If This Is Heaven, I'll Hate It Too

In the film Heaven Can Wait, the afterlife is depicted as a highly bureaucratized place. Football player Warren Beatty is taken prematurely by an angel, because Beatty was involved in a car accident, and the angel, assuming he couldn't survive it, wants to spare him the pain. But the angel's superior James Mason checks the official lists and finds out Beatty does survive the accident. He needs to be returned to his body, except his body as cremated, so now they have to go through procedures to find another body for him. It's all handled through "corporate" policy.

The Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life has an afterlife where new arrivals are boarded in fancy hotels and can dine at all sorts of restaurants without having to worry about counting calories, fat intake, or cholesterol. They spend several days there as the powers that be, a legalistic bureaucracy, decide whether they are ready to move on to a higher existence or must return to Earth in a reincarnated life.

The Michael Keaton tour de force Beetlejuice also has a very bureaucratized afterlife, albeit presented in a silly, satirical way. Suicides are assigned to be the bureaucrats as punishment for their sin. Take-a-number offices exist where the numbers climb into the millions and the "Now Serving" number is four. Policy is rigid and often nonsensical.

The classic science fiction novel Stranger In a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, while never acknowledging the existence of God, nonetheless sketches a portrait of an afterlife with a very hierarchal bureaucracy. The punchline of the whole book depends entirely on this state of affairs.

The book I Hated Heaven by LDS author Kenny Kemp fits right in with these other works of fiction, but with a decidedly Mormon twist to his afterlife. Nothing about the book would tip off a reader ignorant of LDS theology that this is a Mormon author at work, but for those in the know, the LDS basis to his imaginative afterlife is unmistakable. From the insistence that the next stage after mortality is Paradise, not Heaven, to the lack of wings on angels, to the premortal teachings new arrivals get in the classes they are expected to take, we are swimming in LDS concepts without ever once seeing the words "LDS" or "Mormon."

The reason for this is obvious. Kemp is writing to a national mainstream audience, not an LDS one. He is playing the Orson Scott Card counterpart for the religious genre, where Card often laces his mainstream science fiction and fantasy books with multitudes of LDS spice without ever letting on. Kemp does as fine a job, too, letting the more traditional Christian readers enjoy the book as an imaginative new way of looking at the afterlife, while LDS readers get to have fun being "in the know."

But whether he really has radical ideas about the spirit world, or whether he just wanted to allow his imagination to roam wherever the needs of the story took him -- because, after all, this technically isn't an LDS book -- Kemp's evocation of Paradise is one that seemed to me to violate a number of things we supposedly know about that existence. And his version of God is safely categorized as unusual, to say the least.

But there's no legitimate reason for Mormon readers to get upset over these things. It's all in fun, after all, just an interesting speculative romp. A comic and romantic adventure, as Kemp's website puts it.

Not that the book starts out feeling remotely comical. The first several chapters are very serious, introducing the characters who will be dealing with the otherworldly aspects of Kemp's story. Tom Waring is a construction businessman and a Christian, married to non-believing wife April. They struggle with how to raise their only son Joshua with such conflicting worldviews. Their compromises are precarious, and their own conflicts heartrending. Tom and April love each other dearly, but Tom longs for the day when April will develop faith, and April struggles hard to keep from condemning the faith Tom has that she can see as nothing but insanity.

The books opens with a funeral. Chuck, friend and coworker of Tom, is burying his wife. This brings on a crisis of faith for April -- or should I say a crisis of non-faith? -- as she grapples with her sorrow over the loss of a friend and her desire, but inability, to believe that there is more after this life.

Several chapters later, the question becomes more personal to her as Tom is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that should have already killed him, and does shortly after the diagnosis. In her enhanced grief, she begs him to return to her and tell her if something exists beyond the grave. He promises he will.

Tom is whisked away in the inevitable tunnel of light, and finds himself in the afterlife of Kenny Kemp, a place surprisingly similar to mortality. Tom can see that his spiritual body is composed of the same sort of components that his physical body was: organs, cells, sensations. Although eating and sleeping are unnecessary for the spirit body to survive, the desires to enjoy these things are still with him, even to the feeling of hunger. Even sex, he is assured, is something that spirits can enjoy. Although Kemp acknowledges the LDS doctrine that disembodied spirits long for their physical bodies, one wonders exactly what they are longing for, since every physical advantage mortals enjoy is available to disembodied spirits, but with none of the disadvantages.

Tom finds Paradise -- not Heaven, as he is constantly reminded -- to be a place where people live pretty normal lives in apartments that are constructed out of unnamed material that is presumably the spiritual version of lumber and concrete and steel. Their technology is, by design, kept approximately equal to that of Earth's, to make the transition of death easier. But there are notable exceptions, one being the super-notebook computers called Records that everyone carries around with them, that are networked together in some ultimate version of the Internet.

These are the things that the bureaucrats use to keep tabs on everyone, for bureaucrats are in plentiful supply. Tom is assigned one named Jonathan, who is about the most quintessential bureaucrat there is. Tom runs up against countless policies that rub him the wrong way, and understandably so. Kemp's Paradise is some kind of unholy hybrid of Correlation gone horribly awry and Orwell's 1984. If I were stuck in this Paradise, I would hate it as much as Tom did.

Naturally everyone but Tom is perfectly happy with how this utopia runs. Tom even tries to make a go of it, but he can't easily let go of the promise he made to his wife. He's determined to return to Earth and tell her what he's learned. The only problem -- of course -- is that it's against policy. Indeed, it's against the Prime Directive. (I wonder where Kemp got that label from?)

He tries to go through channels to get a waiver of policy, filling out forms the size of which no exaggerated satire on bureaucracy ever dreamed of. His application for a waiver is quickly bumped back, rejected. He bullies his way into the "Council" and demands to be allowed to return to Earth, but they adamantly refuse.

Finally, Tom decides his love for his wife and his promise to her overrule any policy or ruling by some council. He discovers a deep chasm with a precarious bridge spanning it, and is told that the bridge leads to both Hell and Earth. But the bridge is forbidden to anyone without authorization to cross. And it's guarded by a burly white-booted (as opposed to jack-booted) thug.

At last Tom runs across a person as disgruntled about Paradise as he, and someone who seems to know more about Things than Tom does. The person offers to help him across the bridge and find his way to Earth where he can finally keep his promise to April, no matter the cost to his own eternal soul.

The whole situation is stacked against Tom from the beginning, otherwise there wouldn't be a story. Nothing about Paradise appeals to the reader any more than Tom, and I for one would have been across that bridge the instant I learned about it just on principle. But we're willing to forgive author Kemp for rigging the game, because the story is fun to read, and if the setup is predictable, the way the story develops is not.

The ending wasn't my favorite ever. It felt a little rushed and a little pat, kind of how I felt at the ending to the "Best of Both Worlds" two-part episode on Star Trek: Next Generation. But I tend to prefer more ambiguous endings than the average reader. Traditional readers may love it.

I Hated Heaven is interesting enough on its own to write about, but there's more to the story than that. Kemp wrote this book and tried selling it to "every publisher in the solar system," as he says, and they all rejected it. So he self-published and self-distributed it. Tens of thousands of copies later, it earned him the 1999 Inspirational Fiction Award from the Independent Publishers' Association, and he landed a movie deal for it. Even though the book was published back in 1998, this is what makes the book interesting now. If the movie ends up being released (you never know with Hollywood until it happens), it will be another addition to the recent spree of LDS films, and one like The Other Side of Heaven or the upcoming Charly that will be an adaptation of an LDS book. Let's keep our eyes open.

I Hated Heaven isn't a Shakespearean masterpiece of literature. I've seen depictions of the afterlife that I liked better (e.g., Robin Williams' film What Dreams May Come). But I Hated Heaven is a fine addition to the subgenre of afterlife-as-bureaucracy stories that is enjoyable to read, and is certainly a refreshing change of pace to the many very traditional LDS novels that come out like clockwork each year.

-- 
D. Michael Martindale
dmichael@wwno.com