★★☆☆☆ The Substitute Guest, by Grace Livingston Hill
A world without moral ambiguity
The Substitute Guest
Grace Livingston Hill
A world without moral ambiguity
Every character in The Substitute Guest is either a good person or not that. What's more, the bad people are very bad, and also remarkably stupid. The good people are no geniuses, but there is a difference. The bad people tend towards petty criminal elements of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. The lapses of the good people tend more towards Jonesing for that Darwin Award. Fortunately, when you are the hero of a book whose author needs you to live in order for the plot to continue, any level of stupidity is survivable. The plot of The Substitute Guest is one of those plots that depends on people doing stupid things to generate action. [spoiler1]
This was all clumsy, but what particularly struck me was the entire lack of moral ambiguity. If you're a Good Person in The Substitute Guest, you always know what is The Right Thing To Do. It may not be what you want to do, but The Right Thing is always entirely clear.
Now, The Substitute Guest is a "Christian Romance". Is this entire lack of moral struggle a necessary characteristic of Christian literature? It should not be. Even a good Christian will at times find it difficult to discern the right decision. People who always know what is right are the raw material from which suicide bombers are made.
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For instance, our hero Alan Monteith agrees to deliver medicine to a woman who will die if she doesn’t get it before 6:00 pm Christmas Eve. Alan and Daryl struggle up a mountain in a blizzard to complete this errand. OK, they’re saving a life -- not stupid. The family of the sick woman urges Alan and Daryl to stay the night. What do they do? They say, “No, we have to get back to our family for Christmas.” They set forth on foot, in the dark, in a blizzard, to follow a narrow mountain path back home. (And they get lost, and Daryl turns his ankle so he can’t walk.) That’s how you earn a Darwin Award!