A Rambling Intro

The lore of the Apocalypse has become popular recently in both film and literature, most notably in the evangelical Christian Left Behind series. A staple of science fiction over the last forty years, this new crop of apocalyptic stories revolves around not just a technological devastation, but a religious one -- *the* religious one -- that ushers in the Millennium.

Mormondom has its own apocalyptic movement that, while similar to the generalized Christian vision in most of the broad strokes, is decidedly different in many of the details. Both portray society as corrupt, with religious freedoms substantially curtailed by force of law. Both assume a general decline of both social and economic opportunity with increase in war as its inevitable result, often resulting in a cataclysmic doomsday scenario. Both describe a charismatic anti-Christ who leads the peoples' hearts astray just before taking their freedoms away and establishing Satan's kingdom on the earth. Both assume a small group of faithful who will suffer ultimate privation but survive with their religious hope intact. Both end with the heavens opened and Christ revealing himself in glory.

But the Mormon apocalyptic vision adds a relatively unique element -- a gathering of the faithful and the building of the literal foundations of the New Jerusalem, the city of God that will be restored to the earth at the Millennium. The Saints do not stand helplessly by as the world goes slowly down to hell, they actively combat that decline and establish a community of extreme righteousness in the midst of the chaos.

Of course this Mormon utopia is built in Jackson County, Missouri in fulfillment of modern prophecy that the New Jerusalem will be built there. Add the uniquely Mormon belief that the Garden of Eden was originally founded in Jackson County, and the circle is completed -- the faithful return to the paradise from which Man was first cast out, returning to live in the literal presence of their God after their difficult odyssey.

While a few Mormons have dealt with a science fiction style apocalypse (Orson Scott Card's Folk of the Fringe comes to mind), most of the Mormon apocalyptic novels have been end-times scenarios, speculations on the events that will presage the Second Coming. Most focus on political and social upheavals with characters used only as the links between scenes, usually offering a smug back-pat to the Mormons who know so much more than the rest of the world.

In other words, they spend so much time rehashing the same paint-by-numbers, sef-congratulatory, event-driven, obvious, and politically right-wing doomsday scenarios that they forget to tell stories about real characters dealing with very difficult and uncertain times. By and large they're bad books. In my opinion.

The Review Begins: Synopsis

Which is why I approached Linda Adams' book Prodigal Journey with a great deal of trepidation. I like Linda. I've read a few of her short stories and have quite enjoyed them. I've heard some of her thoughts on AML-List and have been intrigued. I've generally found her to be thoughtful and intelligent and I've come to respect her as both a person and a writer.

So the fear that she had written just another wacky, right-wing politico-religious diatribe against the New World Order kept me from reading her book for a very long time. That and its substantial heft -- 517 pages in volume one alone. I didn't want to lose my respect for an otherwise really nice person.

It turns out my fears were completely unfounded. I really liked this book, despite my strong inclination not to.

Prodigal Journey is a well-written, thoughfully presented, character-oriented exploration of how the hearts of men have turned cold in a future America. It is generally free of the easy moralizing and simplistic dismissals that characterize so many books in the apocalptic category, and takes a clean look at Mormon end-times lore through the viewpoint of a good-hearted young woman who comes from outside the Mormon community.

Alyssa Stark is a child of a radically altered future America that has been devastated by both natural and man-made disasters that left Southern California a radioactive wasteland and utterly destroyed the eastern seaboard, causing the government to establish itself in the midwest under the direction of a powerful and charismatic president who uses the peoples' fear of further devastation to rewrite the Constitution.

The new America created out of peoples' fears has made religion an ugly word and recast both policies and practices with few of the moral constraints that religion formerly imposed. Most drugs are legalized (and heavily taxed), public sexual experimentation is considered a basic human right, and young people are legally emancipated at age seventeen. Life seems generally good, though continuing mistrust of those with strong religious beliefs has caused many to renounce religion in favor of a sort of secular humanism.

Alyssa Stark is part of the first generation to grow up in this new America that celebrates individual expression over communal good. She is a good-hearted child of a viciously controlling mother and an absentee father. She is the ultimate loner, intelligent and likable but cut off from loving relationships -- with a fiercely independent mindset as its result.

The novel follows Alyssa as she escapes her loveless home to go into the wide world, discovering that what she wants and what the world has to offer are largely different. As she deals with a series of difficult challenges she finds her heart changed, her expectations altered. As her situation worsens she feels completely cut off from any source of support until she feels utterly alone and abandoned. As she literally teeters on the brink of death she finds that her life has prepared her for powerful work, though she has no idea what that work might be.

That her path should lead Alyssa to a suppressed Mormon community and a discovery that many of her friends are Mormons should be no surprise -- this book is specifically intended for Mormon readers and is founded around speculation on how the uniquely Mormon Zion might come to be. Though this first volume focuses on the world in general through the viewpoint of a non-Mormon character, it also sets the stage (and begins the process) for a final gathering to Jackson County. It appears that the next volume in the series will bring Alyssa more directly into the center of this Mormon community -- and, presumably, more directly speculate on what that community might look like.

What I Liked

As I said before, this is a very well-written book. The author's style is smooth and readable and never interfered with my enjoyment of the story. Adams' prose ranges from unadorned and direct to vividly detailed and beautiful depending on the situation. The result was that the story never had to fight the author's excesses or deficiencies.

This book is also deceptively engaging. Adams engages the reader by creating a thoroughly likable character then putting her through trials, with the result that I found it hard to put the book down. Though there are few "Wow!" moments, I found myself quite disappointed when midnight rolled around and I had to put the book down so I could go to bed. Despite its heft, I read the book in about three days, staying up quite late to finish it.

Adams' use of a non-Mormon protagonist was a perfect choice, and gave her the ability to create a richly detailed socially decadent world with little of the judgment and moralizing that one would expect from a character with any kind of strongly religious background, and especially with a Mormon one. This kept the focus on the core issues of morality, social choice, and political expedience rather than on explicating a Mormon culture to those who are already familiar with it.

That clean focus gave this a fresh, uncluttered feel. Though Adams would eventually draw a very familiar picture of a standard Mormon apocalyptic political sitution, she did so honestly and with an attention to details and reasons that made the storm-trooper/despotic overlord scenario far less interesting than its effects on Alyssa. By entering the Mormon community from outside, Alyssa is able to observe and comment in ways that an insider voice could not.

That I kept interest in this novel despite its portrayal of a social/political vision that actively tires me is a testament to the overall skill and quality of Adams writing and storytelling. If you're inclined to accept that vision of the future then there is little in this novel to distract from its thoughtful, interesting, well-earned speculations.

What Jarred Me

Which is not to say that this is a perfect novel. I was jarred fairly strongly, and found myself cringing at a number of the author's choices.

This volume is divided into three sections (books). Where the first and third books are essentially a mainstream story set forty years in the future, the second book opens up with a huge amount of both scientific and political speculation that really jarred me, and that featured some of the least believable speculations in the novel -- for me at least. I won't go into the details because I don't want to give away the plot, but I do want to warn you that this is a science fiction book -- at least through the middle third. There is speculation on social science, political science, and medical technology, and once it starts it flows fast and heavy.

Just be aware. The science fictional content kind of blindsided me.

I commented already on the heft of this novel, and though this is an engaging read that kept me turning pages, it also could have been improved with a ruthless reduction edit that cut somewhere over a hundred pages from the final text. The author has a tendency to reiterate points several times when once would have been enough. It's the normal first-draft hesitancy that a good editor should have worked with the author to excise. Not a big problem, but it made an already substantial novel longer than it needed to be.

Perhaps my only big disappointment with the novel was that it didn't feature a strong internal story arc. Alyssa didn't have a strong overarching goal that she was working toward; basically, her goal is to survive until the next day. She starts out trying to survive home life, then college life, then life in the slums, but she isn't really trying to accomplish anything substantial. I would very much have liked to see a unifying goal, a quest of sorts, to give more context and tension to how well she addresses the struggles that befall her.

Remembering that this is the first of a three volume set, I suspect the big story arc will be introduced in volume 2 -- the character has now been set fully in context with a problem, and the next installment will help define the limits of that problem and the consequences of failure. Unfortunately, her placement at the heart of a series of epic events came so late in this first volume that it didn't serve as the strong unifying thread that I wanted earlier on.

Not a critical flaw, but an element that left me just a little flat at the end. I liked Alyssa enough that I am still anxiously awaiting the next book in the series.

Scott's Mormo-Political Rage

I ranted about what I see as a limited Mormon social/political creative vision in my review of Gerald Lund's The Freedom Factor so I won't do it again here. But this novel raised many of the same frustrations for me. I would really like to see a more varied speculation on social and political conditions.

It can be argued, for example, that the Mormon tendency to rush to Jackson County and build a New Jerusalem isn't really supported in scripture. Both the Bible and the Doctrine and Covenants talk about that city coming down from heaven at the Millennium rather than being built before the Second Coming. And while I admit that I haven't researched modern revelation, the idea of the gathering to Jackson County seems more folklore than doctrine -- yet that gathering in that place is a consistent element of Mormon apocalyptics.

(If I got that wrong, I apologize. It may well be that we have explicit revelation saying that the Saints *will* gather to Jackson County prior to the Second Coming, but the majority of what appears in the D&C is at best vague on that notion and seemed oriented toward the specific community of Saints in the late 1830s. In either case my frustration is not with interpretation of scripture but rather with what I perceive as a narrow creative vision relative to how we tell stories about that speculation, and which details we choose to emphasize.

I know -- I'm building a list of angry people who will come back on me with a giant "So what?" when I eventually write my own novel of speculative apocalyptics, but I defend myself on the basis that whether I succeed at meeting my own goal or not, I'd still like to see a more varied set of stories that rely less on a commonly accepted set of events.)

Part of this, I think, is the vast sense of incompletion that dominates the Mormon mindset as regards Missouri and Illinois. In both places we had nearly built our Mormon utopias, only to have them snatched from us by angry mobs and corrupt politicians. In both places we had established communities that were both socially progressive and politically powerful, yet both communities failed -- largely due to circumstances beyond our control.

Those stories were never completed, they just stopped. And I think that sense of a job left undone is part of what drives our desire to complete in fiction what we were unable to do in history. I hope the recent dedication of the temple in Nauvoo will ease that sense of incompletion somewhat. I know it does for me. After visiting Nauvoo in 2000 I was left with a sense of emptiness at our last great social failure that was largely assuaged when the new temple was dedicated.

I'm not saying Mormons should move on, but I would like to see a more varied basis (or at least geography) for our utopias. Of course I also can't help but note that the Jackson County obsession specifically challenges the Salt Lake Valley obsession, and the prankster in me can't help but giggle a bit at anything that makes that socially overbearing Zion in the tops of Utah's mountains into a temporary stop on the way to the real Zion somewhere else -- maybe in South Dakota or near Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Conclusions

In terms of Mormon apocalyptic lore, Linda Adams goes over a lot of familiar ground in Prodigal Journey. But she does so with more style, thoughtfulness, creativity, and freshness of vision than any other author I'm aware of in the category. Her emphasis on character and spiritual discovery makes her story unique and very much worth reading. It gets past most of the cultural noise to the core issues of individual hope and belief that should dominate our own thoughts. I heartily recommend it not only as the best in its class, but a worthy book in any class.

Good stuff. I very much look forward to the next installment, and so should you. Linda Adams is a Mormon author to pay attention to.

Scott Parkin