Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > A Children’s Bible

2/14/24: Reread for Spring 2024 YAL class, sort of in conjunction with Dry by Neil Shusterman, a YA novel, also dystopian about our world set on fire through climate change, and the kids on their own, left with the world we have given them, and what can they do? Millet's book is not a YA book, and is much better written, imo, but both can reach younger audiences with the urgency the topic requires.

Original review, 10/27/22: The Children’s Bible is a kind of dystopian allegory of a near future descending into chaos. Brought on by climate disaster that the kids are aware of more than the adults. The parents are just clueless--wealthy, educated, where “drinking was a form of worship for them. . . they respected two things, drinking and money." Climate change has come quickly to disaster; whoops, there it is, we thought we had more time, shoot! Then chaos, people rioting over food and water, as the parents pair up and “couple” in upstairs bedrooms.

The kids look at all this as they see the world burn. These children--some of whom are also careless jerks in this book--are aware of the sins of their parents; they know that greed, selfishness and general disregard for the planet is destroying their future.

“Do you blame us?” [a mom asks, late in the book]
“Oh, we blame you for everything.” [a girl]
“Oh, I don’t blame you. . ." [another girl]. The woman smiles gratefully. “I just think you’re stupid, and selfish. When the time came you just did what you always do, whatever you wanted to.”

“When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born. Relatively speaking. And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no. Had they had goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.”

“It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides. They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs.”

If you think the parents are painted too broadly, too caricatured, consider that one thread of this pretty amazing, deeply angry and sad book is the darkest of comedy, satirizing adults--who are mostly considering their stock portfolio performance and getting wasted every day at the cocktail hour--from the perspective of the next generation left to clean up the mess. This is a view familiar to anyone growing up in the late sixties, where young people saw the post-WWII generation as racist, sexist, in denial about the environmental disasters that they were creating, pro-Viet Nam War, and so on.

Cue Greta Thunberg as the emblem of environmental responsibility:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452...

and then, in the next slide, you'd want an image of a million adults partying and spending millions in Vegas, or whatever (yes, I saw the Super Bowl and enjoyed the whole billion dollar spectacle with hundred thousand dollar seats, but I take Millet's point here; I'm not sayin' I'm a saint; I crave escapism as antidote to despair, too).

And yes, there are actual deaths and disasters that happen in this book. It's not merely a light satirical joke. Millet is writing climate fiction. She knows what is coming.

What are the narratives of children without adults? Lord of the Flies is a central one, a view that debunks the idea of childhood as Edenic innocence, and instead embraces the Calvinistic notion of total depravity. The kids in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here periodically spontaneously combust, and recover, and are seen as the victims of upwardly mobile, negligent parents. I am most recalling as I read this novel a short story about neglectful parenting, “Pilgrims,” by Julie Orringer, where adults are so selfishly caught up in sex and drugs in the seventies, leaving the kids alone, and this neglect leads to violence. As with The Children's Bible, this story is a vicious castigation of generations of ignorance leading to catastrophe. And in these stories the adults are not right wing extremists but liberals, stoned-meditating as the kids run wild. Peace, indeed.

I also thought of Nathaniel West’s social chaos in The Day of the Locust. Not quite realism, on the edge of madness. I thought of a pre-meme bumper sticker from the sixties: Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty, or the Who’s "I Hope To Die Before I Get Old" (still alive, old Who guys. . . who? Who!? Can you speak louder, I can’t hear from years of playing this music too loud!). See Meg Rosoff’s YA dystopian How We Live Now. . . and maybe Peter Pan and the Lost Boys?

I didn’t love Millet’s most recent book, Dinosaurs, which might also be categorized as climate fiction. but I loved this one. It has a real edge to it, a sense of rage and despair and absurdity I relate to in it. Climate fiction at its best.

“That time in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices. Politicians claimed everything would be fine. Adjustments were being made. Much as our human ingenuity had got us into this fine mess, so would it neatly get us out. Maybe more cars would switch to electric. That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying.”

Ooh, burn (baby, burn).

And the title, The Children's Bible? My sister and I had one of those, growing up. Noah's ark, lots of animals there and in the Garden of Eden. As in this book, where a child carries a Children's Bible around. Always they leave out the Book of Revelation though--too disturbing for kids. I like that moral thread through this book, that threat. Oh, let's read the Psalms and all the happy parts, instead!

Delicious and horrible horror for Halloween at any time.