the rix mix

For the past month I've mostly been reading very entertaining if not first rate mystery novels, & couple of bestseller pot-boilers circa 1999. Chapters are short - most of these books could easily have been blogged, & were likely written in one or two hour daily installments. Which you can do when you have a contract for your next book before the current one is finished. So I thought I'd try something different, a contemporary Irish-American fantasy novel by Andrew Greeley, Angel Light. 150 pages in & the only reason I keep going is a perverse fascination with finding out if the second half is as awful as the first half. I don't know the protagonist any better than I did back on page 20, & I didn't like him or his family much then. The story is old & there's nothing wrong with recycling it; marry a certain woman within a specified amount of time & win a huge inheritance. This requires a trip to Ireland. There are angelic, or rather seraphic miracles on every other page - mostly instant gratification stuff, brought about by Raphael, who initiated contact disguised as an internet travel agent & turns out to be a rather sexy female who looks like she has healthy appetite. Greeley's take on sexuality is quaintly peculiar, & occasionally really weird, which may or may not have to do with his being a Catholic priest. The seraphim are sexual creatures in his telling, but the males are "life-givers" & the females "life-bearers," a pre-scientific view from when it was believed that male sperm contained all the necessary ingredients for creating a fetus & female womb was required only as a repository. This view carries over to the relationships between human men & women in the novel. The descriptions of women's bodies have a peek-a-boo quality, like looking through a hole in the girls' locker room wall or getting sentimental about a woman nursing a baby in public - the "maternal breasts" thing. Maybe Greeley's priest-detective novels are better.

Labels: religion, what I'm reading