A reader asks a question I can’t answer…

A reader asks a question I can’t answer… November 12, 2015

…so I hope some of youse guys can in the comboxes.  To wit:

Long-time reader of your blog here, and I’m writing with a question/favor to ask of you in your capacity as a fellow Chesterton fan and someone who seems to know his way around both literature and Christianity.    Briefly, I’m wondering if you can think of any good fiction that that revisits some part of the story of the Fall, but from a perspective still sympathetic to God. This is for a college course I’m teaching on Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I’m hoping to center around the famous debate between C.S. Lewis and William Empson about whether Satan should be read as the hero or the villain of the piece (including some modern versions of the story that support one or the other position).

I’ve got Lewis’s Perelandra on the pro-God side, but I’m worried that taken solo it lacks the oomph needed to stand up respectably to the likes of Philip Pullman and Mary Shelley in the pro-Satan camp.   Might you know offhand of any other good popular narratives(fiction/film/graphic fiction/other– not necessarily “high literary”) that, like Perelandra, retell some part of Creation and/or the Fall from what we might call an orthodox or anti-Satan perspective?   Alternatively, is there anyone else you can think of that I might consult for suggestions on this question?

I got nuthin’, unless you want to count Frankenstein as a sort of backhanded and upside down commentary on the idea of seizing the perogatives of God.  Ironic, given who Mary Shelley was married to.  But that’s pretty much it.  I was going to suggest Perelandra, but then I kept reading your note and pffft.

Anybody out there in Readerland have any suggestions?  If so, put ’em in the comboxes and I will direct my reader thither.

 


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