Job: A Comedy of Justice

Reviewed by J. Neil Schulman

1985

Anybody who knows me at all knows that there are three authors I revere above all others--Ayn Rand, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Heinlein.

There are other writers of whom I stand in awe for specific qualities. I consider Anthony Burgess to be the best English prose stylist I've ever encountered--A Clockwork Orange, in particular, astounds me for its use of language. Ira Levin knocks me silly with his masterful integration of descriptive detail into story-telling. J.D. Salinger and John Irving reach directly into my heart and squeeze: Holden Caulfield and Garp are characters I would have for friends if I ever met them; both Salinger and Irving, also, are stylistic masters. Colin Wilson can take a subject as dreary to me as vampires and turn it into a fascinating look at psycho-sexuality.

All these--and other--writers, I admire as stylists, thinkers, and story-tellers. But what makes me pick out Rand, Lewis, and Heinlein--and set them apart from other authors--is that these three are the writers who have been battling for my soul.

Lewis, Heinlein, and Rand converted me to rationalism.

Heinlein and Rand converted me to libertarianism.

All three have made me an arch-romantic and stern optimist.

Because of these three writers, I wrote my first two novels.

Lewis converted me from atheism to Christianity--Rand converted me back to atheism, with Heinlein standing on the sidelines rooting for agnosticism. Then I put the argument into the mouths of my own characters in The Rainbow Cadenza and found Lewis winning the battle for my soul again.

Damned if I know where it'll end up.

I never met Lewis--he died the year I first picked up one of his Narnia Chronicles. I managed to meet Rand on the telephone: I argued with her for hours, and found her mind to be even more stunningly cogent in conversation than it was in print. But the woman was so bitter and ungiving that I could hardly believe this was the same radiant spirit I'd met on the pages of Atlas Shrugged.

Then, Heinlein. Boy, things get complicated there. After being an avid fan of his since nine or ten years old, I first met him at age 20 in 1973. I learned that he's the same man in person that you meet through his books. I interviewed him for hours, once commissioned an original piece of art as a gift for him, followed him around New York City one day like a puppy dog, made the biggest blunder of my literary career while trying to get him to endorse Alongside Night, was his stentor at his reception for blood-donors, and named a torchship for him in Rainbow Cadenza.

I feel like a private being inspected by a general whenever I talk to him. I'm always afraid I'll say something stupid and because I'm so nervous, half the time I do. I see the man the way I see my own father: my father's life as a virtuoso violinist is a symbol to me of the necessity of pursuing supreme excellence and the possibility of achieving it--Robert Heinlein taught me how to take that symbol and apply it to my own life.

Which brings us to last August, when Heinlein's new novel Job: A Comedy of Justice showed up in the window display of a Waldenbooks. I ran in and bought a copy, interrupting my own writing to read the new Heinlein. And I read it practically in one sitting.

Now, I may be accused of being prejudiced because I think virtually everything Heinlein has written has one thing or another that makes it worth reading, but this time--regardless of what you may think about books like I Will Fear No Evil, Starship Troopers, and The Number of the Beast--for which Heinlein has gotten heat--this time, Heinlein has really outdone himself.

Job is great.

In a nutshell, Job is a travel-log through multiple parallel-Earths (an s-f or fantasy story, depending on your own metaphysics) in which its first-person hero, Alex, and heroine, Margrethe, never stay in any place long enough to do more than get familiar with some new history books before they're facing still another Earth. The book ultimately takes us through a dozen alternate histories of Earth, then through Heaven and Hell, then even-more bizarre places.

Job is as good as anything Heinlein has written and better than anything except possibly Stranger in a Strange Land or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is hysterically funny, brilliantly inventive, well-plotted, well-paced, romantic, and stylishly executed.

(And, parenthetically, it is a sequel-of-sorts to two other Heinlein stories: his novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and his short story, "They"--though Job contains only one brief reference to "The Glaroon" from the latter and the "sequelness" to "Jonathan Hoag" exists only in identical metaphysics.)

Would you believe that Heinlein can take Alex, a bigoted, Bible-Belt, anti-libertarian fundamentalist ex-preacher, and make him a sympathetic hero? (You can deduce, however, that this is a man-who-learns-better story.)

And that this guy falls in love with Margrethe, a beautiful Odin-worshipper, and has to try saving her soul?

But, to me at least, Job's real interest lies not in its characters and story, but in its theological and doctrinal underpinnings. This is probably the most irreligious s-f novel published in the English language since Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man--or you might have to go back to Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. (This definition carefully excludes Victor Koman's equally irreligious novel, The Jehovah Contract, soon to be published for the first time in a German- language translation, but yet to be published in the prophet's homeland or native tongue.)

C.S. Lewis would have cringed (after he stopped laughing) at Heinlein's portrayals of Heaven: a class-conscious Bureaucracy where Angels are first-class citizens and saved humans ride in the back-of-the-bus--it's got good architecture and the best hamburgers to be found anywhere, but no decent libraries; Hell: a benevolent Principality run by Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, as a benevolent anarchocapitalist society, and the hotel service beats anything in Heaven; Jehovah: a pettish young Jewish artist; and Lucifer: Jehovah's brother--and the nicer of the two. But you can't assume from this lack of respect to religion that Job is a book Ayn Rand would have liked.

If Lewis was in fiction the best Twentieth Century apologist of Christianity, and Rand in fiction was the best Twentieth Century advocate of Objectivism, then--in Job--Heinlein has firmly established himself as the best advocate of the "The Universe Isn't Anything Like You Bastards Have Even Been Able To Imagine" school of metaphysics. The man makes the paranoia in Illuminatus! look tame by comparison.

Now I'm going to do something that Heinlein says he doesn't mean his readers to do: take him seriously. Heinlein says he's in the business of writing entertainments for cash, not in the business of making philosophical statements. Undoubtedly, this saves him from a lot of arguments, particularly from people like me, who love to argue philosophy.

But, I said earlier that Heinlein is in battle with Lewis and Rand for my soul, and it is that aspect of Job that I want to address.

I'm not a Biblical expert, so I can hardly comment on what relationship there is between the Biblical character of Job and Heinlein's character of Alex, who is supposed to be a second Job. But I find it a little easier to comment on the character of God as He appears in Heinlein as compared to Lewis. (Rand is out of this particular argument--she wouldn't have deigned to debate it.)

C.S. Lewis, in his belief and advocacy of Christianity, takes the Judeo-Christian tradition at its word: Jehovah is the First Cause, creator of all that isn't Himself, the primary Fact of Existence and Consciousness Together--that which Was, Is, and Always Shall Be--the Creator of the Angels before He created Man. Lucifer was merely an Angel who abused his free will and chose Evil: the equivalent power not of God, but of Michael.

Heinlein portrays Jehovah and Lucifer as brothers-- equivalent in power as only two of many Gods--both of whom are subservient to a still Higher Power--a God even to Jehovah-- whom Heinlein calls "The Chairman, Mr. Koshchei." The name has been used before elsewhere, by James Branch Cabell for the Bureaucrat who runs the Universe, and as the Magician in Igor Stravinsky's 1911 ballet Petrushka.

In effect, by demoting Jehovah to a rank equivalent to Lucifer, Heinlein has portrayed in Job that He Who C.S. Lewis worshipped as God is merely (in Lewis's terms) an Angel--and a dishonest, megalomaniacal, and cruel one at that. God is another level up.

What Lewis might properly have asked at this point (if he took Heinlein's fantasy at its word) is: (A) what evidence Heinlein or anyone else could have in suggesting this possibility; and: (B) if Koshchei is, after all, God, then wouldn't prayers directed to Our Father in Heaven go not to Koshchei's deceitful angel Jehovah, but to Koshchei?

Even if he doesn't want to be taken seriously, Heinlein tries to answer at least some of the theological questions raised by his paradigm, much of his explanation out of the mouth of the most sympathetic character in the story--Lucifer. Unfortunately, the so-called Prince of Lies keeps contradicting himself.

Lucifer explains to Alex that Koshchei has no desire to be worshipped, and tells Alex that in saying to Jehovah, "Thy will be done," Alex is setting himself for any sadism that Jehovah can think up--"the test of Job."

Then, in the only case we see that Lucifer is being judged by Koshchei--involving the possibility of Lucifer being sent to a real hell of sorts (see Heinlein's story, "They" for the exact nature of this threatened banishment) Lucifer tells Koshchei, "I must leave it to the Chairman's judgment." And Koshchei replies, "Yes, you must."

As for me, I see no semantic difference between "Thy Will Be Done" and "I must leave it to Your Judgment."

Lucifer also goes to great length to tell Alex that justice is a human illusion--then goes out of his way to prove himself a Just Being. Lucifer sticks his neck way out for Alex--a creature far below himself from which he can gain nothing-- telling Koshchei at great personal risk that, "[T]his animal ... tried hard on my behalf when it believed me to be in extreme danger. Now that it is in trouble I owe it an equal effort."

A Being who acts on such a Principle of Reciprocity, for all his protestations, believes in Justice.

Then, Koshchei punishes Jehovah for his treatment of Mankind, saying, "Aren't you the God who announced the rule concerning binding the mouths of the kine that tread the grain?" And Justice is supposed to be a human illusion? Hah!

But one moment in Heinlein's portrayal of Koshchei would have given even C.S. Lewis pause: one, single image of Koshchei's True Face seems to create the Awe that Lewis was talking about, the sehnsucht that caused his belief in God.

Alex, narrating, tells us, "I looked into that great face; Its eyes held me. They got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I slumped forward and fell into them."

Job may be anti-religious. But it's hardly anti-Supreme Deity.

Ultimately, however, Heinlein's paradigm cannot be taken seriously--exactly as Heinlein would wish--since it is published only as fiction. Lewis claimed that his portrayals of God (as Aslan in Narnia, as Maleldil in the Ransom trilogy) were actual attempts to portray, as best he could understand it, a Being whom he believed actually exists.

Rand, while not believing that her perfect man John Galt existed apart from his appearance in ink on paper, believed that the qualities she portrayed in Galt were achievable in reality.

Robert A. Heinlein makes no claim whatsoever, aside from his hope that the $16.95 plus tax that the hardcover set me back entertained me enough that I'll plunk down again for his next book.

I will, Sir, I will. But, really, is it hoping too much that someday you'll go on the record--as Lewis and Rand have-- with your thoughts on what sort of universe(s) you think we're really in?

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