A CHILDREN’S BIBLE. By Lydia Millet. Norton. 224 pages. $25.95.
“After every war, someone has to tidy up.” This is the opening line of “The End and the Beginning,” a poem by the great Wislawa Symborska.
Lydia Millet’s new novel, “A Children’s Bible,” deals with the climatic equivalent of war. Although it reads like a fable, the novel isn’t set in some projected dystopian future. The apocalypse is now, the result of a great carelessness. The adults have abdicated, and the children have to do the cleaning up. “A Children’s Bible” imagines scene after urgent scene as the children plot to salvage the Earth while the adults pour another drink.
“A Children’s Bible” opens with a backward glance at paradise: “Once we lived in a summer country. In the woods there were treehouses, and on the lake there were boats.” Loons call. The children jump off the dock as the sky turns violet. Uphill from the dock, deer amble on the lawn.
The summer idyll begins in a repurposed symbol of greed: a 19th-century mansion built by robber barons. Our narrator is Evie, a smart teenager who adores her younger brother Jack (“a prince among boys”).
The parents are out of sync with their own children. Millet shows them as grotesques who leave “a trail of slime behind them.” An artsy and educated gang, they are college buddies who have reunited for a “last hurrah.” Just for the occasion, they revive their college drug habits and spend their days refilling each other’s glasses. They’ve given up.
The young person’s beef is against all the generations of oldsters who didn’t strive to leave a better world.
As the children are breaking away from their parents and taking control of their own lives, Terry, one of the boys, makes a grand speech. He tells the others that unlike dragonflies who die too soon, “our species hung out way past its expiration date. It turned into litter, a scourge, a blight, a scab, an atrophied limb.” He winds up with an Icarus allusion: “We should rise on feathered, shimmery wings and fly up up toward the sun.”
Whether the metaphor is singeing one’s wings in a flight to the sun or biting the apple and losing Paradise, Millet’s story favors risk taking and all the consequences that ensue.
Early in their wanderings, someone gives Jack “A Children’s Bible.” He clings to it as a beautiful story, a training manual, and a real-life prophesy. He tells Evie about a talking snake and a girl with her name. The eviction from paradise is very much to the point. A flood (and mandatory evacuation) will come, along with more ties to the stories in Jack’s book.
Jack and some of the other kids collect a menagerie of animals to join them on a platform that is, pointedly “smaller than the Ark.” In these hectic times, people are getting sick. Maybe it’s the plague. When some of the parents contract dengue fever, it is up to the children to transfuse good blood into their ailing families.
Jack remains a one-boy force for good. His life is a daily reminder to Evie that she has to have faith. They are not the only ones saving the animals and keeping watch. The idea of goodness gains force, even as they are confronted with so much badness.
As they are making their getaway from their parents, the children meet Burl, a gardener for a large estate, who offers refuge. Some “Angels” come along when things get tougher. A baby is born in a barn. Jesus is Jack’s imaginary friend.
Millet doesn’t preach, but there are lessons embedded in her tale of runaway children, lapsed parents and haphazard salvation. She even gives us a God figure: the “owner,” a nice octogenarian lady who swoops down in her helicopter, performs a couple of minor miracles, speaks sign language to the deaf and leaves.
Confronted with so much chaos, Evie calms herself by thinking of organized systems: the periodic table, the hangers in her closet, the list of irregular French verbs.
As the novel trails off, she is still making lists of what will matter in the future. It’s a lovely, comforting list that she recites to Jack: “The comets and the stars will be our eyes. … The clouds, the moon. The dirt, the rocks, the water and the wind. We call that hope, you see.” The end.
