Harry's Blog

As promised here is the first part of my look at the book Left Behind. I've read three chapters now, but today I want to focus on the first chapter, how it sets the scene and some of the issues raised by it. My overall impression so far is that it is very much like the works of Dan Brown in that it has huge logic holes all over the place that make it difficult to suspend disbelief at all.

One of the major points of the first chapter is so stupid that I had to read the section again to make sure I wasn't just misreading. But we'll come to that in good time. Let's get into the first chapter and take things in order.

The first thing that happens is that we meet one of the main characters. Rayford Steel, for that is his name, is busy thinking about sex. I suppose that's apt given the authors have given him an adult movie star name. He's an airline pilot and we join him mid-air in the cockpit while the co-pilot sleeps. Yes sleeps.

Rayford has a problem. His wife has become some sort of religious nut. It's hard to tell how the authors are trying to view both Rayford and his wife. Steel isn't getting any and his wife's new found faith seems to be responsible. Reading between the lines I think we're supposed to realise that Mrs Steel is a good Christian who is focussing on her faith while her husband goes through the motions of attending church. Yet Mrs Steel's brand of Christianity, which seems to echo that of the theology of the book, is rather skewed.

Her priorities are on The Rapture, the love of Jesus and saving the souls of others – in that order. Is this book is about The Rapture, slightly less about Jesus and saving the souls of others we can leave to last for now? Having not read the rest of the book I'm wondering if this order of priorities will continue. I also wondered about Mrs Steel's inability to be a good wife, she sounds a bit of a shrew to be honest rather than some model of Christian piety.

The focus on the book on The Rapture and why this series has been such a success in the US is succinctly explained by Mrs Steel's words to her husband in flashback. "Can you imagine, Rafe," she said. "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?" This is the true nature of Rapture obsession – salvation without death. Jesus may have died, but a lot of people don't fancy it, they want their cake and to eat it. To go to heaven without suffering and dying. Clearly this is a theology that could only flourish in a nation obsessed with trying to pretend death doesn't happen. The Rapture is head in the sand theology. It ignores everything the Bible says about death. It's a modern construct for people who want everything easy, everything given on a plate. The Rapture is the theology of the modern consumer age. "I only believe what the bible says," Irene Steel says – this is the biggest lie of Left Behind, pushing its Rapture theology as something featured within the Bible.

Next we meet Cameron "Buck" Williams, a journalist and passenger on the aircraft that Rayford Steel and his snoozy friend are flying. Here the authors commit a major mistake. We are told that Buck is a genius reporter, a brilliant writer. Making this kind of claim is always a mistake. A writer should use their character's words and actions to prove their qualities. Making a claim that the authors' own lack of skills can't match makes for poor and unbelievable reading. For example there's no point describing a character as the funniest man alive if you can't make him say anything that would have you believe that. And in the first chapter there's nothing that would make you believe that Buck is some great journalist. Quite the opposite.

However the story of Buck Williams and his adventures in Israel are comedy gold. You see Buck made his name covering events in Israel and strange events they are. First of all we are told that Israel has recently become super rich. Did you ever get the impression before that Israel was a poor nation with little financial backing? No? Well neither did I. Anyway we're told that Israeli scientists have invented a formula that made their lands so amazingly fertile that agricultural yields across the nation rose dramatically. Fields could support many harvests a year and the nation became the most amazing producer of crops in the world and thus became the richest nation on earth. And so it made friends with all its neighbours and the Middle East became a happy place.

I know what you must be thinking. That's stupidity on a Dan Brown scale. Let's take it piece by piece. Firstly this crop nonsense. Israel is not a large country. Israel is the 149th largest nation on earth with an area of 8,019 square miles. Let's play fair with Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins and give them an inflated best case scenario. So let's assume that every single square mile of Israel became farmland. And let's say that each square mile would yield in each harvest, thanks to this amazing new fertilizer ten times what a normal area of farmland would. And let's go further and say that you could get five crops per year out of these new super fields.

That means that Israel would produce as much food as 400, 950 square miles of regular farmland. That's still just 10.8 percent of the land area of China, 10.7 percent of the area of the USA, 10.4 percent of the area of Canada and perhaps most importantly given what happens next, a mere 5.0 percent of the area of Russia. And we're supposed not to laugh at the idea that somehow Israel has become the richest nation on earth based on agriculture?

It's not as if Israel is poor anyway. The 2005 GDP estimates have Israel's figures at $23,416 GDP per capita. This puts Israel towards the top of the world's rich nations in 28th place. If we look at the 2003 Human Development Index Israel is 23rd in the world with a high figure of 0.915. Israel is not a poor nation and it could not find further riches by planting crops. To make real money would require a few oil strikes. But let's let the authors off with this gross stupidity for the moment and move onto the next problem with this concept.

Israel and its neighbours became friends. How? We're not told. We are just informed that Israel's agricultural riches meant that Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc. all wanted to become friends. This makes no sense at all. None. It completely ignores pretty much the whole of Middle Eastern history. Is this book written for people who have zero knowledge of the world outside the USA? I'm not even going to go into detail why this is such a dumb plot point, it's just so bloody obvious.

Anyway, what happened next was even funnier. Russia, poor old Russia, angry that Israel wouldn't share its magic fertilizer decided to wipe the nation off the face of the earth. It sent everything it had, every fighter, bomber and missile. And the Israelis were caught napping, not seeing the attack until the Russian forces were overhead. Perhaps I'm reading Left Behind wrong, but I thought it was set on Planet Earth. Unless things have radically changed since I was at school doing geography, Russia does not share a border with Israel. Attacking forces would have to pass over Turkey, Iraq or Syria, perhaps even Ukraine, Lebanon or Georgia too. And no one noticed. No one noticed the entire Russian air force making this journey?

And Israel, with one of the best intelligence agencies in the world didn't catch a whiff of this? Could such a force be mustered and launched without the USA, Israel's ally, knowing? Of course not. The Pentagon would have been on high alert just from satellite imagery and intelligence of so many aircraft being prepared for a major sortie, let alone the actual launch of missiles. Russia isn't acting alone – the great Russian bear is aided by the combined might of Ethiopia (yes they really wrote this stuff), Libya and Iran. Yes those mighty military powers, just the ones you'd want to help in such a situation. Why? Well we'll come to that in the aftermath of the attack.

Anyway, this attack fails. Israel is protected by the wrath of God or something. I don't have a problem with that. It's an unknowable. This is a spiritual book dealing with big God issues, so I'll let them have this one. God defends Israel. But our intrepid reporter Buck Williams was in Israel to see the attack foiled and made his name in covering the amazing events. We're told how this affected his beliefs, how while not a Christian now, he was now more "spiritually attuned". Jeez, if I'd just watched the whole of Russia's might bounce off a Godly force field over Israel I'd have been down to the Synagogue right there and then.

The aftermath is pretty odd too. With talk of vultures picking the flesh of downed Russian pilots and the like. It's all very lazy stuff. Fuel (presumably nuclear fuel) in the debris now apparently powering Israel for the next six years, rather than it just rendering all that lovely super farmland radioactive. Reading this stuff you can almost see the authors' pain, they are trying to think of some way of trying to create a scene that somehow they can justify being predicted by a few lines of Ezekiel in the Old Testament. It's such poor writing it's funny, seeing such a limited imagination trying to cope with making some kind of point about the Bible predicting this particular attack from Russia. And it seems all that nonsense about the mighty (?) Libya, Iran and Ethopia joining was just to fit to the Biblical text too. To misquote Darth Vader, it's as clumsy as it is stupid.

The rest of the first chapter seems a little flat after all this wonderfully comic stuff about Israel. Some people disappear off the plane, presumably because the Rapture has just happened. And their clothes remain behind, neatly folded. I know this is the crux of the whole book, but after the whole tale of Buck's adventure in Israel nothing else came close to being as interesting from there. I'll tackle the disappearing passenger issue when I look at chapter two.

So far I'm finding Left Behind hugely entertaining. It's laugh out loud stuff. Naive beyond belief and having huge plot holes in it, it's just as funny as anything Dan Brown has written. The prose isn't as poor as Brown, the text is fairly good, but the brains behind it really do make you wonder what planet they are from. I can't wait to find out what happens next. I know I promised to take the book seriously, but I'm struggling. You've read my post, look at the stuff the authors have written. I'm trying to be good. Honest.