Book Review: A Landscape with Dragons

A Landscape with Dragons is about battlegrounds and books and battlegrounds that are books. In it Michael O’Brien offers a critique of contemporary children’s literature, with a goal of pushing parents to think seriously about the impact such reading can have on their children – for good or ill.

O’Brien is a smart and impeccably readable writer, and that makes it difficult not to respect his line of thought even when one disagrees with it. He’s also the author of Island of the World, one of the most marvelous storytelling triumphs I’ve ever seen. So while I’m busy reviewing Dragons, allow me to pause and strenuously recommend that you find a copy of Island somewhere. Experiencing that story will lend greater credibility to what the author has to say about stories here.

That said, I came away from Dragons with mixed feelings. Sometimes it was the pettiness of certain complaints; sometimes the line of argument just wasn’t very convincing. I’m not ready to concede, for example, that Jurassic Park is a manifesto for reptilian omniscience.

More troubling is O’Brien’s Roman Catholicism. He toots the popish horn rather loudly for my taste. (Being the iconographer that he is, I suppose such things are to be expected.) Case in point, there’s that awkward moment when he admonishes his readers about the perils of idolatry – and then urges them to invoke the intercession of the saints, the angels, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. For this Presbyterian, the irony was a bit much.

There is also his over-polite handling of the Universalism of George MacDonald. MacDonald was an exemplary writer and storyteller (see The Princess and the Goblin), but O’Brien’s appreciation for these qualities leads him to treat MacDonald’s stray theology with gloves that can only be described as alarmingly soft.

In sum? O’Brien urges us to be cautious in our reading habits, and to take our helpings of literary porridge with a grain of salt. We ought to do the same with him.

Having given that caveat, it must be said that I loved a great deal of what he has to say – above all, perhaps, his passionate reinforcement of a truth often acknowledged but infrequently acted upon: the minds of the young will not be left alone. Either we will see to them, or someone else will. This means war. This means tending the imagination, fortifying it to withstand the shock troops of paganism. As Douglas Wilson writes in Father Hunger,

If a Christian father does not teach his children that the dead are raised, someone else is going to teach them that the dead will do no such thing… Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum, and when Christian fathers leave a vacuum, someone or something else will in fact fill it.

And so it goes with the literature our children feed on. Lay off the super-sized pop cliches and faddish nothings. Real culture, the kind that reaches down and seizes beauty, goodness, and truth by its roots – this is essential. This is the choicest meat; this, the choicest wine. Why are we be satisfied with less?

“The imagination must be fed good food,” notes O’Brien, “or it will become the haunt of monsters.”

The New Wave of Shock Fiction

In A Landscape with Dragons, Michael O’Brien makes a key distinction between the horrors found in classical tales and the horrors that saturate so much contemporary fiction:

These shocks are presented as ends to themselves, raw violence as entertainment. In sharp contrast, the momentary horrors that occur in classical tales always have a higher purpose; they are intended to underline the necessity of courage, ingenuity, and character; the tales are about brave young people struggling through adversity to moments of illumination, truth, and maturity; they emphatically demonstrate that good is far more powerful than evil. Not so with the new wave of shock fiction… This nasty little world offers a thrill per minute, but it is like a sealed room from which the oxygen is slowly removed, replaced by an atmosphere of nightmare and a sense that the forces of evil are nearly omnipotent.

On the Bookshelf XXVII

Lessons in Music Form by Percy Goetschius
A fabulous little volume for music lovers of the thinking stripe: “There are two essentially different classes of music lovers. The one class takes delight in the mere sound and jingle of the music… The other class, more discriminating in its tastes, looks beneath this iridescent surface and strives to fathom the underlying purpose of it all.”

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
It’s been ages since I’ve read a story so consistently, hilariously, brilliantly entertaining. Think Wodehouse meets Ian Fleming, and you have a fairly decent idea of what Laurie is up to here. He’s good at it, too. Very good. A full length review is forthcoming.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
One of those classics I never got around to in high school. It was Neil Postman’s thesis that Huxley was closer to the mark than Orwell: “In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Batman Vol. 2: The City of Owls by Scott Snyder
The cotton candy in my literary diet. Good writing, great artwork. And Batman. So much Batman. What’s not to like?

A Landscape With Dragons by Michael O’Brien
I can already tell this is going to be fascinating: “… a controversial, yet thoughtful study of what millions of young people are reading and the possible impact such reading may have on them. In this study of the pagan invasion of children’s culture, O’Brien, the father of six, describes his own coming to terms with the effect it has had on his family and on most families in Western society.”

What’s on your bookshelf right now?