Michael Standaert has written a critique of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels at nth position (via Arts & Letters Daily).

It seems to me that Standaert has put together an accurate analysis of the novels, purely as novels. Although Standaert declares himself an “enemy” of LaHaye’s evangelical fundamentalist Protestantism, he has restrained himself from arguing against LaHaye’s morality and theology and sticks to the literary.

Overall, there is little difference between characters other than that they are on the side of Good or on the side of Evil. Their actions, thoughts and motivations are one-dimensional. There is no postmodern murkiness, at least on the surface. What these layers of authority achieve is not literature (for lack of a better term), but a paint-by-numbers, soulless, and morally didactic blueprint of right-wing political and religious ideologies masquerading as fiction. The characters are subservient to all the above.

Standaert calls these “anti-novels.”

I should say I would have the same problems with authoritative fictions of this type coming from the Left as well. I should also say I have no qualms with fiction dealing with political themes from any quarter, as long as the novels are not subservient to a political aim or are written by political operatives using fiction.

Standaert here lets his own simplifications show. While he criticised LaHaye for dividing the world into Good and Evil, he appears to divide everything into Left and Right (note the capitals), as if the diametric opposite of Tim LaHaye is Tim Robbins. But leaving that aside, I would take exception to the idea that novels with a political aim are inferior novels. Let’s choose ten examples of political novels that are generally held in high regard:

• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
• Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
• All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
• The Manchurian Candidate, Richard Condon
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Alexander Solzhenitzyn

Now it seems to me that at least four of these are not only political novels but polemical novels, that is, they were written with the hope or expectation of influencing readers’ political views. Michael Standaert would argue that difference between these novels and the Left Behind series is that they are not subservient to their political aims. But in what sense does 1984 fail to serve Orwell’s political intention? How can Solzhenitzyn’s novel be said to leading his politics? In fact, Ivan Denisovitch only works as a novel if one is aware of the political context in which it was written; as a self-standing novel, it is a litany of woe, a Book of Job with a devil but no god.

I would argue that the only things that separate a good polemic novel from a bad polemic novel are the standards of character, plot, style, concept, and structure. Subservience per se is beside the point. After all, if Standaert’s view is taken logically, then the Left Behind novels would be less objectionable if they were well-written. I think this is wrong. Left Behind novels may be bad books in literary terms, but what makes them worth fighting against is the morality, not the lack of literary virtues. These may, as Standaert intimates, be flip sides of the same coin. The moral simplifications of LaHaye’s mental universe are no doubt playing into the pathetic Good-Evil dichotomies that define the Left Behind characters.

As things stand, the Left Behind novels really appeal only to people who already believe the message. LaHaye’s threat to liberal politics is minimal from his novels. It is his actual on-the-ground political activity that damages liberalism, not his books. At worst, his bestsellers have helped finance his political activism, but as agents of change in themselves they are probably failures, just preaching to the converted. What scares me about LaHaye’s novels is not that they exist but that millions of people buy them. The poverty of LaHaye’s writing gives me comfort that however many readers he has, they are blinkered and unsophisticated readers who would not likely be reading anything better anyway. LaHaye’s literary incompetence is a consolation.

If LaHaye had produced a powerful, nuanced novel in the Left Behind universe, then that would be a book to fear.