Athol Dickson's "They Shall See God"

For a long time, I wouldn’t read novels set in New Orleans. I’d find too many references to Southern accents; the only people in New Orleans who had Southern accents were people who moved there from other parts of the south. Or I’d find really screwed up geography, which told me the author hadn’t visited the city, or even looked at a map. Or I’d find too many references to Spanish moss, as if the entire city had been draped in it (the parks and St. Charles Avenue, yes, but not much else).

Over the years, there have been a few exceptions – A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (he got the New Orleans accent exactly right); The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; Chasing the Devil’s Tail by David Fulmer (and his several other novels of New Orleans and Storyville); and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. There are others, but these few stand out as being about the New Orleans I knew and I know.

I started reading Athol Dickson’s They Shall See God because it was written by Athol Dickson. I didn’t realize beforehand that it was set in New Orleans. Dickson is a favorite writer of mine, and I nearly panicked when I realized it was a New Orleans novel (and a New Orleans mystery/suspense novel). I’ve liked everything of his that I’ve read, but a novel on New Orleans, the setting that so many other writers seem to screw up? Would he join that group?

I shouldn’t have worried. They Shall See God is not only a good story, it also manages to capture the spirit and the geography of the city where I was born and raised. It also manages to explore the themes of religion and faith by weaving together confrontational Christianity, Reform Judaism, and not-quite-confrontational Christianity – and keep the reader on the edge of the chair.

Ruth Gold, a Reformed Jewish rabbi, and Kate Flint, a French Quarter antique store owner, were childhood friends who were witnesses to a brutal murder. They both testified in the trial, and afterward drifted apart. Twenty-five years go by.

Solomon Cantor, who was convicted of the murder with the help of the two girls’ testimonies, is being released from prison. He’s met by his wife Gabby, who has in the intervening years managed to create a highly successful real estate business. Their son is estranged from the family, doesn’t speak to his mother and doesn’t plan to speak to his father.

The murder victim was a member of a Christian group that protested in front of a Garden District temple, the same temple where Ruth Gold is now a rabbi. And they’re still protesting.

Solomon Cantor returns to New Orleans, and people associated with the trial begin to die. The story moves from the Garden District (with some especially horrific scenes in Audubon Park and the Audubon Park Zoo) to downtown and the French Quarter, to Algiers on the west bank of the Mississippi, and out to the City Park area where Kate lives with her two children. Dickson captures the geography exactly right, and he captures the feel of the city exactly right as well, as the story moves toward its final crescendo – what may become a reenactment of the original murder.

Originally published in 2002, Dickson republished the novel in 2012. He describes in the introduction how he came to study the Torah (which features in the story) and how technology afforded him the opportunity to make improvements in the original manuscript.

They Shall See God is a fast-paced, riveting story – and it captures New Orleans exactly right.

Photograph: The streetcar (we don’t call them trolleys in New Orleans) on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District.

Born to create

You read a book like Matt Appling’s Life After Art, and you remember things long buried and forgotten in memory.

What I remembered was that I wrote poetry in high school.

It wasn’t love poetry. If I remember correctly, it had more of an apocalyptic, alienated bent to it. And I actually held on to the poems for years, stuck in a box or old filing cabinet in the basement. I went looking for it recently, but it wasn’t where I thought it would be.

What I can’t recall is what prompted me to write poetry in the first place. I would have been 16 or 17. This was at least a few years before I knew that writing forever would be a part of my life.

Forty years would pass before I started writing poetry again. And I can’t really explain why I did this time, either.

But I think it has something to do with the idea of beauty.

I was trained as a journalist, and have spent most of my career in public relations.

You have to look hard to find beauty in journalism or public relations. It’s there, of course, as it is in all of life, but journalism is a lot about ugliness, and public relations is, too, for that matter.

“The world is full of ugliness,” Appling writes. “It is desperately searching for beauty. And even the beauty the world thinks it finds is usually ugliness in disguise.”

I was in a boringly routine meeting at work when I first began to hear the beauty of work, a kind of poetry pouring forth from the repetition of the same thoughts, ideas, words, and sentences. At first I thought I was hearing things, but as I continued to listen, I discovered there was beauty in some the most mundane aspects of my workplace (a meeting, no less!).

The novelist Athol Dickson has written a lot about beauty, and it what he strives for in his stories. “Maybe we’re embarrassed by the idea of discussing beauty in our work,” he says. “Maybe we feel it is immodest to admit pursuit of such a goal. Or maybe we’re intimidated by the subject. Maybe we fear open talk of beauty makes us more accountable for its absence from our words.” (The whole article is here.)

It’s one thing to say something is beautifully written. It’s quite another to say the writing is beauty, that beauty is what we strive for because it is beauty that so distinguishes the work of God from the work of humanity.

Beauty points to God. We are creators, and the beauty we create points to God.

At The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Life After Art this month. Today concludes the discussion. To see what others are saying, please The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Athol Dickson Talks about ‘January Justice’

For several years, ever since I happened upon his novels, I’ve been a fan of author Athol Dickson. He’s written some extraordinary stories, and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. He’s taken a slightly different turn with his new novel, toward a more classic murder mystery. But it’s the same tight writing and the same kind of compelling story. Athol had the opportunity to answer a few questions about his new book, writing, and himself.

Athol, tell us about your new murder mystery, JanuaryJustice.

The back cover pretty well tells the story: Reeling from his wife's unsolved murder, Malcolm Cutter is just going through the motions as a chauffeur and bodyguard for Hollywood's rich and famous. Then a pair of Guatemalan tough guys offer him a job. It's an open question whether they're patriotic revolutionaries or vicious terrorists. Either way, Cutter doesn't much care until he gets a bomb through his window, a gangland beating on the streets of L.A., and three bullets in the chest. Now there's another murder on Cutter's Mind. His own.

January Justice is the first in a new series will follows Malcolm Cutter as he works as a chauffeur/crime sleuth and looks for his wife’s murderer on the side.

When did you decide to become a writer?

 

I didn’t really make a decision to become a writer, so much as it just happened. I was working as a partner in an architectural firm, and spending most of my days dealing with handling business issues instead of having fun designing buildings, which was not what I had in mind when I went into architecture. I wanted some kind of creative release, and I’ve always loved to read murder mysteries, so I decided to try my hand at writing one. A couple of years later, I met a newspaper editor who had good connections in the publishing world. He volunteered to read my novel, and to my surprise, he thought it was pretty good. He gave me my first professional editorial advice, and after I made the changes he suggested, he sent the manuscript to some friends of his. The next thing I knew, I had an offer from a publisher.

It was all sort of accidental, so I never really thought of writing as anything more than a hobby. But I enjoyed it, and I had a publisher, so I kept writing. Then one of my novels won an award and I flew to Denver to receive it. When they stood me up on stage and praised the book and gave me a round of applause, I remember thinking that somehow, I had become a writer. That was the first time it sank in.

Do you have specific habits when you write?

I write toward a specific goal every day. Sometimes it’s a certain number of words, and sometimes it’s the completion of a scene, but one way or the other I give myself that goal and I keep writing until I get there.

Are you an early bird or night owl?

I’m a morning person, usually up by five or five thirty, and working no later than seven.

If you could have coffee with any character of any book, who would it be and why?

Sherlock Holmes would be near the top of the list. I’d like to try to stump him. Also, I think it would be fun to have tea, not coffee, with Miss Marple. I’d love to hear her call me “dear.” And Sam Spade, for the witty banter.

What do you do, besides writing?

Boats and boating are a passion, and have been since I was very young. One of the earliest photos of me was taken while I was “steering” a boat on a lake. (Actually, I think it was my uncle doing the driving while I sat on his lap, but I didn’t seem to realize that at the time.) A few years later, I built a boat from Styrofoam packing material one time and floated down a creek and into an underground drainage culvert, which didn’t open up again for about three city blocks. That was a big adventure. And just a few years ago my wife and I sold our house and cars and moved aboard a boat and cruised on it for a year, along the Gulf of Mexico’s northern coast, and up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Is there something you want the readers to know about you?

I’m humble but lovable, and if you don’t believe it, just ask me.

Best reward as a writer?

When I finish a scene, and I know it’s good, that’s a fantastic feeling.

How do you react to a bad review?

Over the years I’ve had very few really bad reviews, and the few I’ve had, I ignore. There have been maybe three or four from individual readers on Amazon, and none from professional reviewers in print. So I figure the best thing is to go on pleasing the majority instead of worrying about the opinion of a small minority.

Do you have a good relationship with your fans?

Of course! How could I not love a fan?

Related:

My review of January Justice.

Athol Dickson’s “January Justice”

I’m a fan of Athol Dickson’s fiction: River Rising, The Cure, Winter Haven, Lost Mission, The Opposite of Art. They are extraordinary novels that are officially classified “Christian fiction” but go well beyond the genre with their broad appeal.

In the 1990s, before Dickson wrote these novels, he wrote several mystery stories – the Garrison Reed series. And now, with January Justice: The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs, he’s back to mystery and suspense.

It’s a complex story, and a great story, comprised of several interconnected sub-stories that weave together in an intriguing, entertaining narrative.

Malcolm Cutter has just been released from a mental hospital. His wife, the much-loved and admired actress Haley Lane, is dead, driven to leap from a cliff by an overdose of LSD, the same overdose that caused Cutter to nearly lose his mind.

Virtually no one knew they had been married. Cutter had been her driver and bodyguard, and he wanted to keep their marriage quiet because of his past. A former U.S. marine, he had been involved in an insurgency in Guatemala and military duty in the Balkans, and had been dishonorably discharged because of an incident in Afghanistan.

His mind still fragile, he agrees to look into a kidnapping from years before. The more he looks, the more his own past comes forward. In short order, he survives a bombing attack, a vicious beating by a street gang, his own attempted murder, and arrest and jail. And then things get really interesting.

Dickson draws his characters well. Even the villains are painted in detail, to the point that the reader’s skin crawls whenever the villains show up (and there are a lot of villains and possible villains). The more Cutter deals with them, the more the story seems confusing, with any number of possible outcomes. And then he learns that the death of his wife is a factor in the case.

We watch Malcolm Cutter, a broken and brokenhearted man with old-fashioned ideas of honor, try to make his way and find out what is really happening, and what happened to his wife and himself. And somehow, he’s going to have to come to terms with it, or die in the process.

January Justice is an action-packed thrill of read by a fine writer who brings formidable talents to his storytelling.

Related - my reviews of books by Athol Dickson:

River Rising.

Lost Mission.

The Opposite of Art.

The Beauty of Athol Dickson

For a year or so, I wrote a column for The Christian Manifesto, a site devoted to movie, book and music reviews and on faith and culture. It was something of an edgy site, and I was something of an oddity, with a more conventional perspective. But they were happy with my work, and I was happy to write for them.

We quietly drifted apart. My drafts occasionally get lost and I’ve to do a bit or prodding and reminding. Recently, the publication did a major overhaul, and my articles disappeared.

Well.

Many of my articles were actually pretty good (others’ opinions as well as mine) and the topics interesting and still current, so from time to time I will be reposting them here. I’m starting with one on author Athol Dickson, and it’s timely – next month under his own imprint, he’s republishing four of his novels – and he has a Win-A-Kindle and books contest this month. More information on the contest can be found here.

The Beauty of Athol Dickson

Author Athol Dickson wrote and published three suspense novels and a non-fiction book before he wrote four extraordinary novels: River Rising, a story of the 1927 Mississippi River flood and – slavery; The Cure, in which a small town in Maine attracts thousands of the homeless because of a rumor of a cure for alcoholism; Winter Haven, in which a young woman travels to an island off the coast of Maine to identify what may be the body of her long-lost brother, and his body hasn’t aged in 10 years; and Lost Mission, two stories of a mission in California set centuries apart.

The four stories are entirely different, although they do share several things in common.

All four portray a strong sense of place: a small town on an island in the swampland south of New Orleans; a seaside town in New England; an island off the coast of Maine; and the desert cities and suburbs of southern California.

Each of the novels contains a strong sense of the apocalyptic, with looming natural or man-made disasters or, in the case of Winter Haven, a foreboding sense of evil that is so palpable that the reader experiences high anxiety as soon as any character gets too close to the woods.

 

And each of the four are not “Christian novels” or “Christian fiction;” instead, they are novels – very fine novels – written by a Christian author.

They are also something else.

In a recent article for the Novel Journey blog, Dickson discussed fiction and beauty. He argued that a goal of a novel, perhaps the goal of a novel, is beauty. Even if we think beauty is a result of all of the other aspects of a novel – plot structure, characterization, narrative flow, even particular fine sections of writing – we still miss the point. It’s not a result of all these things; it is the result when all these work together, and work together well because it’s designed that way all along. Beauty, he says, should be intentional in a novel.

And then he says this: “The best friends of beauty in a novel are deep contemplation, honesty, intentionality, originality and love.”

I had to ponder that statement for quite some time. Those “friends of beauty” are not something readers, including Christian readers, are well versed in considering when we read a novel. Usually we say something like “it was a really good story” or “I felt so uplifted after reading it” or “that story edified me” (or didn’t, as the case may be). We don’t ask ourselves if the story was honest or original; in fact, originality often makes us uncomfortable because it takes us into uncharted waters (read Faces in the Fire or The Unseen, both by T.L. Hines, for examples). We look and look for familiarity, even when it takes us to the trite and clichéd.

Dickson’s novels are anything but trite and clichéd. While there are structural similarities in all four, they are not formulaic. And they take us into uncharted waters. River Rising, for example, takes on racism in a surprisingly unexpected way, through a kind of retelling of the story of Moses. Lost Mission tackles the motives that often lie unseen behind evangelism and contemporary Christianity, although never in an explicit way. Winter Haven looks at appearances, and how what looks like one thing can actually be an entirely different thing. And The Cure explores alcoholism and forces us to confront our discomfort with the homeless and “the bums on skid row” by turning them into something threatening – what we may appear to be to them.

If his intention was beauty, then Athol Dickson has succeeded – four times.

Since this article was first published, Dickson has also written the novel The Opposite of Art. My review was posted here last September.

Athol Dickson"s "The Opposite of Art"

A rather callous and selfish painter, Sheridan Ridler is known for using and abusing people. He finds himself falling off a bridge into the Hudson River, and he dies, or at least seems to die. But there in the river he sees something, something marvelous, some kind of glory. Waking up from what seems the dead, he knows he has to paint what he’s seen, and nothing else matters.

He begins a journey, a journey that stretches from a hippie commune in the Catskills and a Buddhist enclave in the Far East to Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Rome and New Mexico.

Ridler’s unscrupulous agent (who knows his paintings are worth more with Ridler dead than alive) eventually has the artist declared legally dead. He tries to make a move on Ridler’s pregnant girlfriend, but she leaves New York and establishes her own life in California.

Decades pass. And then all of these separations begin to circle within one another. New paintings begin to show up, offered as kinds of apologies. The agent begins to get nervous – the value of all the known Ridler paintings will collapse if he’s found alive and still painting. And so the decision is made – Ridler has to die, and in a sense, he has to die for his own art.

That is the structural framework of Athol Dickson’s latest novel, The Opposite of Art. He’s called it his best novel to date, and I won’t argue with him except to say all of his novels are good novels, from “River Rising” to last year’s “Lost Mission.”

I will say that this is an important novel, more important than I realized when I first started reading it. It is not “Christian fiction,” even though Dickson is a Christian and the novel is filled with a Christian understanding and sensibility.

Ridler embarks upon a spiritual journey, and it’s completely recognizable, because it’s the same journey we are all on and the journey that we, like Ridler, seem to completely misunderstand. He keeps seeking spiritual masters to lead him to the glory he has to paint, and he keeps finding them to have clay feet and unable to give him what he believes he desperately needs. Each new location, each new guide, leaves him at the same starting point and closer to despair and the conviction he will never find what he’s spent his life seeking.

The Opposite of Art is beyond what we think of as Christian fiction; it is a work of art, full of questions and answers that pose more questions. It is about art, all art, and the nature of art and what it means. It is about the hole in our soul we look everywhere to fill. And it’s a shockingly good story.

Related:

Christian Manifesto: The Beauty of Athol Dickson

Athol Dickson's "River Rising"

I grew up in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, in a suburb of New Orleans. Jefferson extends from Lake Pontchartrain on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. Below New Orleans and to the east, separated from Jefferson by the Mississippi River, is Plaquemines Parish. For a very long time, Plaquemines was governed by one man, Leander Perez, who was known for his less-than-liberal views on all things, including race.

It is the fictional town of Pilotville, set in 1927 Plaquemines Parish, that is the setting of Athol Dickson’s 2005 novel River Rising. As in all of Dickson’s, “place” plays a very important role, often becoming another major character in the story. And that is what happens in “River Rising.”

The Rev. Hale Poser guides his leaking pirogue (that’s Cajun for canoe) into Pilotville from New Orleans. He gets a job as a janitor at the infirmary for the town’s black people, and shortly thereafter performs a healing miracle for a woman in childbirth – or what is believed to be a healing miracle. Then her baby daughter is stolen, and the whole town, white and black, turns out to search. This stolen baby turns out to be only one of many others stolen over the years. Poser, compelled by something he doesn’t understand, keeps looking for her when everyone else stops. He canoes deep into the swamp, almost dying from lack of food and water in the process, and eventually finds the missing baby. And he finds a lot more: an almost unspeakable horror.

This is 1927, and something else is at play – the Mississippi River. The historical flood of that year serves an apocalyptic purpose in the story, and the river will both destroy and expose, and possibly help redeem.

This novel received a host of accolades and recognitions, including the Christy Award for best Christian novel of the year. But its appeal is much broader, for it is not so much a Christian novel as it is a very fine novel written by an author who happens to be a Christian. It is a grand story, and an honest one. And it ends up being a story of great beauty.

Related:

Athol Dickson writes on “Forgotten Beauty” at Novel Journey.

The Beauty of Athol Dickson, my post published Thursday at The Christian Manifesto.

The First Day of Christmas: Athol Dickson

Athol Dickson’s Lost Mission is one of the best books I’ve read this year. And there’s a story behind its publication, as in, the publisher screwed up and forgot to do the things publishers are supposed to do. Okay, it happens. But it’s worse than a shame it happened to as fine a novel as Lost Mission.

I reviewed the book in October; you can read the review here. I had no idea what had happened to the book until I read Dickson’s blog post on the Advent season, “Peace During Advent.” There’s more information about the book and the author at Dickson’s web site.

If you’re not familiar with Athol Dickson, you should be. He’s writing really fine fiction. My first experience with his writing was The Cure, about what happens to a town in Maine when people here there’s a cure for alcoholism there. Then I read Winter Haven, about a young woman who travels to an island off the coast of Maine to identify the body of her long-missing brother, a body, almost perfectly preserved for years, that washes up on the shore. And there’s River Rising, a novel about the 1927 Mississippi River flood that’s of special interest to me, who grew up about a mile from that river in New Orleans and who currently lives about 13 miles due west of it in St. Louis.

For me, discovering Athol Dickson was like opening up a whole new world of fiction – Christian fiction unlike any I had ever read. And Dickson led me to other writers (and you should let him lead you to them as well).

Read Athol Dickson. Read him. He’s better than good.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should be doing the other 353 days of the year as well.)

Athol Dickson's "Lost Mission"

Athol Dickson’s novels always seem to include at least a touch, and often more than a touch, of the apocalyptic. In River Rising it’s a flood. In The Cure, it’s a town under siege by desperate alcoholics. Winter Haven, perhaps the least apocalyptic of Dickson’s works, still portrays a sense of unease and then menace and impossible, almost paranormal things happening. And now there’s Lost Mission.

Lost Mission is apocalypse, Southern California style, crossing two centuries – the late 18th century, when missions were being established by the Spanish from Mexico (New Spain), and the 21st century, with its eclectic and politically/socially explosive mix of wealthy Americanos and illegal aliens. Layer on both eras the rigidity of religious belief (Franciscan Catholic in the former and evangelical Christian in the latter), and you discover some fascinating parallels.

You also find an incredibly good story.

In the late 18th century, three Franciscans, Abbott Guillermo, Brother Alejandro and Brother Benicio, travel with a contingent of soldiers to Alta California to establish Mission de Santa Dolores. They gain early converts among the native population, but Abbot Guillermo’s rigid sense of propriety and order, and his inherent condescending attitude, soon begin to work against the goals of the mission. Brother Alejandro is ordered to paint an altarpiece, a triptych of paintings, so that the converts can visualize the crucifixion of Christ and related events.

In the 21st century, Guadalupe Soledad Consuelo de la Garza leaves her small shop in Mexico to preach to the pagan Americanos. She is given a triptych, kept safely locked away by the local priest, to help lead her onward. She will need to enter the United States illegally, and she is helped by Ramon Rodriguez, crossing into the United States to find work. She wanders in the desert, until she is found by Tucker Rue, a seminary graduate spending 40 days in the wilderness to understand his calling. Eventually, Tucker established Sanctuario to help illegal aliens and their families, and Lupe goes to work for Delano Wright, a wealthy Californian who lives high atop a mountain and who will eventually develop a plan for a Christian enclave, separated from the world.

The enclave, of course, occupies the same site as the old Spanish mission. And the old mission was destroyed in an attack by the native population following a long period of plague. And plague, under certain conditions, can remain dormant.

The author credits his agents for slogging through “an ugly early draft” and his editor for her work on the novel. Whoever is responsible for the final outcome did an extraordinary job – Dickson tells the two stories as one, moving deftly from one to the other. And gradually the reader comes to understand that one story is actually being told.

Lost Mission is the work of a master writer, a good story told incredibly well.

(Attention Federal Trade Commission: I purchased this book from Amazon.com. No one gave it to me. I have received no compensation from it other than the pleasure of reading a really good novel.)