2018 photo by Wil C. Fry
★★★★ (of 5)
- Full Title: Job: A Comedy Of Justice
- Author: Robert A. Heinlein
- Year: 1984 (mine is 1992 paperback)
- Genre: Science Fiction, Religion
- Publisher: Ballantine Books
- ISBN 0-345-31650-9 (paperback)
- Wikipedia page
- Author’s Wikipedia page
Summary
Named both for the biblical book of Job and a James Branch Cabell novel (Jurgen, A Comedy Of Justice), this late novel from famed sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein sat on my bookshelf for a couple of decades and I labored under the impression that I had read it. Recently I flipped through the pages and saw that I remembered very little and decided to read it again (or possibly for the first time).
Among the last writings of the prolific sci-fi writer, Job is less a science fiction story than an examination of the world’s religions through the eyes of a U.S. born evangelical Christian as he inadvertently tours multiple universes. Main character Alex Hergensheimer (occasionally known as Alec Graham, for startling and hilarious reasons) finds himself waking up in different realities every so often. Sometimes it’s months; other times it’s mere days or hours. And it always seems to happen when it’s least convenient. Convinced that some supernatural being is playing games with him — as the biblical YHWH did with Job — Alex continues to believe in and worship the God he was raised with. Startlingly, after some of his recent activities, he ends up in Heaven anyway but can’t find the woman he loves. She believed in the Norse gods, including Odin and Loki, and therefore wasn’t “saved”. The most interesting part of the book is when Alex storms through Heaven and Hell trying to find his beloved.
What I Liked Least About It
Job: A Comedy Of Justice won a Locus Award in 1985, and was nominated for a Nebula Award (1984) and a Hugo (1985), which I think says more about the state of sci-fi in those days than it does about this book. There are a couple of problematic areas — and not only because the book is 34 years old.
One I noticed right away is the term “blackamoor”, something you kind of expect to see in writings from the 18th or 19th centuries but was startling in a book written in the U.S. during my lifetime. While varying definitions can be found, it’s widely accepted that the word is offensive and typically used with contempt. In other writings, Heinlein clearly cared nothing for bigotry — and outright spoke out against it — so it caught my attention here. The only excuse I can find is that he was clearly writing from first-person perspective of a character that didn’t share the author’s views on many topics — especially religion. I wonder if perhaps the casual racism was a conscious attempt to paint the character (Alex) as having issues with bigotry. On the other hand, Alex seems to get along well with the non-white people he meets, and the (many) non-white characters in the book are presented well enough (other than the use of this term). I think it all could have been avoided by avoiding the multiple uses of this one word.
There are also a couple of scenes midway through the book where otherwise decent characters express an interest in incest. (Not entirely shocking for regular Heinlein readers.) Fortunately, it not only turns out that the characters had only been pretending to be related, but that one of them is Satan himself and the other is an imp — creatures you’d expect to not always do the right thing.
What I Liked Most About It
The most impressive thing about the book, to me, is how well Heinlein expresses conservative religious views through the main character’s viewpoint, since it’s known that Heinlein himself didn’t hold these views. It can be one of the most difficult things in writing to fairly and considerately present opposing views, and I thought he here did it masterfully. All dissent comes from other characters, including Alex’s love interest, Margrethe.
Margrethe is religious in her own way; she claims to believe in the Norse gods — Odin, Thor, Loki, and others, but has studied Christianity enough to roundly criticize it:
“Alec my only love, I don’t want to attack your faith. I don’t enjoy it... But you did ask me point blank whether or not I accepted the authority of ‘Holy Writ’ — by which you mean your Bible. I must answer just as point blank. I do not. The Jehovah or Yahweh of the Old Testament seems to me to be a sadistic, bloodthirsty, genocidal villian. I cannot understand how He can be identified with the gentle Christ of the New Testament. Even through a mystic Trinity.”—page 140-141
Throughout, Heinlein expresses a good working knowledge of Christian doctrine and is careful to answer any criticism by other characters with a heartfelt, knowledgeable explanation from Alex, who sincerely believes the world is only 6,000 years old and that every word of the Bible is literal truth.
He also wrote well of multiple alternate realities/universes, a common feature of Heinlein’s last several novels. As in all his stories dealing with this possibility, the characters here quickly develop a method for determining whether they’re in a new universe. In this book, the method is going to the local library and looking up who was elected president in particular years. In other novels, universes were classified into groups based on who was the first person to get to the Moon.
Another thing I liked about this story, common to most of Heinlein’s later works, was his admiration for women and his recognition of the burdens they bear even in modern societies. The author himself was married to an accomplished woman — a chemist, engineer, accomplished college athlete, and naval officer — and she apparently served as a model of sorts for the confident, independent, supremely qualified women in his stories.
It is also worth noting that many of the themes presented in this book felt entirely relevant to today’s political and social atmosphere. With a little updating of the language, a book like this could be published today and no one would realize its age.
Conclusion
If I had indeed read this story in the late 1990s as I previously believed, then I remembered nothing of it; this read-through felt like the first time. For example, the term “Ragnarok” is in this book, but I’m pretty sure I had never heard/seen that word until the recent Marvel movie Thor: Ragnarok was released in theaters. And I certainly don’t recall any Heinlein characters visiting literal Heaven and Hell as Alex does in this story (after being caught up in the Rapture).
I enjoyed it thoroughly, as I have most Heinlein books.
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