Missionary Fiction

In an episode of what Madame Mental Multivitamin calls synchronicity/serendipity/synthesis, I read two works of fiction this week based on the lives of the authors’ missionary grandparents. I’ve also been thinking a lot about sending two “missionaries” from my own home to Slovakia in a couple of weeks and about my mother and my father-in-law and the legacy of faith they have given to me and to my family.

The first book, The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Binnings Ewen, was just O.K. The writing quality is somewhat uneven, and the characters sometimes enigmatic. The story opens in 1916 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, when Barbara (Babs), a schoolgirl and aspiring opera singer, meets Harvey Perkins, a young medical student. As the two grow together, get married, and then endure being parted while Harvey serves in the military in France during The Great War, Barbara learns that she must subordinate her choices to those of her loving but firm-minded husband. The couple go to Thailand to serve as medical missionaries, even though Barbara must give up her hopes for a career in opera and even her enjoyment of classical music itself to live in a remote mission outpost in Northern Thailand. Of course, with such different outlooks and goals in life and with what I suppose was a typical (?) early twentieth century lack of communication in the marriage, trouble is bound to ensue. And it does.

Besides the fact that the characters’ motivations were sometimes obscure, I guess what I disliked about the story was that neither Harvey nor Barbara seemed to have much of a faith in God to lose. They do lose their faith, both of them, in the face of suffering and hardship in Thailand. But I couldn’t figure out whether they believed in anything much in the first place, other than themselves and their own ability to “be a team” and improve the physical lives of the Thai villagers. The book was good, but not great, although I liked the ending and the ideas about the legacy we leave as a result of the choices we make.

The second book I read had the same basic premise as the first: a young couple goes to the mission field, China this time, in the early twentieth century. However, City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell made me cry. It’s very, very difficult to write a book about Good People, about heroes and heroines, without making them larger than life, unapproachable, and unrelatable. (The dictionary says “unrelatable” isn’t a word, but it should be, and I’m going to use it anyway.) Will and Katherine Kiehn are ordinary, fallible people, and yet they are heroes. They go to China as young, untested volunteers with only their calling and their faith in God’s love and mercy to sustain them, and they survive disease and poverty and famine and family tragedy and war and persecution. Each of the two has a “crisis of faith”, maybe even more than one, but they manage to hold onto the the God who is always holding on to them, even when doubt and fear threaten to overwhelm. The story is told in first person from Will’s point of view, interspersed with excerpts from Katherine’s sporadically kept journal. The whole novel is just golden.

As a reviewer, I feel as if I ought to be able to tell you how Ms. Caldwell was able to write such a true story about people that I believe in as much as I believe in my own parents and grandparents, but I can’t. The humility and the honesty displayed in the characters of both Katherine and Will inspire imitation. I wanted to sit beside an elderly Will Kiehn, listen to his stories of China, and absorb some of his wisdom and his indomitable meekness.

City of Tranquil Light is one of the best fictional accounts of missionary life I’ve ever read. It ranks right up there with Elisabeth Elliot’s No Graven Image, a book I mentioned (and recommended) here. City of Tranquil Light has the added advantage of painting a wonderful picture of a committed, growing marriage.

Can you tell I really, really liked this book? I happened to pick it up from the library and read it because it’s one of the books on the long list of nominations for the 2011 INSPY Awards. Thanks to whomever nominated this book. If all the nominated books are as good as this one, the judges will have an impossible job.

18 thoughts on “Missionary Fiction

  1. City of Tranquil Lights is now on my “to read” list! 🙂

    I don’t know if you have ever read Edith Schaeffer’s autobiography called The Tapestry. I owned it once and then loaned it out and never got it back (sigh…). Thankfully, the used copies on Amazon came down a lot in price so I was able to pick it up again a few years ago. It reads like a novel.

    The reason I thought of it is that the first part of the book is about both of their parents… his not people of faith and hers as missionaries to China. Not to mention it details so many of the hardships they went through as missionaries in Europe.

    It is very inspiring, I thought of it often through the years as I went through trials… which I believe is the sign of a great book.

  2. I’ll have to put that second one on my TBR list. I don’t think I have ever read any missionary fiction other than the one you mentioned by EE and some children’s ones when my kids were small. I’ve read a lot of missionary biographies and true stories, though.

  3. You’ve certainly made me want to read City of Tranquil Light. Even the title is wonderful. My parents were missionaries to Taiwan when I was small, so I love missionary stories and ones about China more than others.

  4. I normally eschew Christian fiction, but I love China and missionary stories, so may have to break down and read this one. Thanks for the great review.

  5. Oh I”m sorry to hear you didn’t like The Moon in the Mango Tree, I really loved it. But I liked the more subtle approach to faith and the story of Barbara and how the calling was never hers, but she loved her husband and went along with it for that reason.

  6. I want to thank you for reviewing these books. I am always interested in reading books like these, but I just don’t think about them. I am happy to report my library has both!

  7. I like your reviews very much. They aren’t too long, nor too short and gave me enough information. Now I want to read both of them, however I’m not sure whether I would have the time for both of them, since I’ve just started reading The Moon in the Mango Tree. I like it so far.

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