The Gates

Just finished reading John Connolly’s The Gates, a book for older children (and adults). In it the powers of hell try to invade earth by a combination of clumsy witchcraft and the Hadron Particle Collider—science and demons intertwined in ways that are reminiscent of warnings from CS Lewis.

Connolly is a word master and just plain funny. Here is a sample:

Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities, sat on his gilded throne, his servant Wormwood at his feet, his kingdom spread before him, and yawned.

“Bored, Your Scourgeness?” inquired Wormwood.

“Actually,” said Nurd, “I am extremely excited. I cannot remember the last time I felt so enthused about anything.”

“Really?” asked Wormwood hopefully, and received a painful tap on the head from Nurd’s Scepter of Terrible and Awesome Might for his trouble.

“No, you idiot,” said Nurd, “Of course I’m bored. What else is there to be?”

Connolly blows off God in the first couple of chapters, caricaturing him as an old man with a beard who created the world in seven days, and in whom no self respecting person with a knowledge of science can believe. Then he goes on to give a description of hell as another dimension attempting to break into ours. Why heaven cannot be making a similar attempt he does not say.

Connolly’s Satan (The Great Malevolence) hates mankind with a perfect hatred—because men are happy and productive and love flowers. Man as man is the object of his scorn. The biblical notion that Satan hates man because of the Image he reflects is not on Connolly’s radar. Here is a repeated theme of the modern novel—Satan without God, hell without heaven, and evil resisted and overcome by man without any help from You-Know-Who.

Heaven still manages to sneak into the book through the back door, however. In the end, a child’s courage saves the world, along with a demon who joins the forces of light and sacrifices himself to save the others. Child-like faith. Conversion to the other side. Self-sacrifice. Hmmm. Truth pervades all art worth the name, maybe even against its will.

Still a fun read!