose main relationship has been with an imaginary person she can idealise, who doesn’t seem able to extend sympathy or grace to the flaws of real people, and who doesn’t even seem to understand the concept of being able to sympathise with a decision with which she disagrees. Meanwhile, she’s seen no problems with making a decision to marry her first serious partner only a few months after meeting him, while still in full-on NRE stage.

With that background, it feels very realistic that she has this kind of 180o reaction to finding out something about Will of which she disapproves. She doesn’t seem to have any kind of framework for accepting and forgiving someone who has done anything with which she disagrees, however long ago and however deeply regretted. And, now that she can no longer idealise Will (the way she idealised her imaginary sister), everything has crashed down for her.

But I don’t get any sense that this characterisation was deliberate on Atkins’ part. It could, in fact, have worked really well to present Caz deliberately as a flawed protagonist and unreliable narrator. But Atkins is trying to present her as Cassandra the ignored prophetess, the truth-speaker we should all believe. Atkins is on Caz’s side here.

Having given this scene a lot more thought than it actually deserves, I’ve eventually realised that Atkins is clumsily trying to make some point about non-Christians supposedly being unable to forgive:

So what do I do? I honestly don’t think I know anyone who’d understand. I once knew a man [her grandfather] who would have done. But then he had a future and a city with a crystal river to look forward to, where the sun never sets. He would have known what to do. But this, all this futility, wasn’t the end for him.

I don’t have his future or his faith, and my point of reference isn’t the Bible but the classics – which he understood well enough too – so I’ll have to look for my answers there.

So it seems Atkins thinks nonbelievers are incapable of forgiveness. At the same time, she seems to have no concept of reacting to a disagreement by thinking about the person’s reasons for acting the way they did and/or their feelings about it now and whether they regretted it and forgiving others in that way. In other words, she doesn’t really seem to understand forgiveness at all. I’m left with the impression that she sees forgiveness as ticking off a mental ‘there, forgiven’ box rather than actually trying to understand anything about the other person’s viewpoint or actions.

Atkins does not seem to see anything wrong with Caz’s lack of any such attempt to understand. As far as I can see, the only problem Atkins has with Caz’s reaction seems to be that she isn’t able to tick the mental ‘there, forgiven’ box which (in Atkins’ eyes) a Christian would be able to make everything all right by ticking. Other than that, Atkins seems to see this harshness and lack of compromise as completely justified. If this is how Atkins really feels about the matter, then that tells us quite a lot about her.

And just when you thought this was bad enough… (further content warning)

Caz, having broken up with Will because of a decision he made years ago under great pressure and clearly deeply regrets, feels she also can’t face living without Will. So, her reaction is to start planning her own suicide.

She doesn’t go through with it; after a few days of relating her despair at great length (and, to be fair, with beautifully written vivid description; Atkins is good at the wordsmithery part of writing), she posts a more positive diary entry which is all very vague but does effectively imply that she’s going to go and make it up with Will. On top of which, she is apparently a major character in Atkins’ next novel, and, from the look-inside feature on Amazon, it seems she is back with Will, so clearly that’s what happened. But we do get these few days in which, although she never specifically says in so many words that she’s planning to kill herself, she makes it very clear that that’s what she’s thinking.

Now, I’m trying to think how to say this next bit, because I do not want either to minimise the horrendous pain that leads so many people to take their own lives or to make assumptions about what anyone does or doesn’t feel they have to live for. I know that people whose lives seem wonderful on the surface can have unsuspected torments beneath that surface. I know that depression is a tricksy lying weasel that can convince someone that their life is hopeless even when it seems objectively good. So please, please, do not take my next comments as being any sort of judgement on the real people who are faced with real problems that drive them to suicide, and please, if anyone reading this feels that way themselves, know that I believe in your pain and hope for you that you have people who will take it seriously and help you.

But here is the problem with Atkins’ portrayal: We’ve been reading Caz’s diary all along, so we know that she doesn’t have that level of problems. This isn’t a case of someone who seems fine on the surface while feeling terrible underneath. This is someone who has not been suffering from depression, who has not been struggling with hidden problems, whose life has by her own account been going splendidly up until the point where she chose to break up with her fiancé purely because she is too rigid and lacking in compassion to accept that he once, long ago, did something she believes to be wrong. And the result of writing Caz as planning suicide solely for that reason is that what would otherwise have been a genuinely excellently written portrayal of someone struggling with despair comes across more as a teenager having an ‘I shall DIE and THEN they’ll all be sorry!’ strop.

On top of which, we get this:

Cassandra died the moment she’d been believed; with the truth, as always, on her lips.

…which Caz ties in to the fact that she got such good reviews of the advance copy of her book:

My book has been hailed as prophetic, the catalyst to change the law. ‘The tide of morality is turning (I quote) and soon the law will protect the unborn child again, as it has throughout most of history until 1967.’

Oh, yes, they believe me now.

They believe me now.

So, Atkins is trying to draw a parallel between Caz’s planned suicide and Cassandra’s death, with both of them presented as the prophets who die only at the point where people finally believe them. I’m sure she meant this to be powerful and symbolic, but it doesn’t stand up well.

Firstly, Caz isn’t making a prophecy; she’s expressing an opinion. So people aren’t disbelieving her, they’re disagreeing with her. There’s a difference, although Atkins doesn’t seem to get that.

Secondly, the reason Cassandra’s realisation of her upcoming death was a tragedy was the inevitability of what she predicts. She knows that she’ll die later that day and she knows that there is absolutely nothing she can do to prevent it. Caz, on the other hand, is making a choice. She has the options of either facing the grief and learning to make a life without Will, or being less unbendingly rigid in her requirements for the people in her life, forgiving him, and taking him back. However much she might dislike the idea of either of those choices, they still exist.

The result of all this is that her comparison of herself with Cassandra comes across as not so much powerful as grandiose. (It also occurs to me that it is really quite rich for Caz to be comparing herself to someone who had ‘the truth, as always, on her lips’ when she has in fact spent years lying to her publishers.)

However. We are not done yet; there is still a layer of hypocrisy icing on this particular intolerance cake. Because we now find out…

Will and I are having a child.

This, by the way, is written on August 26th. Caz also says it’s a boy, so she’s supposedly far enough along to have had some sort of test for (apparent) gender. Caz and Will met on the first of May and became lovers some time in the middle of June. If Caz is not only pregnant but far enough along to have had a gender check, she must have conceived almost as soon as they started going to bed together, which was only about a month and a half after they met. That is… not a good timescale for making decisions about creating a new person for whom the two of you will be forever jointly responsible.

However, setting that aside; Caz, ferocious defender of fetal life, is pregnant. And considering suicide. So, surely, according to her own beliefs she should be planning on postponing her suicide until the baby is born? Nope. We’re back to the Greek mythology-based symbolism:

Procne took her beloved son, her Itylus, and killed him out of vengeance for her sister.

[…]

Will and I are having a child. A boy. Our Itylus.

…so Caz’s plan is, apparently, to commit suicide while she is pregnant and to view this as some kind of symbolic vengeance against Will in a gospel-according-to-Greek-mythology way.

And she’s planning this despite the fact that her defining character trait throughout the book has been her utter opposition to abortion, which she firmly believes to be child murder. Despite her protest in the end of her book, written only weeks ago, about how having to live through ‘a few short months’ of unwanted pregnancy shouldn’t outweigh a child’s right to life. Despite her childhood vow ‘never to kill my children, I mean a baby in my tummy’. Despite the fact that the entire reason she’s upset in the first place is because she’s angry at Will for what she believes to be child murder on his part. The hypocrisy is utterly breathtaking.

And it could still have worked in-story if called out. After Caz’s eventual decision not to commit suicide after all, she could have had a scene of looking back with horror at how nearly she had done something she found abhorrent. It could have been a learning moment in which she realised for the first time what it was like to be desperate enough to get to that point. She wouldn’t even have needed to change her views on abortion; just find the understanding and compassion that has been so missing from her character until now, maybe look back at her mother’s decision with new insight and sympathy. But we don’t get any of that.

The outcome, and final thoughts

After several entries in which Caz despairs of ever feeling happy again (and also some letters, including one from Caz to her niece for her sixth birthday in which she sends her the story she once wrote of Procne and Philomela, because of course that’s a totally appropriate present to send to a six-year-old, especially when you’re planning to commit suicide knowing what a traumatic event that will be for her), we get a final entry in which Caz seems to have found her way back to inner peace and a wish to go on living. And, again, the wordsmithery part of the writing here is very good. Caz goes out to look at the Thames and we get shown-not-told that she’s focusing on more positive imagery, in ways that are very nicely bookended with the negative images she was writing about back in the novel’s opening pages. The final line, in a callback to a pleading letter Will wrote Caz a few days earlier in which he told her he’d get a bottle of Moet and wait for her, is:

Well, I thought as I turned away, who ever said you couldn’t have Moet for breakfast?’

So, without being explicitly told that Caz has decided to try again with Will, we can still pick it up from that line. In these ways, this chapter is good writing.

The problem with it, however, is that we’re given no indication of how Caz got mentally from Point A to Point B. In real life it is of course fairly normal for a few days of letting the dust settle to be enough for people to find they’ve moved quite naturally from ‘LET’S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF’ to ‘Potayto, potahto, whatever’; not every argument needs a big definitive resolution. But, when you’ve gone to the trouble of throwing a nuclear-level disagreement in as a plot twist forty pages from the end of your novel, you need to actually address it in some way, not just let it peter out vaguely into nothingness.

Caz could have realised that, while she still disagreed with what Will had done, she could nevertheless feel empathy for him and forgive him. Even better, she could have come to the obvious realisation about her own hypocrisy in planning suicide while she was still pregnant and could have learned the more general lesson of ‘people can make decisions they deeply regret later, especially in acutely stressful circumstances, while still being basically good people’ and extrapolated that to understanding and forgiving Will. But we don’t see any of that. We just go from Caz being all ready to commit suicide to make a point, to Caz waking up feeling a bit better, to Caz apparently feeling positive about life again and being about to go back to Will. So, as plot resolutions go, it’s a damp squib.

However, good or bad (I’m voting ‘indifferent’), it is the end of the book. As I mentioned, Caz does show up in a subsequent Atkins novel titled ‘On Our Own’, and if anyone does happen to have read that I’d be interested to know what happens with the plot and whether the dangling threads from the end of this one are ever addressed. But I’m not interested enough to bother ordering the book, so unless I happen to find a copy in a charity shop somewhere I will not be reading any more about Caz.

And, since I have finally ranted myself out on the topic, this is also the end of this book review. I am sadly behind on responding to comments – for which my apologies – and will try to do so in upcoming days. Meanwhile, I will close by once again channeling Richard Ayoade: Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Five

This is the fifth of a six-part series reviewing the 1994 anti-abortion novel ‘The Lost Child’, which is about protagonist Caz reacting to her mother’s abortion by constructing an elaborate lifelong fantasy about the younger sister she thinks she would have had. At this point in the story, Caz is finishing her own book-within-a-book about the subject, in which she alternates between her experience of her mother’s abortion when she was a child and her fantasies about her imaginary sister Poppy written as though they were actual memories. This post is going to be about the conclusion of that book-within-a-book, in which she reveals (or at least confirms, since it’s probably fairly obvious by now) the truth about Poppy’s imaginary status to her readers.

The book-within-a-book’s conclusion

Caz, after a bit of humming and hawing, comes out with the reveal:

Have at you, then; I shall say it. Know what you’ve already worked out. Poppy is dead. I shall never see her no more.

I do not wish to dismiss Caz’s clear distress over the issue, but can we please keep sight of the fact that Poppy, even within the story, never existed. I do understand that, in this storyline, Caz genuinely sees her mother’s abortion as a sibling she has lost, that this would have been a potential brother or sister for her, that from her perspective she’s lost a sibling, that her grief over this is genuine. But that’s not the same as Poppy being dead. Poppy-the-person, the character described in the book, was never more than a creation of Caz’s imagination.

What more can I say? That I see her death in terms of tabloid headlines? Terrified Child Torn Limb from Limb. Callous Cold-blooded Killing…

Atkins has clearly been reading anti-abortion propaganda; the ‘torn limb from limb’ bit is a classic anti-abortion ploy of describing abortions in the most lurid way possible, at the expense of accuracy. We also now know enough about fetal brain development to know that a fetus doesn’t develop conscious awareness this early and thus a first-trimester fetus isn’t going to feel ‘terrified’ or anything else (though, to be fair, on the level of knowledge available at the time that Atkins wrote this it would not have been unreasonable for her to believe it).

At the time, as a child, I thought my world had gone mad when I found that those who were my greatest security, those I was supposed to turn to in times of most desperate trouble, were monsters of grotesque proportions, perpetrating violence against the innocent.

While Caz could plausibly have read anti-abortion propaganda between her childhood experience and the writing of her book, what she seems to be implying here is that the ‘torn limb from limb’ view of abortions was part of what made such an impact on her back when she first heard about them. The problem with this is that, regardless of what Atkins thinks about the accuracy of this description of a abortion, it doesn’t fit with the plot she’s chosen. The whole point was meant to be that we get the reactions of a child with no prior knowledge of abortion to the euphemistic description she’s given of it. Atkins doesn’t seem to have spotted the contradiction with having this same child apparently aware enough of abortion mechanisms to interpret them in pro-life propaganda terms.

This is, I gather, an adjustmental flaw. Most children can absorb new, even shocking facts about the universe, and modify their worldview to accommodate them. I could not. I still cannot.

Actually, Caz’s (and, by implication, Atkins’s) main adjustmental flaw is that she doesn’t seem capable of recognising anyone else’s viewpoint but her own. Remember that she’s showing no empathy for her mother’s risk of postnatal depression had she continued the pregnancy, and that she couldn’t even comprehend the fact that her lover was able to see her mother’s side of the story as well as hers. And, yes, for all the heavy subtext implications that this adjustmental flaw is Really A Virtue, this sort of rigidity is a major flaw.

Caz talks about how she invented Poppy’s life to deal with ‘the fact that no-one would even acknowledge she had ever been’. Then she moves on to discussing how she now feels about her parents. Or, rather, conspicuously avoiding discussing how she now feels about her parents.

The time has come when I want to say that I don’t blame my parents, because I know that they will read my book and the last thing I want is to cause them any more pain.

Caz, come off it. While it might well be true that you don’t actively want to cause them pain, it’s also true that you are a) publishing the book, b) doing so without discussing it with your parents first, and c) not even trying to anonymise them. Clearly, avoiding pain for your parents is lower priority to you than avoiding any of the above actions. When you can’t even spend the time on a find-and-replace of the names and details in your book to at the very least try to avoid doxxing your mother in the process of publishing her personal life for the edification of the world, let alone think about not publishing it in the first place, don’t try to tell us that causing them pain is ‘the last thing’ you want.

Having assured us that she wants to say that she doesn’t blame her parents, Caz… does not say that she doesn’t blame her parents. Instead, she tells us:

When I was studying the Second World War at school, I couldn’t understand why such a civilised country, which produced Beethoven and Bach and Mozart and Goethe, and some of the most interesting and gentle people I’d ever met, could have allowed six million people to be murdered without a protest. Had they all gone collectively mad?

This, please note, is the next paragraph after Caz’s claim that she wants to say that she doesn’t blame her parents. Yup, nothing says that you don’t blame someone like comparing their actions to the Holocaust.

My teacher explained it to me by saying that many didn’t know, and more didn’t believe what they knew. And those who both knew and believed did what they could before they were arrested and hanged themseles.

But what will posterity say of us? That we all knew, we all believed, and those that condemned did so politely in the newspapers.

This is something I actually remember from my own time as a pro-lifer: actually failing to comprehend that pro-choicers genuinely do not see embryos and fetuses from conception on as being full people with full rights. I really believed that all the people supporting abortion rights must just not know about fetal development, and once they knew all the details it would change their minds. (Shut up; I was naive, OK?) The thing is, once I realised that that wasn’t so, it did give me pause; not in a ‘all those people must just be callously evil!’ way, but a ‘wait, is it possible that there’s something wrong with my conclusions here?’ way. My mind didn’t change at that point, but it was one of the things that sowed the seeds. Atkins doesn’t seem to have had this reaction.

Meanwhile, Caz still notably fails to come out and say that she doesn’t blame her parents. It’s like the scene in ‘Monsters’ University’ when the can design lecturer tells them in their first lecture that some people find can design ‘boring, unchallenging, a waste of a monster’s potential’ and then says nothing to contradict this. The headcanon I was left with is that Caz knows perfectly well on some level that blaming her parents is an unpleasant thing to do that doesn’t fit well with her image of herself, and so is subconsciously struggling with wanting to say that she doesn’t blame her parents but not wanting to do the actual emotional work of not blaming her parents.

However, while the silence remains deafening on the topic of whether Caz blames her parents now, she does tell us this:

Strangely enough, I think that on a subconscious level, emotionally not rationally, without questioning why, as a child I blamed my father not my mother. This was totally unfair of me.

Yes, it was, rather, wasn’t it?

A possibly relevant bit of background here: Atkins happens to have read the same anti-abortion propaganda book as I did back in my anti-abortion days; ‘Two Million Silent Killings’, by Margaret White. I know this because she quotes from it several times for her chapter epigraphs. While it is a mercifully long time since I have read this book, one thing I do remember is that White did try the ‘but why do fathers get no say in what happens to their unborn children!’ argument. I wonder, therefore, whether that’s where Atkins got it from.

By the way, the reason I remember that detail is because it was the one claim I managed to see through even when I’d fallen hook, line, and sinker for the rest; I recognised perfectly well that this supposed concern for giving men ‘a say’ in the decision would be nowhere to be found in a situation where it was the man who wanted the abortion and the woman who didn’t, that pro-lifers were going to be just as much against abortion in a situation where both partners agreed that was what they wanted, and that White was only using the argument because it supported her overall viewpoint, not because it actually stood up. Shame this didn’t give me any pause in questioning everything else she wrote, but at least I spotted that fallacy.

Anyway, however Atkins got there, she seems to have actually spotted the practical flaws in this particular argument while still finding it convincing on an emotional level. This gives her an interesting case of cognitive dissonance:

I believe he would have liked another child. But he is a gentleman and a scholar, and would never have dreamt of compelling my mother to do something against her will. Indeed, such an idea is unthinkable as well as repellent. The man must be a monster who would force his wife to carry a child she didn’t want, even if the law allowed him to, which it didn’t. I have no desire whatsoever to return to a so-called ‘Christian’ society, or emigrate to an ‘Islamic’ state, where a man has powers over his wife and can tell her what to do.

But at this point something atavistic and childlike deep within me cries out in protest against the civilised times we live in. Why can’t a man have some say over his child’s life?

Excuse me, Caz, but your father did have some say. You had a family vote. He cast his vote. He accepted that he was outvoted. That is having some say. I’ve never before seen it made quite so obvious that ‘Why can’t men have a say?’ is code for ‘Let’s look for excuses to stop women from getting abortions!’

And is a woman’s body so precious, I want to ask, that it is worth more, for a few months, than my sister’s whole three score years and ten?

Can we drop the claim that pregnancy and birth are just a matter of ‘a few months’? It’s nine months plus postnatal recuperation time of varying and typically significant degrees of problems, with all sorts of potential complications (speaking of which, let’s once more remember that Caz knows about her mother’s high risk of postnatal depression), some of which can be permanent. And that’s all even without discussing the permanent impact that becoming a parent has on your life.

And, yes, everyone’s rights to their body are that ‘precious’. That’s why we don’t make organ donation compulsory.

It’ll be said, by those who want to say it, that I had problems because of my upbringing. That I suffered a trauma, at the age of five, because of well-meaning parents who were too liberal, who told me too much, who allowed me to know something that a five year old can’t cope with. That I suffered from too much truth. Say that if you must. I’ll never believe it. The truth, in itself, can’t be harmful.

Firstly, I think that, whether or not her parents did the right thing by telling her about her mother’s pregnancy and abortion, the way they dealt with telling her was terrible. Her mother told her about her pregnancy before having made the decision about it, thus giving Caz a chance to get excited over the prospect of having a sister only to have that snatched away from her, and then there was the whole dreadful family vote scene in which she was left feeling that the responsibility for stopping the abortion was somehow on her. If they were going to tell her, it would have been better if they’d presented her with a fait accompli and then sympathised with her disappointment over not getting the sister she wanted. (Caz’s grief and disappointment about this haven’t been properly acknowledged by her parents at any point, and are inextricably tangled with her moral outrage.)

Secondly, regardless of the effect on Caz of knowing vs. not knowing, Caz is showing that her parents were wrong to trust her with the information. She’s about to make a personal and painful episode in her mother’s life public, without discussing that with her mother. While Caz is still focusing only on the impact on herself and what would or wouldn’t have been best for her, I think her mother would have been better off not telling her.

I hope I shall follow my parents’ example, and always tell my own children the truth, however unpleasant it is. If they ask me where we go when we die I shall answer, quite truthfully, that for all I know some godless hell awaits us.

I suspect this is Atkins trying to write what she thinks a nonbeliever might sound like and ending up in ‘said no actual person ever’ territory. In terms of the validity of this approach, it’s like answering “What are we going to do today?” with “Well, for all I know a grisly fatal accident might await us” on the grounds that it’s quite true that for all you know that might be the case. Telling people ‘the truth, however unpleasant it is’ has its points as an approach but does not require deliberately digging up the most unpleasant hypothetical situation possible.

Caz wraps up the epilogue and her book-within-a-book on a positive note, telling us that she’s finally said goodbye to Poppy and is moving on and building her own life, and that she’s looking forward to having her own children ‘and making my own mistakes instead of dwelling on other people’s’, which was more of a self-own than I’d have expected. Thus ends Caz’s book-within-a-book.

There are still a few more chapters of the overall book, all part of the frame story of Caz’s diary and letters. While I’ll review those in a separate and final post, there is one point from the next chapter that seems to fit more neatly in this part of the review, which is the reception of Caz’s book by the ARC reviewers:

My book has been hailed as prophetic, the catalyst to change the law. ‘The tide of morality is turning (I quote), and soon the law will protect the unborn child again, as it has throughout most of history until 1967.’

To get the pedantry out of the way first; I have no idea why Atkins included the words ‘I quote’ in brackets. That’s both unnecessary (since the quote marks show that it’s a quote) and inaccurate (unless the original line she’s quoting included those words in brackets). C’mon, Atkins; according to your Wikipedia page, your degree is in English Language and Literature.

In terms of Atkins’ claim here, this wishful thinking on her part wasn’t fulfilled by her own book either in terms of the law changing or, as far as I can remember, in terms of making much of an impression at all. (To be fair, it was of course almost thirty years ago, but I do spend a good deal of time in bookshops and this book doesn’t ring any bells as anything I remember seeing when it came out).

As for Caz’s book, realistically it’s hard to see why that would make that much of an impression on society’s collective opinions. Why should ‘children’s author wanted a baby sister and didn’t get one’, which is what this boils down to, be a stronger anti-abortion argument than any of the ones we already know? Doylistically, I suspect Atkins thinks she’s written the equivalent of an alternative-universe scenario in which we get to see what a great and talented person the world could have had and what a wonderful relationship Caz would have had with her sister if only it hadn’t been for the abortion. But, of course, that isn’t how the story goes; what we’re actually given is Caz’s idealised imagining of the wonderful sister and trouble-free relationship she thinks she could have had, which isn’t the same thing at all. Watsonianly, meanwhile, I’m headcanoning that Caz’s publishers realised what they’d been saddled with and sent the ARCs off to the most pro-life reviewers they knew of so that at least they got glowing reviews to quote.

Anyway, that’s it for this section. The last post in this series, with review of the final part of the frame story, will be up next. Brace yourselves; it’s another doozy.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Three

This is part of a multipost series about ’90s anti-abortion novel The Lost Child, by Anne Atkins. The first post is here; other posts will be linked back there as I post them.

This part of the review will be about the third of the three alternating story strands that I described in my initial summary. In this strand, protagonist Caz tells the story of her relationship with her sister Poppy as part of the book-within-a-book she’s writing, thus giving us what seems on the face of it to be a rather sweet story about the lifelong bond between two sisters. However, in her book’s conclusion, Caz will reveal that Poppy was in fact imaginary. In response to her mother’s abortion, Caz invented the sister she thought she could have had and spent the next twenty-four years picturing the different things she might have been doing with this imaginary sister, and her book has actually been telling the story of her memories of imagining these things.

I originally planned to get through all of this part of the story in one post. However, Atkins has a tendency to weave in bits of anvil-dropping moralising, and there was so much to discuss that I’ve finally decided to split it into two posts. As I still have two concluding posts planned after that, this will make the full review six posts long.

Content warning: Greek myth involving rape, body mutilation, silencing, and child murder.

 

The imaginary baby sister

This strand of the story starts out with what are supposedly Caz’s memories of the day Poppy was born. This scene works well in light of the reveal; the scenes Caz describes are blurred and confused in a way that could work equally well for ‘adult remembering something that happened when she was six’ and ‘six-year-old’s imagined version of what a baby sister’s birth would be like’. However, the next scene doesn’t. It’s a lengthy anecdote about how six-year-old Caz and her grandfather get left in charge of baby Poppy one afternoon and chaos ensues, which works well when we think it’s an actual story of someone looking back on what a mess they now realise they made of something as a child and joking about it all in hindsight, but doesn’t read like something that a six-year-old would have had the self-awareness to invent.

The imaginary justifying quote

As Poppy gets older, Caz and Poppy play together extremely well despite the age gap. That fits perfectly with the reveal (of course Caz would want to picture this imaginary sister as someone she loved playing with). However, what doesn’t fit well with the reveal is that Caz ‘quotes’ her mother as telling other people that it’s actually really easy to have a fourth child because Caz and Poppy just amuse each other all day long and her mother has hardly anything to do. Since under the circumstances her mother clearly couldn’t have said any such thing, what this means is that Caz has blatantly invented a quote from her mother to convince us and herself how easy it would have been for her mother to have the baby. (As Atkins herself has four children, she might well have been trying to get in her own opinion about her own experience. However, she doesn’t seem to have realised what an inappropriate comment it is from Caz in this context.)

The Greek myth

When Caz is twelve and Poppy supposedly six, they spend a holiday with her grandfather, who is apparently a retired classics teacher and who is ‘appalled’ to find out that Caz’s private school no longer teaches classics. Caz is in fact interested in learning the subject and thus her grandfather starts telling them various Greek myths, including the particularly gruesome one of Procne and Philomena. In this story, Procne’s husband King Tereus rapes her sister Philomela and cuts her tongue out to prevent her from complaining; when Philomela nevertheless manages to communicate the terrible truth to her sister by weaving a tapestry which shows the story, Procne gets her revenge on her husband by killing their son Itylus (or Itys, in most versions, but this is the name Atkins used).

Atkins had a few different Doylistic reasons for including this myth, which I’ll get to, but first Caz asks her grandfather the obvious question; why would Procne get revenge by killing the child who was her much-loved son as well? This seemed like a good question, so I did a fairly small amount of internet research and found a point which hadn’t occurred to me; Procne, in the story, would not actually have another option for getting any sort of justice for her sister. Her husband was the king in a country with an absolute monarchy, so he was above the law. I realised that the power of the myth was in Procne’s dilemma; she either had to let a hideous crime against the person she loved the best go unavenged, or avenge it in a way that would hurt her even more. We can disagree with her solution and still recognise why the story of the dilemma is powerful.

Now, if I can work that out I’m fairly sure a classics teacher should be able to work it out. And surely someone who’s ‘appalled’ that his granddaughter isn’t being taught the classics should be eager to seize the chance to explain this. However, here’s her grandfather’s take on it:

‘Well, it was an ancient feminist protest, I suppose. Like Medea. Men could be pretty beastly in those days, and what else could she do?’

‘But didn’t she love him?’

‘Her son? Indeed she did: she died of grief afterwards. She and her sister. That’s why nightingales and swallows have such sad voices.’

‘Then why did she do something which would upset her even more than it would upset her husband?’ I wanted to like Procne, as her story was such a romantic one, but she did seem to me to have behaved idiotically.

‘Ah, now, some people would say that’s what Women’s Lib. is all about,’ Grandfather said with a bit of a twinkle in his eye. ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t dare: your mother would give me a frightful ticking off. But it’s only a story, darling. You mustn’t take it too seriously.’

So, there you have it. Raping and mutilating your sister-in-law, leaving her voiceless, is ‘pretty beastly’. But clearly the only reason a woman might not want her sister treated in such a way is that she’s making some sort of ‘feminst protest’ (really, darn those feminists!). And, even if you’re appalled by children not getting to learn the subjects you think they should learn, don’t bother taking the chance to fill in the gaps if you can instead take a dig at ‘Women’s Lib’ while pretending you’re not doing so.

Anyway. One of Atkins’ reasons for including this myth was, of course, so that she could throw in this mention of a woman killing her child because Incomprehensible Feminsty Reasons, Really, These Feminists. Another reason will come up in the final chapters. The other reasons (one thing I do respect about Atkins’ writing is that she does get in a decent amount of layering in this way) are that this helps to set up Caz’s future career and Poppy’s future imaginary career, and it gives us our title grab. Caz writes a short story based on the myth, with illustrations supposedly done by Poppy, and submits it to a publisher under the title ‘The Lost Child’; it gets published in a collection of children’s stories.

Moralising in India

Caz and Poppy drift apart somewhat in Caz’s teenage and university years (which, again, makes meta-sense, since it can reasonably be interpreted as Caz’s interest in her imaginary friend waning quite naturally in her teenage years). Caz then goes travelling through India after university to get some life experience, and meets up with her older brother, who’s working there as an engineer and living in what seems to be a very remote rural village, where he’s formed a relationship with a local woman. Would there be long-term engineering projects in very remote rural villages? I’m a bit dubious, but the Doylist reason is that Atkins wants to set things up for a speech from him about The Evils of Modern Western Society.

‘What d’you imagine it felt like,’ Jack asked me, ‘to be living in the Roman empire at the time of its collapse?’

I was completely stumped. ‘Well, I suppose … er. What did they have? Orgies and things. I guess if you were rich enough …’

‘Exactly,’ Jack said. ‘It probably felt all right. Perhaps quite fun: they might even have argued that that kind of sexual freedom, for instance, was an advance on the strictness they’d had before. […]’

It sounds from this as though Atkins went along with the view that the fall of Rome was related to their sexual activities. From what I can find out on the subject, that idea now seems to be thoroughly discredited. By the way, the actual answer to what it would have been like to live in the Roman Empire when it collapsed seems to be, for the most part, ‘Horrible, with severe food shortages and a high death rate‘.

‘[…]Anyway, that’s what Europe looks like to me now: a society in decline. […]’

[…]

‘But how does it affect things? What d’you mean?’ After all, does it matter if society’s in decline, if people are fed and warm and comfortable?

If people are fed and warm and comfortable, that sounds like a society that’s doing rather well. But what Atkins is talking about, apart from the implication about what she sees as sexual immorality, is the society’s attitude towards having children.

‘It affects everything. It means children over here are more important than cars or telephones. It means people would rather have a family than an electric oven. It means there’s a hierarchy, and people have duties to one another, instead of simply having rights.[…]’

I’ve never understood this particular either-or; it’s like saying ‘coins should have a tail side as well as a head side’. The existence of rights automatically implies the existence of duties.

‘[…] It means I have to decide whether I want to give up my way of life back home and stay here and marry Shangani; or take her home with me; or give her up. If this were Europe we would have been living together for the last year, and she would have had a child if she wanted one, and wouldn’t have if she didn’t, and if she wanted a career she’d have a career, and if she didn’t she wouldn’t; and if I wanted to leave I’d leave, and if I didn’t I’d stay for a while.’

And you’re talking as though having those choices was a bad thing. Yes, I do much prefer living in a society where creating new humans or entering into permanent unions are choices rather than obligations and where women as well as men get the opportunity of having careers. I notice we aren’t told what Shangani thinks of the issue; how does she feel about living in a society that expects her to have children whether she wants to or not?

(On a separate issue, I can’t find the name ‘Shangani’ on any of the main name sites. I might be wrong but I have the feeling Atkins might have pulled a Panju here.)

Caz says that surely that approach is ‘much more convenient, after all’, which doesn’t sound at all to me like an actual response anyone would make to this; I suspect Atkins is working from some kind of pro-choice stereotype (as per the ‘they have abortions for convenience!’ myth). Jack says that it’s more convenient but he’s not sure it’s right, and he’s considering whether to stay in India with Shangani.

‘I don’t want a child in England,’ he said. ‘Europe doesn’t value children. I think that’s what I’m trying to say.’

First, a disclaimer: India and Europe are both huge areas with populations in the hundreds of millions, so I’m very wary of generalisations about how people in one of these places think X while people in the other think Y. However, taken in the context of Jack’s speech and the fact that he’s living in a particularly poor and remote area, what Atkins seems to be trying to say is that subsistence societies place a greater level of importance on having children than Westernised societies do. And, while this is true overall, I think Atkins has completely missed the point of why this is. It’s not because children in subsistence societies are more valued as individual people; it’s because, in a subsistence society, children are your workers and your pension fund. I suspect Atkins might be less keen on the reality of that attitude to children.

The reappearance of Poppy

Caz gets a job as a correspondent in Iran and moves there. After a bit more than a year and a half, she starts up with Poppy again, with the in-story explanation supposedly being that Poppy is travelling for a bit after finishing art school so will come out and see her. How this is supposed to fit with the reveal is extremely unclear. We do learn that Caz is really lonely and longing for another British woman to talk to, but taking up with your childhood imaginary friend again seems a bit of an odd way for an adult to deal with loneliness, and doesn’t go that well with Atkins’ main storyline about the Poppy invention supposedly being Caz’s reaction to the effect on her of her mother’s abortion. There’s then a whole bit about Caz waiting for Poppy and getting so worried when she doesn’t turn up that she phones her parents daily, and Poppy eventually hitch-hiking to get to Caz who then berates her for taking such a terrible risk. Again, I’ve no idea how any of this is meant to fit with the reveal. I suspect that at this point in the story Atkins had temporarily lost sight of the fact that Poppy wasn’t supposed to be real.

Caz loves spending time with Poppy and ends up deciding to come home to London. As it happens, Caz’s parents have just moved to the country and are letting ‘Poppy’ have their London house, so Caz moves in with her. No mention is made of how the finances work out; do Caz’s parents just let her have a family-sized house in London for little or no money while still somehow affording a second place themselves, or is Caz paying a London-rate rent or mortgage on a house that size on a freelance correspondent’s pay? The former sounds implausible but the latter would be downright impossible, so, on Sherlock Holmes’ famous principle, I’ll go with the explanation that her parents were letting her spend years living in a very valuable house for at most a peppercorn rent. That adds an even more pronounced level of poignancy to the way Caz is currently treating her parents.

Anyway, that issue aside, Caz finds that sharing a house with her imaginary friend works beautifully:

In some ways we were happier than the happiest of cohabiting couples. We never quarrelled, as couples inevitably do because they have so much invested in each other. We were never jealous, because we had no rights to each other. If we found each other irritating we could ignore each other for a few days. If either of us needed a change, we could go on holiday with someone else, or simply travel, for a couple of weeks or more. If one of us had a new boyfriend, as I did seldom and Poppy did frequently, the other would simply take a delighted interest in the progress of the affair. [p 251]

That’s the nice thing about imaginary friends; you can picture their interests and wishes as harmonising exactly with yours. I do wonder if Atkins realised this or if she really thought this was a realistic description of what a beautiful relationship Caz could have had with her younger sibling if her mother had continued her pregnancy. Of course an actual relationship with a real sibling – with someone who would have been hanging around hogging the bathroom when Caz wanted to ignore them, who probably wouldn’t have wanted to disappear on holiday conveniently just when Caz wanted them to, who would have had actual new partners whom Caz might not have got on with, who would have had all sorts of traits that would have grated on Caz’s nerves, who might well not have wanted this convenient house-share in the first place – wouldn’t have gone this well. Maybe it would still have been a great sibling relationship, maybe not; but it would never have lived up to the idealised image Caz is picturing.

I think this is a good place to break the post, so I’ll post the rest of my review of this part of the story in a few days, followed up by two more posts as per the original plan.