Monty Python and the Problem With Religion

The six members of Monty Python on the set of The Life of Brian in Tunisia, 1978

My target audience largely catches the reference when I write: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” Brian Cohen's climactic sermon in Monty Python’s 1979 classic The Life of Brian is among cinema history’s funniest scenes. Brian desperately wants the crowd that has adopted him as Savior to think for themselves, but they won’t listen. Brian’s domineering mother just wants the crowd to go away, but inadvertently riles them up.

Brian’s only fully-developed homily turns on one statement: “You’re all individuals! You’re all different!” But his followers respond, in the paced unison viewers remember from hearing congregations pray together: “Yes, we’re all different!” To the Monty Python members, all unbelievers, this statement probably summarizes the ways religion encourages groupthink and steals autonomy. But rewatching the movie recently, for the first time since VHS days, something struck me about his crowd:

They’re all Jewish.

Jews have maintained their collective identity since the Late Bronze Age, in substantial part, by maintaining their rituals. Jewish religious observance doesn’t rely upon individual belief, the way Christian and Muslim rites do. Instead, Jewish traditions involve reënacting pivotal moments in Jewish folk history, like the Passover or the Maccabean rebellion. Whether these events happened as enacted doesn’t much matter, though; what matters is, they do them together.

This doesn’t mean Judaism has always benevolently maintained that authority. By the late Second Temple Era, when Jesus preached, Judaism had developed stark sectarian divisions over “correct” observances, divisions only closed when the Second Jewish War saw most sects destroyed. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus’ repeated complaint against religious leaders holds that Jewish observance had become robotic, and deaf to the cries of the poor and dispossessed.

Monty Python mocks this robotic tendency through the “People’s Front of Judea,” a revolutionary sect comparable to the Zealots. We can encompass everything wrong with the PFJ in leader Reg’s legendary line: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Life under Roman occupation sounds pretty nice.

Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman) approaches his denouement in The Life of Brian

I might find this less jarring if it weren’t spoken by John Cleese, who was born relatively rich and attended Cambridge University, a bastion of British imperialism. The parallels between the feuding Jewish revolutionaries, and divisions within separatist groups like the Irish Republican Army, are too obvious to not support deeper analysis. Under Monty Python’s analysis, freedom fighters look ridiculous, while the empire, though hardly benevolent, never hurt anybody who didn’t deserve it.

Because of its strategic location along trade routes linking Africa, Europe, and Central Asia, empires have repeatedly conquered Judea and attempted to assimilate its people. Though Jewish ethnic identity arguably dates to Moses, Jewish religious identity dates to Jeremiah and the Babylonian Captivity. The Maccabees revolted against the Greek-speaking Seleucid Empire because the Greeks tried to forcibly assimilate the Jews, pollute their temple, and defile their women.

These tactics sound remarkably similar to techniques the British (English) Empire used to conquer other peoples. Closer to home, they’ve been remarkably successful, as Irish and Scots are minority languages in their homelands, and Cornish is extinct. Further afield, British forces caused native nations of India, Africa, and the Americas to abandon their separate identities and local wars, and create racial and ethnic allegiances to expel the invading empire.

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not suggesting Monty Python is objectively pro-Empire. That exceeds the remit which the movie provides. However, like Agatha Christie or Roald Dahl, the Pythons emerged during the British Empire’s dying wheezes and, as a bunch of White, male, mostly heterosexual Oxbridge boys, realized the dying Empire was taking their privilege with it. To them, the dying Empire was their culture’s ambient background noise.

Yes, religion can steal followers’ individuality and autonomous thought. But turning people loose hardly works better, as post-Christian Western Civilization demonstrates. Without religion’s catechistic approach to building a soul, atomized individuals glom onto whatever political party, commercial enterprise, or pop-culture fandom offers them a desirable group identity. Despite Nietzsche’s claims, no person becomes fully individualized without a foundation to build from.

Brian’s followers aren’t stupid and mindless, as the movie implies. They’re simply an occupied people, seeking a leader to offer them a shared identity, goal, and strategy. Without their devotion to Brian, they have only commerce, arena sports, and worst, Roman imperial politics. There’s no guarantee Brian could’ve saved his people, certainly. But the alternative is assimilation. Look around you and ask how that’s working out.

Some Thoughts on the Nature of “Tragedy”

Stock photo of the Titanic wreckage

I avoided writing about the OceanGate Titan, the submersible that vanished while gawking at the wreck of the Titanic, while there was hope of rescue. Since it disappeared on Sunday, social media has been flooded with dollar-store schadenfreude mocking the passengers’ entitled hubris to treat the remote, and still poorly explored, wreck as a tourist attraction. But at this writing, oxygen reserves have run out, the vessel is probably lost, and the tone has shifted.

By Thursday morning (really Wednesday evening), reactions bifurcated. Some observers, perhaps motivated by the parallels between this event and the original Titanic sinking, began describing this event as a tragedy. Behind them, a rising tide of dissidents reminded audiences that an overloaded migrant vessel sank last week, potentially dragging over 600 impoverished Libyan refugees to the deepest part of the Mediterranean. Why, dissenters asked, isn’t this the real tragedy, not the submarine full of CEOs?

This debate reflects not only the priorities driving the 24-hour news cycle, but the way words drift over time. Mass media slings the word “tragedy” around so heedlessly that it’s come unmoored from its Greek roots. Aristotle defined tragedy as a theatrical form in which the protagonist is destroyed, not by bad luck or circumstance, but by the consequences of his (and indeed usually “his”) own actions. Then the horrified audience feels pity for him.

For Aristotle, the defining tragedy was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. You probably know the broad outlines, even if you haven’t read it or seen it performed. Oedipus, king of Thebes, promises to root out the cause of the curse plaguing his city. The prophet Tieresias promises Oedipus he won’t like the answer, but Oedipus persists. Following a detective-like investigation, he discovers that he caused the curse himself, and he’s already living out the morally horrific consequences.

Many modern writers forget tragedy’s most important point: Oedipus brought these consequences upon himself. On at least four occasions, the play’s suffering and bloodshed could’ve been avoided if Oedipus or his forebears had listened to advice. In this regard, the OceanGate Titan catastrophe is indeed tragic. Deliberate disregard for safety protocols, and the belief that money insulates rich people from calamity, led three CEOs, a teenager, and a technical crew to their almost-certain watery graves.

PR photo of the OceanGate Titan submersible

And the narrative induces horror and pity. If the passengers and crew weren’t killed instantly, the conditions of their now-likely deaths sound horrific. Trapped in a claustrophobic submersible, undoubtedly wearing urine-soaked clothes, and being slowly suffocated, this disaster has robbed them not only of their lives, but also their dignity, and even a marked grave. Like Oedipus, they arguably deserve their fate for rubbernecking at a mass grave, but their deaths are still pretty piteous.

Edit: after I wrote this essay, the U.S. Coast Guard announced they had identified the remains of the OceanGate Titan. It appears the submersible suffered a rapid structural implosion, and the passengers were, indeed, killed instantly.

Okay, but if the OceanGate Titan is a legitimate tragedy, doesn’t that describe the Libyan refugee ship? The hundreds of deaths are both horrific and piteous. Yet I’d contend they aren’t tragic, for one reason: there wasn’t much anybody aboard that vessel could’ve done. Their choices were limited to remaining in Libya, which has been anarchic and violent since the Obama Administration’s reckless intervention in the overthrow of Moammar Gadhaffi, or risk death at sea.

Oedipus, King Lear, and Jay Gatsby are tragic heroes, not only because they died horrifically, but because they’re responsible for their own deaths. Any of them could have, at any time, stopped events from happening. They perhaps didn’t realize the agency they possessed, but each one made choices which led directly to their own downfalls. If the captain of the refugee vessel misled refugees onto his boat, causing it to sink, that would be tragedy.

Aristotle believed that only kings, generals, and potentates had enough power to be responsible for their own deaths. I disagree. I’ve recently become a fan of horror fiction, and novels like Ania Ahlborn’s Brother and Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street probably count as contemporary Aristotelian tragedies. In both books, at least one character could’ve prevented catastrophe by asking questions, listening to advice, or not going with the flow like a dead fish.

So yes, on balance, I’d say the OceanGate Titan catastrophe is a tragedy. It meets Aristotle’s standards not only of narrative structure, but of audience reaction. We are, indeed, suitably horrified and pitying. The only question remains: will we learn anything? Will we respect safety standards, shake the illusion that money deflects consequences, and the dead aren’t for gawking at? Only time will tell. At least we can start reclaiming the definition of a “tragedy.”

The Human Desire to Dominate Nature

A boater chews up the water near the top of this photo

Sarah and I sat on the docks, watching the waves on the Lake of the Ozarks and listening to birdsong from the forested shore. The floating dock bobbed gently with the waters of Missouri’s largest tourist attraction. With over eleven hundred miles of shoreline, most of it privately owned, Lake of the Ozarks attracts vacationers from the American midlands who want to relax on the water without the time and expense of flying to the coasts.

Then some nincompoop in a pontoon boat shot by at absurd speeds, creating a wake that sent our floating dock reeling. As Sarah gripped her seat with both hands, waiting for the turbulence to subside, she rolled her eyes over at me. “It’s like some people want to be on the water,” she said, in tones of long-suffering patience, “and others want to dominate the water.”

Something in Sarah’s comment struck me as both apropos, and ironically jarring. Lake of the Ozarks is a man-made reservoir, created when the Bagnell Dam stopped the Osage River back in 1931. It exists because the Union Electric Company sought to dominate the water. From our position, perched between lush forested shore and the flat, picturesque water, it’s easy to mistake the lake for “nature,” but its very existence represents human industry and artificiality.

Yet simultaneously, we’re witnessing different reactions. Sarah and I struggle to attune ourselves to the forests, the water, to “nature.” Sure, the lake is artificial, but nature has adapted itself to humankind’s influences, and now we’re adapting ourselves to nature. We bring only our clothes to the shoreline, dangle our feet in the water, and attempt to exist entirely as we are, in this place and moment, without making demands.

Meanwhile, others bring industrial modernity onto the water. Speedboats, water skiers, pontoon boats, and floating party platforms crisscross the water throughout the daylight hours. Most have noisy gas-burning outboard motors; many blast loud rock or country music from elaborate onboard speaker systems. Their passengers want the dopamine hit deriving from bright sunlight, loud sounds, and fast speeds. They consider “nature” a negative space onto which they draw their experiences.

Traditional religions require humans to adjust their mental rhythms away from worldly tempos. Sung hymns, chants, and unison prayers force congregants to slow their mental wavelengths, while silent prayers and mindfulness meditations require congregants to practice sitting still and listening. Traditional religions believe that God, the spirits, or Truth exists at a tempo different from commerce, industry, and work.

Private vacation homes along the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks

Capitalism, by contrast, forces people to accelerate their internal rhythms. Assembly lines, retail outlets, and high-value finance require us to think, speak, and act quickly. This acceleration spills into non-working life. Consider drivers who get onto rural highways and attempt to achieve speeds only possible on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Lake of the Ozarks, at over ninety miles long, lets boaters reach and maintain speeds usually reserved for the open ocean.

This constant, almost Sonic the Hedgehog-like demand that we “Gotta Go Fast” has deleterious consequences. Capitalist America has the world’s highest rates of clinical depression, stress ulcers, and Type-II diabetes. While slowing down wouldn’t magically remove these facts, the tendency to carry our demand for machine-like speed into our off hours and vacations reflects the ways capitalism changes our brains, even when we’re not working.

Meditating in forests and lakes, while pleasant, isn’t necessary to find our inner rhythms. Cities have rhythms, reflected in the ways people walk the streets, and how they stop to converse or shop. London’s or Boston’s notorious winding pedestrian byways bespeak this inner rhythm. Capitalists naturally colonize our cities by sequestering us in hermetically sealed cars, and razing pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves in the name of “urban renewal.”

Watching speedboaters crisscross the lake at absurd speeds, I can’t help wondering whether their “vacations” will return them to workaday life any better prepared for capitalism’s punishing paces. Instead of resting, recovering themselves, and finding their inner rhythms, they’ve dragged modernity’s breakneck industrial pace onto the water. No wonder they’re blasting classic rock from their speakers: despite their numbers, I suspect they’re lonely.

As the boaters’ wake subsided, Sarah and I returned to the rhythm of the water. The smell of rich organic loam filled our noses and permeated our clothes. Birds that had paused in their singing returned, and a cool northeast wind rustled the leaves. “Nature” doesn’t exist, as I’ve written before, but nature always reestablishes balance after humans quit disturbing it. All humans have to do is listen.

Mr. Clean and the Home-Grown Revolution

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

Anyone who knows me well, knows I’m a pretty poor housekeeper. My house looks exactly like an unmarried man lives alone there. This contrasts with my personal appearance, which is carefully controlled and doesn’t permit unwanted creases in my long-sleeve button-down shirts. I’ve spent much of my adult life inventing justifications for my sloppy skills, most of which reflect that my parents used housecleaning as a punishment.

But if I pause my self-serving justifications momentarily, I know that’s confusing cause and effect. My parents used cleaning as a punishment because, if they didn’t, I’d never do it. I resisted cleaning because I considered it abjectly futile. The reward for vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing the household porcelain, was the opportunity to repeat it next week. What meaningful task, I wondered, was never truly done? What a waste of time.

A few weeks ago, though, even I, the eternal housekeeping refusenik, realized I couldn’t stand these conditions anymore. I couldn’t afford to have company over, I couldn’t cook dinner for a date, I couldn’t even invite my sister around to feed my cats and water my plants if I needed to leave town. My parents’ old household techniques of vinegar and sponges weren’t working. So I bought myself a pack of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

Some household dirt was months or even (I blush to admit) years old. Sponges, vinegar, all-purpose cleaner, and scouring powder all failed to remove it. Yet a Magic Eraser and some elbow grease worked wonders; dirt, soap residue, and hard water stains just rolled off. I mean literally rolled off, as it formed convenient little pills which I rinsed with water and watched flush down the drain. Years of dirt, gone.

Without exaggeration, I’d forgotten that my bathtub was originally white, not ecru. I’d also forgotten that my shower spigot was shiny chrome, not dingy lime-scale. These scrubbers peeled off not only my dirt, but some that, I’m sure, lingered from my home’s previous tenants. But these scrubbers didn’t just uncover dirt, they uncovered something deeper: my sense of pride in keeping my own house.

Like many members of their class and generation, my parents didn’t see cleaning as just cleaning; they considered it a moral expression. People who didn’t maintain their houses were inherently bad people. “Nobody,” I recall my father saying while driving the family through a notoriously run-down neighborhood in a major city, “is ever too poor to clean their yards and wash their windows.” Slovenly people were clearly moral reprobates.

Spot which part of this faucet was cleaned with a Magic Eraser and dried overnight

I was more conservative then, but even I realized this was, at some level, fallacious. Even if they’re married, poor couples often work three or more jobs between them to cover rent, groceries, childcare, and utilities. Telling overworked, underpaid people that further household busywork makes the difference between moral and immoral people, is a massive class-based imposition. My father’s unspoken message was: “Shut up and act White.”

What arrogance! In a world wracked by poverty, violence, and structural injustice, my father wanted poor people to abandon social solidarity, and instead organize their own lawns. I was too young, White, and conservative to explain it in those terms, but that encapsulates the underlying thought. White, middle-class demands for household cleanliness were, and are, demands for atomized individualism in the face of organized injustice.

In a society organized so unfairly that one in eight American children faces chronic hunger, housecleaning seemed like a retreat from the conflict. This tendency was compounded because, like many suburban White kids, very few people outside my family ever saw the inside of my house. As I became increasingly conscious of America’s ingrained injustices, cleaning seemed increasingly self-indulgent and luxurious.

Yet, watching old dirt form pills and rinse down the drain, I realized: keeping my own house is part of participating in the community. I cannot invite fellow reformists to my house to plan and organize, or even to share common meals and a beer, if I don’t have a bathroom I’m willing to let others see. Solidarity is always public-facing and vocal, yes, but true community solidarity starts at home.

This change is new. I’m still feverishly cleaning old, stained surfaces, wearing out Magic Erasers like there’s no tomorrow. Yet I do it because, for the first time in years, I’m starting to feel proud of my house. I’m starting to feel like I can invite people around and let them see the place where I live. I’m starting to see that housecleaning isn’t injustice or punishment, it’s home.

Corporal Punishment, the Church, and Me

My defining moment in the Amazon documentary miniseries Shiny Happy People happens about midway through the second episode. An invited speaker at an Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) seminar invites a child volunteer onstage to demonstrate the speaker’s precepts of Biblically appropriate spanking. The child was volunteered by his parents, not of his own volition, and never speaks or is even identified by name onstage.

The speaker (who shall remain nameless here) takes the child volunteer over his knee and pantomimes the spanking incident, backed with a monologue about how the misbehaving child simply needs discipline to grow with God. Because the speaker mimes the spanking so gently, the effect appears downright predatory. This appearance isn’t helped when, upon letting the child rise, the speaker demands a hug from the kid he just finished disciplining.

Back in the 1990s, I attended a United Methodist congregation in a small Nebraska town. For those unfamiliar with Protestant denominationalism, the Methodist tradition doesn’t have even a shirt-tail theological relationship with most American Evangelical or Fundamentalist churches. Most such churches are theologically Five-Point Calvinist, while Methodism descends from Arminianism, a deliberate rejection of Calvinist absolutism. Methodism shouldn’t be compatible with Evangelicalism.

Yet much of White American Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s trended toward Calvinist conservatism. Pushed by the ideological bloc of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, many White Christians yearned for the doctrinal certainty which Evangelicals seemingly enjoyed. Congregations which had no theological truck with Five-Point Calvinism snapped up books by Tim LaHaye, Charles Swindoll, and Francis Schaeffer. Their theology soon bled into regular worship and teaching.

As the pro-spanking speaker finishes his ganked, almost fetishistic mock spanking, he demands a hug from his volunteer. But he immediately rejects the hug he receives, declaring it insufficiently enthusiastic. He replaces the kid across his knee and resumes the spanking. This repeats a pattern, perhaps unknowingly, visible in Christian thinkers since at least Augustine: that if you’re sufficiently righteous, you can threaten children into loving God, and you too.

My small Nebraska congregation brought a local pastor aboard who, as part of his ministry, demanded the congregational council hire his son as youth and young adult minister. The son was highly charismatic, and quickly gained acclaim among his intended young parishioners. He introduced a rock concert-influenced evening worship service, and accordingly, local Christians treated him like a rock star. Eventually, he seemed to start believing it himself.

Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar became the celebrity face of Bill Gothard's IBLP

I wanted to believe it, too. In my early twenties, I was considerably more conservative and doctrinaire than I am now, both politically and theologically. This father-and-son team verified that my primarily emotional spirituality was justified. But before long, I realized they didn’t treat everyone equally. They wanted congregants who were extroverted, but submissive. Those who conformed received preferential treatment; everyone else watched from outside, confused and scared.

Don’t misunderstand, my desire to separate wasn’t a Daniel-like stand on morality. I was simply lonely. The ministry focused on highly demonstrative episodes, “mountaintop moments,” and gregariousness; it left no opportunity for thoughtful contemplation, much less deep discussion performed in our “indoor voices.” I attempted to peel myself off simply because I needed time to catch my breath, while their ministry was breathless, breakneck, and quick.

My only mistake came in trying to announce my separation. Instead of just quietly not showing up—as an increasing number of the congregation’s introverted members started doing—I attempted to make my polite apologies before going. The youth minister responded by angrily deploying a laundry list of “sacrifices” he’d made to support his “ministry.” The list rambled on, voluble and extensive, until I finally relented just to escape the situation.

I’ve seldom faced literal violence in my life. I realize how privileged I am to even say that, but I haven’t faced state repression, violent crime, or relationship abuse. Even given my frequently adversarial relationship with my father, he seldom spanked me; he reserved corporal punishment for extreme circumstances, and discontinued it early. Therefore, until I saw a self-righteous spanking enacted onscreen, I didn’t make the connection to what happened that day.

But on a key level, when leaders believe themselves appointed by God, they start demanding love. They demand obedience and adherence from those beneath them. Some enforce those demands through violence, while others enforce them through guilt and shame. But in both cases, they believe they have God-given authority to make demands. Listening, learning, and adapting are for lesser people. Leaders make demands, and the first demand is for love.

Cat & Mouse, and 90s Movie Cheese

L.R. Jones, You Look Beautiful Tonight: a Thriller

Meek Nashville librarian Mia Anderson has the life she wants, with a decent job, comfy apartment, and narrow network of good friends. It isn’t glamorous, but it works. But her BFF, who really is glamorous, pushes Mia to join a dating app. Online, a charming civil engineer named Adam makes it his personal project to uplift Mia and unlock her hidden potential. Too bad Mia doesn’t want unlocked, because Adam is willing to kill.

L.R. Jones has purportedly written several bestselling “dark” novels, but I can’t find them; this is apparently her first under this byline. This novel feels like the big-screen thrillers Joe Eszterhas wrote in the 1980s and 1990s, with hard-bitten characters pushed into corners and forced to reveal their secrets. Jones is less libidinous than the notoriously salacious Eszterhas, but she recaptures his texture. This is both good and bad.

Someone starts tucking anonymous notes for Mia under her morning latte, and in other places that show her secret admirer is close. This gives her conflicting impulses. She knows she ought to feel “stranger danger,” but the unanticipated attention also makes her feel validated, assured that her actions matter to somebody. She starts adjusting her behavior to receive her secret admirer’s approval. Her admirer, unfortunately, misreads Mia’s intentions.

Here’s where experienced thriller readers start compiling a suspect list, and testing it against the growing weight of evidence. But Jones offers us a cornucopia of possible suspects. Mia’s two best friends have begun acting squirrely, for instance, each in their own way. Mia also has two bosses who each conform to different stereotypes of why you can’t trust management. An enigmatic stranger has begun watching Mia at work.

Then there’s Adam. Mia hasn’t actually met him yet, only interacted with him online through the dating app and social media. He begins the relationship with the pickup artist’s trick of negging her. Mia initially sees through that. But Adam responds with an eloquent spiel about how he, too, was once chronically overlooked in today’s fast-paced and deeply inauthentic society. He only wants to help her escape her self-imposed shackles.

L.R. Jones

If this seems like a confusing cast of thousands, I won’t argue. Introducing all the moving parts in Mia’s life takes forever, giving this book an extremely long first act. Only somewhere around the halfway mark does Jones quit clearing her throat and begin the thrilling part of this supposed thriller. Though in fairness, once Jones begins moving, she begins moving hard. Her villain, once introduced, plays Mia like a fiddle.

Jones provides Mia with a remarkable antagonist. The enemy claims to value Mia’s well-being, and targets villainy at whatever prevents Mia living to the fullest. But the enemy also gives conflicting cues. “I want you to assert control in your own life,” the villain tells Mia, while simultaneously literally picking Mia’s wardrobe and scripting Mia’s interactions with the various people controlling her life.

We readers with our suspect lists start getting confused. The antagonist is intimately aware of Mia’s daily activities, and provides running commentary, while remaining strangely invisible. How, we wonder, can somebody be seemingly as close as Mia’s elbow in her workplace, social activities, and home, while remaining wholly unnoticed? Don’t worry, Mia notices this too, and her trajectory moves from horror to determination to paranoia.

Remember the Joe Eszterhas comparison? I don’t make that lightly. Jones creates a multi-layered story of distrust so complete that, like Eszterhas’ most famous movies, the resolution is almost certainly disappointing. It relies on characters keeping secrets, but not the ones they’ve let us believe they’re keeping. And, I cringe to write this. It relies on conflating mental illness and trauma with moral weakness.

I’m trying not to reveal too much because, when Jones’ narrative works, it works well. Audiences who love character-driven thrillers will appreciate plenty herein. But in the final resolution (and extremely talky denouement), Jones reveals an Eszterhas-like belief that humans will inevitably repeat the mistakes of their past, unless compelled to change through violence. Jones hints at that in earlier chapters, but her resolution makes it explicit.

Again, the right audience will appreciate Jones’ story. It’s character-driven rather than shocking, and nearly all the violence occurs offscreen. The appeal isn’t violent horror, but the paranoia and self-doubt Mia experiences as she, like her audience, struggles to reconcile the conflicting evidence. But the culmination is so thoroughly unmoored from anything that came before, that I fear experienced readers will sit in disbelief and, like me, throw the book.

At War in the Kingdom of Foodies

Beth Cato, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge

Ada Garland has lived as a fugitive on the kingdom’s periphery for years, surviving by her wits and her cooking skills. She’s a Chef, a form of supernatural guardian whose capabilities combine the roles of cook, general, and priest. Officially, every Chef in the kingdom of Verdania belongs to King Caristo, but Ada’s wits have kept her free for decades—free, but alienated from her lost husband and child. Then an assassin appears in her lodgings.

Author Beth Cato is as famous on the genre convention circuit for her cooking as for her fiction and poetry. This, Cato’s sixth novel, combines her two loves. She creates a world where love of food is a gods-given gift and terrible responsibility. Cato’s writing also shows the influence of George R.R. Martin, particularly his fondness for the impersonal, violent politics of medieval Europe. And nothing provides a richer political target than a wedding.

Princess Solenn knows she doesn’t look or think like other royalty of Braiz. Only when she’s shipped to Verdania for a politically useful marriage does she discover why: she’s a Chef, an ability that supposedly only travels in one’s bloodline. Though lacking training, her innate Chef abilities uncover a plot to assassinate her callow young betrothed. Solenn doesn’t love him, but she definitely loves the peace which Prince Rupert’s assassination would disrupt.

Despite alternating between these two viewpoint characters, Cato hasn’t created a conventional character-driven novel. Both Ada and Solenn are beholden to political forces and old vendettas they might stem, but never completely prevent. Poisonings and regicides are simply extensions of the political horse-trades that make royal court life possible. Cato’s characters want simple, honest lives, but late-medieval politics refuses to let them sleep easily.

Please understand, I don’t make the GRRM comparison lightly. Like Martin, Cato creates a kingdom where magic exists, but isn’t central. Political logrolling matters more than the Chefs’ food-based wizardry. Our characters desire simple, honest lives, but court intrigues keep intruding. This doesn’t stop our viewpoint characters from describing their sensory circumstances in rich detail; Cato’s prose includes multiple lush descriptions of ingredients and the cooking process.

Beth Cato

Though a Chef’s responsibility manifests primarily through food, political exigencies define what that actually means. Ada previously commanded troops in battle, though she lost faith in the corrupt king she served, and deserted to save her soul. (Exactly how food magic translates into strategic command is left implicit.) Now somebody is clearing the ranks of Ada’s fellow disillusioned generals. Ada must apprehend her assassin’s employer before it’s too late.

It spoils nothing to say, since Cato reveals it early, that Solenn is Ada’s long-lost daughter. Though her politically expedient marriage would cement peace between Verdania and Braiz, if her actual parentage ever comes out, the political consequences will be severe. Until then, though, somebody wants to not just assassinate Prince Rupert, but frame Solenn for the crime. Solenn must survive the intrigue in order to prevent the war.

Besides the focus on politics, Cato also shares GRRM’s casual attitude toward historicity. She describes Verdania’s Bronze-age religious rituals and downright Roman attitude toward antiquities, while musketeers with rapiers and flintlock pistols struggle to keep peace within the palace. Like GRRM, Cato cares more about creating the feel of her setting’s historical parallels, than about remaining scrupulously realistic. It’s casual, but it works.

Cato’s two heroines reflect two different approaches to conspiracy and intrigue. Ada, the wanted fugitive, must actively pursue justice through Verdania’s byways, knowing that if she ever lapses in vigilance, her enemies will destroy her and her family. Solenn, by contrast, is trapped by her royal circumstances. Her greatest aspiration is to survive, which isn’t always guaranteed. She occupies a hall of enemies, and must remain forever vigilant.

This novel does require a certain dedication. Though Cato’s characters both act and are acted upon, the forces acting upon them aren’t always clear. Therefore, her storytelling involves occasional breaks where characters explain circumstances to one another, which sometimes slows the momentum. Pushing through these occasional dry breaks, however, rewards audiences with the suspense and drama they expect from similar political novels.

Ultimately, Cato shares GRRM’s interest in politics, but lacks his cynical fatalism. Her characters frequently lack control, but not agency; they aren’t prisoners to circumstance. They want what we all want: liberty and simplicity. But like us, they can’t have it, because they live in a world of humans and their dependencies. Therefore, Cato offers us the ultimate resolution: just stay alive until you find answers.