Dean Koontz’s Innocence likely deserves or at least should be subject to, a mention of some kind. It was so vividly told, and with such evocative imagery, that I expected more from it than a hackneyed Eden story. The magic and mystery of the underground world, the evil of various people in the city, the wonder of a new friend with similar limitations as our hero are made maudlin when we realize it is a tale almost Christian in its simplicity.
The two part ghosts we see through the hero’s eyes, invisible to all others, become trite angels and demons, while the evil of humanity is so profound in this cynical vision of us, that no one can bear to look upon our hero. He is an intolerable reminder that we have sinned, and even the best people in the novel cannot bear being confronted with that knowledge of themselves. Is that really true?
Are we so blinded by our own petty desires and evil wishes that we become ravening lunatics at the sight of someone who is innocent. Why not kill all babies then? Surely they are innocent, although in this Christian telling they are guilty of the first sin as well and therefore tainted enough that we can endure their sight.
Although that may not be the most grievous problem the book has, it spoke the most to me. What vision of humanity allows someone to see such unmitigated evil so generously spread through all people that they cannot even stand the sight of a mirror? That’s right. The Christian vision allows that nicely.
By the end of the novel all of the regular humans are dead, and our hero and heroine, with four children only two of whom are related (in case our sinful minds wonders about the incest of the first Garden of Eden) settle into a peaceful glade where the lion lies down with the lamb, although billions of humans have been wiped from the map. Once again, the Christian story, in an effort to cleanse the filthy human, must resort to genocide.
There is no killing in this new world. Even the bears eat fruit, we are told. That is well and good. Perhaps the god that brought this new paradise to pass was replete when the other seven billion humans were tragically murdered.
These simplistic fantasies have an easy hold on our minds. It is comforting to think that if we could only kill almost everyone, then we could live in peace.
Unfortunately, in at least one way I have to agree with the book. The problem with that vision is that the glory and depravity of humanity does not merely reside in an other. It is all of us. Around us now for over a hundred thousand years we’ve had those who tried to build something out of human culture, who tried to add to the edifice of what we are, and we’ve had those who tried to tear it down because it did not satisfy their fantasy, or ideology, or fancy. Koontz’s book does not add to the wonder of Innocence in the world. Instead, it is one which is deeply guilty of the problems we are trying to escape.
The answer to human striving is never murder, regardless of what old books say, and we are all equally special, rather than a particular chosen few. Koontz would have us wait for an old myth to come true rather than merely enact one. We know already how to make this world a garden, and many thousands of people are working toward that goal.
All we really need is for the inertialess masses to stop believing in such Koontz-like nonsense, to stop waiting for manna from the sky and start to work making the world of angels they ostensibly dream of.
Don’t worry about the evil people you think so much of. If you merely strive to make the world better it will be as if those others didn’t exist. For under the beautiful language and old testament rhythms of the book, evil lurks in its premises.
