Empire of Lies

Empire of Lies, by Andrew Klavan, is a novel given to me by a friend who thought I should read it for my "read a book you disagree with" challenge. And I'm going to assume that he didn't read it before he gave it to me, because that's the most charitable assumption I can make about a person who would actually purchase a novel promoting lies, hate, misogyny, racism, lip-service-only Christianity, and sexual perversion. I haven't read anything I hated so much in years, and I'd like to destroy my copy so that no one else will ever have his--or her--mind stained by reading something so ugly and harmful.

Let me give you some evidence for my claims about how awful this novel is. The protagonist (I will not call him a hero!) is a self-proclaimed conservative Republican who introduces himself by describing his long-ago journalistic expose of corrupt government in his town for which, as he says "I was roundly despised by some of the best-educated and wealthiest people in town. Something about my uncaring, insensitive editorial policy. Elites hate to be proved wrong by the common man." Don't you love the name-calling? That's only the beginning. Oh, it gets better. Later he thinks "hm, I guess those dark-skinned angry-looking killers named Muhammed all over the world aren't radical Muslims after all....Hey, News-clowns! Tell the truth for once in your useless lives! Say the word! Say some word, Islamo-fascists! Jihadis! Something." Inevitably he progresses to calling all Muslims terrorists and seeking out people who also enjoy name-calling: "camel-jockey--rag-headed--dune-coon." The groups this guy belongs to just inform the ways he's despicable, rather than tempering any of his lunatic tendencies. Despite the fact that he fights against going crazy in the same way his mother did, by the end of the story this protagonist does not see the world the way most other people see it--which is one of the very definitions of insanity.

The Big Lie of the novel is that "anti-American, relativistic, multiculturalists...have...created a breeding ground on campus for hate-filled, violent, terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitic Islamic radicals." This protagonist wants all issues to be simple; he wants to boil them down to "good and evil," and he doesn't think about ideas, but merely feels. His reaction to attending a lecture is not to consider the ideas he's heard and weigh the evidence for them, but to have "an emotional response" and then--get this--to have a revelation: "as I sat there breathless and sweaty--then the thought came to me--as clear as if it were spoken aloud--spoken with absolute certainty, absolute conviction: Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is."

The protagonist is so convinced by his own revelation that he later breaks the professor's kneecaps with a hammer in an attempt to get him to confess to terrorism. Of course, since this is a novel, the professor actually IS a terrorist and breaking his kneecaps makes it possible for the protagonist to save his own daughter from being blown up. I guess Klavan couldn't resist novelizing the traditional excuse-for-torture scenario. And the protagonist enjoys the torture: "but the thrill of it...Yes, that. The coursing rush of excitement, the old dark, mesmerizing sadistic joy--that belonged to me. Even at that moment, I could feel it flowing into my brain, into my belly and my groin. I could feel the old smoky sickness of lust and pleasure spreading all through me." Mr. protagonist thought he had given up sadism in favor of Christianity, but evidently not. Descriptions of the various kinds of sexual sadism he enjoyed in his younger days are detailed, and available for the reader's prurient interest.

The protagonist's misogyny manifests itself at first as a promise-keeper's twisted version of how to be a good husband and father. He wooes his wife by telling her that he's "the because-I-said-so guy, the head-of-the-household guy, that's me. Marry me and I call the shots. I'll break my butt to make you happy, and I'll try to give you the life you said you wanted. I don't cheat, I don't leave, and I am what I say I am." He soon shows his true colors, however, admitting that "frankly, I find the only way to avoid hitting women is to avoid women who need to be hit. Right then, Lauren needed a smack in the face, maybe a couple of them. I was itching to give them to her...."

If there is anything in this novel for me to disagree with, rather than simply be repulsed by, it's the exaggerated comic-book characterization of all college professors as uniformly leftist liberals who espouse political correctness and want to write articles like "Chador--A Source of Pride for Muslim Women." In fact, earlier this week--before I began to have my mind stained with oily residue from reading Empire of Lies--I sent an email note to an OSU professor of philosophy, Andrew Oldenquist, telling him how much I liked his recent article about why the U.S. should ban burqa wearing within our borders, and I got a gracious response.

I don't usually read a lot of non-fiction, although you better believe that the next few books I try reading to see if I disagree will be non-fiction. It seems to me that the promotion of hatred and fear in a novel like Empire of Lies is even more insidious than making the same arguments would be in non-fiction, because the author doesn't even have to attempt to give any evidence for his absurd claims.

Since I don't believe in book burning, I'm fantasizing about dumping this book in the toilet. Maybe I could take pleasure in breaking its spine with a hammer. Sigh. Or maybe I could just reread something better, like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, to get the bad taste out of my mind.
Update: reading a book you disagree with is one thing, but reading seven over the next year is worth considering! I hereby subsume my little challenge into the better one at Shelf Monkey.