“If I could show you a way back to your friends from the theater, what would you do?”
“I’d hold–I’d do–I wouldn’t do–oh damn. You want me to tell the truth, don’t you?”
“Very much.”
“I don’t know what I’d do. I want to say I’d be a different man; that I’d care for people and keep them close and keep Christmas in my heart every day of the year. I want to do that. But I’m not sure I can. I’m still Will Sverdrup, who’s terrified of commitment.”
“That is the right answer. If you’d made promises you couldn’t keep, you’d have stayed in this passage for a very long time.”
“I can promise even less if you like.”
“The point is to recognize that you cannot rescue yourself.”
“I can’t.”
“Then you must turn to the One who can rescue you.”
Blood and Judgement by Lars Walker is a really weird mythology/fantasy novel with flashes of profound insight–like the one above. To tell the truth, as much as I hate to admit it, I got lost several times during this novel, almost as lost as the characters in the story, but I loved the flashes. I’m not sure whether my getting lost was due to the complicated nature of the plot and its philosophical, literary, theological, and scientific premises or whether there were real gaps in the logic of what was happening, causing me to lose the the thread of the narrative. I’m not even sure if the preceding sentence made any sense.
However, I’m still thinking about this book and trying to figure out everything that happened and why it happened and what it means, so there must be a lot of stuff there. Let’s see if I can explain a little of it. Will Sverdrup, an amateur actor who’s afraid of commitment and love and getting close to people, falls through a trapdoor in the theater where he’s practicing to be the title character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He ends up in Denmark in the 6th century, and he’s inhabiting the body of the original Hamlet whose name is actually Amlodd. Amlodd, on the other hand, has exchanged his warrior body for Will’s weak twenty-first century body, But he’s not in the twenty-first century. He’s in some kind of alternate universe along with the other actors from Will’s play. (Are you confused yet?) The other actors and Amlodd are supposed to be re-enacting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but they’re not sure they want to do that since they all die in the end. Will, back in Denmark in Amlodd’s body, is re-enacting his own saga–an ancient version of the Hamlet story that comes out of some source story by a guy named Saxo.
The purpose of all this is to talk about, explore as they say, purpose and pain and revenge and forgiveness and blood and judgment. One of the chapters toward the end reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. The whole book reminded me of the TV series LOST, probably partly because the entire Semicolon family is absorbed in LOST right now, but also because of the multiplicity of overlapping themes and the fact that the characters in the book are stranded in an alternate reality sort of like the people in LOST. It would have been interesting to have developed some of the other characters in the book besides Will Sverdrup a little more, but maybe each one would have required his or her own book–or TV series. Also like with the people in LOST, the future of the characters in this story depends to some extent on how they deal with their past sins and issues.
If you like Hamlet or LOST or medieval historical fiction or action swords and sorcery or Norse sagas or some combination of all the above, you’ll probably like Blood and Judgement–unless you don’t like them all mixed together. For what it’s worth, Hamlet will never be the same.
And I always did wonder if Scrooge really would be able to keep Christmas in his heart from then on.