The Flame Tree by Richard Lewis tells the story of Isaac Williams, the twelve year old son of American missionary doctors in Java, Indonesia. His best friend is Ismail (get it–Isaac and Ishmael?), a Muslim boy who is beginning to be caught up in Nahdlatul Umat Islam, a fundamentalist Islamic group with terrorist ties. Isaac is at first confused when Ismail says that they can no longer be friends unless Isaac submits to Islam. Then things get even worse when a faction of the Nahdlatul Umat Islam captures Isaac and holds him as a hostage. Finally, after facing malaria, cruelty, fear, and degrading treatment, Isaac is released, but then he must decide what to do about his captors and about his bitterness toward God for allowing him to suffer at the hands of evil men. The entire book is an interesting lesson about what can happen when Islam and Christianity clash, and the characters in the book demonstrate that people are complicated and difficult to understand. The Islamic hostage-takers are not one dimensional, stereotypical evil terrorists, but rather men, and women, who are sometimes kind, sometimes very cruel, caught up in a religion that allows fanaticism to grow and at the same time preaches peace. Isaac himself is not sure who he is after his captivity. “Maybe, just like he was neither a Javanese nor an American, he was no longer a Christian, but not quite a Muslim.” Later, he comes to see that, unlike Muslims who have no choice but to submit to the will of Allah, he has choice, and he chooses, by the grace of God, to be a Christian and to forgive. This is a difficult book in the sense that the author describes Isaac’s treatment during his captivity in more graphic terms than I was comfortable reading, but I realized after reading about the cruelty of some of the terrorists that perhaps I needed to be made uncomfortable in order to appreciate the miracle of forgiveness that comes in the ending.

At first I didn’t think that the second book I read this week had much in common with The Flame Tree. The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer is historical fiction/fantasy set during the 8th century AD on the coast of England and in Scandanavia. It includes Viking raids, trolls, dragons, talking animals, and magic spells. However, there are at least a couple of points of similarity. Jack is eleven when the Northmen, berserkers, raid his village. He, too, learns that people are not all bad nor always to be trusted. Jack, like Isaac, is a captive, and any time he begins to trust and even admire his captors, he is reminded of their cruelty and otherness. Jack is Saxon, and his village is Christian. The Northmen are worshippers of Odin and believe in seeking a glorious death in battle which will send them straight to Valhalla, a “heaven” that sounds a lot like an everlasting drunken feast. Jack remains a Christian, mostly because he doesn’t seem to think he has any choice, but he does learn to care about the Northmen even though they are not to be trusted to act in accordance with Christian morality, but only to act as their own pagan religion tells them to in order to maintain their honor. Jack, like Isaac WIlliams, returns home at the end of the book. Unlike Isaac, Jack doesn’t deal with the choice between bitterness and forgiveness; he just feels happy to be home, although he does wonder if he should have given kindness to one of his enemies when he was a slave to the Northmen. His teacher reassures him that “no kindness is ever wasted, not can we ever tell how much good may come of it.”

It seems to me that both of these books teach the same lesson: peace and forgiveness and understanding, as important as they are, can only go so far. At the end of the day, if those who follow a different god are determined to be obedient to their own evil desires and to revel in cruelty, we must defend ourselves and our families and villages even as we forgive and try to understand their blindness (there but for the grace of God go I). Hell is real because some people choose it. Not even God forces forgiveness on those who do not believe they need it, those who believe they have done nothing wrong, those who practice cruelty and sin in the name of Odin or Allah . . . or Jesus.

I have a problem. I’m getting lots of good recommendations for books to read from bloggers, too many ideas for the time in which I have to read them. However, that’s not the problem. I just finished these two books that I saw recommended somewhere maybe a month or two ago. I have no idea who recommended The Sea of Trolls nor The Flame Tree. Thank you, though, and be sure to comment if you gave me the tip on either of these.

Reverend John Ames is seventy-six years old, and he’s been told that “his heart is failing.” So he begins to write down his memories for his seven year old son, the product of a late and very happy marriage to a much younger woman. Reverend Ames starts out writing about his father and his grandfather and about his love for this life, his memories and his regrets. However, before long, he finds that he must deal with the unfinished business of forgiveness and letting go of the past. The book has several themes:

Fathers and Sons
‘My father was a man who acted from principle, as he said himself. He acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it. But something in the way he went about it made him disappointing from time to time, and not just to me. I say this despite all the attention he gave to me bringing me up, for which I am profoundly in his debt, though he himself might dispute that. God rest his soul, I know for a fact I disappointed him. It is a remarkable thing to consider. We meant well by each other, too.”

Heaven, Hell and Eternity
“If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.”

“I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence,the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”

On Predestination and the Possibility that People Can Change
” . . . there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”

“Your mother said, ‘A person can change. Everything can change.’ ”

Faith and Doubt
“I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.”

I liked the quotes. Rev. Ames has a voice that reminds me of my father-in-law, a Southern Baptist country preacher who lived in our home before he died several years ago. (Interesting aside: I never figured out what denomination Rev. Ames belonged to, just that he was not Baptist, not Presbyterian, not Lutheran, not Quaker, and not Methodist. He believed in baptizing babies, though.)

However, the story itself was what kept me turning the pages of this memoir/novel. I wanted to know the “back story.” How did Rev. Ames come to marry a woman more than thirty years younger than he was? What happened to his grandfather, an abolitionist who knew John Brown and who lost one eye in the Civil War? Why did his brother Edward go to Europe to study and come back an atheist? Can the characters in the book forgive those who disappoint them, especially can Rev. Ames forgive and extend grace to an old friend who may or may not be a repentant sinner? And how did John Ames retain his faith in God and in life itself?

Gilead has lots and lots of questions and even a few answers. I’m planning to read Ms. Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, published back in 1981, as soon as I can find it, and I’ll read anything else she writes. This book was one of the best I’ve read in a very long time.