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The Last Day
by Glenn Kleier
Well . . . silly.
The Last Day will be pretty silly. At least, it will be if
Glenn Kleier's apocalyptic scenario comes to pass.
Try as I may, "silly" is the best one-word description of Kleier's
millennial novel that I can come up with. "Trendy" would be a close second.
Despite a few interesting ideas and a plot that is occasionally suspenseful,
and despite--or perhaps because of--the fact that it takes itself so seriously,
The Last Day is a silly, trendy apocalpyse for an irreligious,
self-absorbed age. Whatever else it may be, though, the novel--Kleier's first--is
a resounding success in two ways: commercially and critically. The commercial
success is due at least in part to good timing. Kleier and his publishers
had the saavy to get this book to press just as popular interest in the
approaching Third Millennium was beginning to gather momentum, but before
the market was inundated with millennial products. They were there first,
and they reaped the rewards, which include a deal with TriStar for an upcoming
TV miniseries. The critical success is much harder to explain. Despite an
array of serious defects,The Last Day has garnered scores of
rave reviews.1 Trendiness in subject
matter and attitude is the only explanation I can offer for the huge success
of this hackneyed, pretentious, silly novel.
The Last Day is divided not into traditional chapters
or sections but rather into 118 relatively brief numbered segments. Perhaps
"scenes" is the best term, because, in a clear nod to television shows such
as "The
X-Files" and (of course) the now-defunct series
"Millennium," Kleier
begins each with a place-date-time "screen subtitle." This approach quickly
becomes tiresome. After all, there are 118 of these scenes,
and many of them take place in a few key locations, so one ends up reading
"Mount of the Ascension, Jerusalem, Israel" or "The Vatican, Rome, Italy"
over and over. It is, however, only the most ubiquitous of many
annoyances.
The novel follows the adventures of Jonathan Feldman, ace reporter
for World Network News (WNN), and his wisecracking cameraman, a macho guy
saddled with the unlikely name of Breck Hunter. Yes, Breck, like
the shampoo. Kleier strives mightily to make these characters relevant and
to make them come alive: As the product of a Jewish-Catholic marriage, Feldman
is supposed to embody the tensions and controversies surrounding the messianic
tradition. He is also the honest seeker who wants to encounter God but is
put off by organized religion. Hunter is the no-nonsense, cynical tough guy
who is as quick with a quip or his fists as he is with his camera, a bad
boy with a heart of gold. But for all Kleier's efforts to turn them into
fully realized characters, these two remain bundles of popular clichés,
right down to the obligatory male fear of romantic commitment (a topic to
which we shall return presently).
Feldman and Hunter are not alone in their two-dimensionality.
In fact, there is scarcely a character in the vast cavalcade of humanity
populating The Last Day who isn't a walking stereotype. As main
characters, the two reporters actually fare rather well in comparison to
many of the minor players, who are nothing but ciphers. Especially noteworthy
in this regard are the members of the Martin family of Racine, Wisconsin,
whose defining trait is stolidity and for whom Kleier wrote dialogue so wooden
that reading it almost entails a risk of splinters. As a Nebraskan, I found
the author's depiction of supposedly typical Midwesterners downright insulting.
Then there is the matter of the Right Reverend Solomon T. Brady, D.D., a
greedy and unscrupulous televangelist. Although I have no problem whatsoever
with seeing corrupt, cynical TV preachers skewered, Brady is such a broad
stereotype and such an obvious and easy target that working him over is like
shooting fish in a barrel--where's the challenge?
Two of Kleier's Vatican characters deserve special mention:
Antonio Cardinal di Concerci and his colleague, Alphonse Bongiorno Cardinal
Litti. Yes, Bongiorno, like the greeting. One of these two nearly
attains believability; the other doesn't even come close. Unfortunately,
it is the scheming, ambitious di Concerci, whose role in The Last Day
is to mislead Pope Nicholas VI with bad advice, who seems almost real.
Litti, whose role consists of suffering for giving good advice and for doing
the right thing, is righteous indignation and Job-like patience personified--but
not a living, breathing person. Oh, well, I suppose it's always easier to
create a convincing heavy than a convincing hero.
As bad as they are, Kleier's characterization and dialogue
are not his worst problems. His prose is amateurish and inelegant, and its
defects necessarily pervade the entire novel. Here are a few of the author's
stylistic gems:
Kleier's next editor could do him a great favor simply by
forbidding him to use the word this.
Then there is Kleier's "saidism"--he is apparently terrified
of the word said and will go to just about any lengths to avoid
it. Perhaps some well-meaning writing coach once warned him of the evils
of overusing said, or perhaps someone presented him with a giant
thesaurus shortly before he began writing The Last Day. Whatever
the explanation, Kleier's characters ask, answer, respond, shout,
argue, interject, suggest, snap, question, retort, conjecture, complain,
agree, reason, fume, correct, and offer, but they
almost never say anything. And all this just in the first 44
pages!
But let us turn to the plot, arguably The Last Day 's
best feature: The story begins on Christmas Eve, 1999. The dynamic duo of
Feldman and Hunter is assigned to WNN's "Millennium Eve" project, covering
the convergence of various millennarian and apocalyptic sects on the Holy
Land. Their work takes on greater significance when a high-tech Israeli
installation in the Negev explodes, setting off a chain of events that
culminates in nothing less than the appearance of an alleged new Messiah.
This figure appears and disappears mysteriously and begins fulfilling a number
of messianic prophecies, for some time staying one step ahead of the pursuing
news crews. Early, badly blurred video footage seems to show a slender, bearded
young man. Eventually, however, the wandering prophet and teacher is revealed
to be not a man but a sapphire-eyed young woman of unearthly beauty who calls
herself "Jeza." Armed with an arresting gaze and an array of Jesus-like
abilities, Jeza is quickly hailed as God's new Anointed by some--and reviled
as the very Antichrist by others. For while Jeza delights the poor and
downtrodden (and those of progressive religious persuasion), she threatens
religious authorities and hierarchies. Moreover, there is the question of
her origin: Eventually, the ruined Negev installation is revealed as a secret
laboratory dedicated to the development of cloned Israeli supersoldiers with
experimental bio-computer chips imbedded in their brains. When Jeza's arrival
on the world stage is traced back to the Negev shortly after the lab's fiery
destruction, the suspicion arises that she may be an escapee from the
conflagration and that her powers may be technological rather than
supernatural.
To be fair, I have to admit that the plot of The Last Day
is occasionally entertaining and, especially at the end, even suspenseful.
For all the novel's flaws, the reader can't help wondering how Kleier will
resolve the "Jeza question." Unfortunately, even here he spoils the fun.
The author has loaded his story with numerous elements that are unbelievable,
offensive, or just plain silly, starting with the concept of the bio-computer
chips that Jeza may or may not be carrying around in her brain. The chips
are a good plot device and an intriguing idea in and of themselves, but Kleier
makes their creator, Dr. Jozef Leveque, a genius in so many fields that
the poor fellow seems more like a comic book "mad scientist" than a character
in a novel with serious intellectual and philosophical pretensions. And the
silliness doesn't end there. Quite the contrary--our author is just
getting warmed up.
Above I mentioned Feldman and Hunter's stereotypical male
fear of commitment. Although this might seem to be purely a characterization
problem, it crops up so often that it becomes a plot plot problem as well.
We learn a lot about the reporters' love lives: While Hunter
is breaking one female co-worker's heart by having an affair with another,
Feldman endangers his relationship with his beloved Anke by becoming infatuated
with Jeza (of all people). Kleier expends so much ink on the romances of
the WNN staffers that the topic becomes very tiresome. I found myself wondering
repeatedly and with growing annoyance what this soap opera-like preoccupation
with relationships had to do with the messianic/apocalyptic plot. (Ironically,
Feldman himself has a similar reaction when he must listen to a drunken Hunter
ramble on about their beautiful but troubled colleague, Erin: "Feldman screwed
up his face, not certain he wanted to hear this" [p. 244]. A rare moment
of insight on the author's part!) It isn't until the novel is nearly over
that Kleier finally makes his rather silly point: Feldman has been confusing
his soul's desire for divine love with his heart's desire for romantic love
(p. 594). Oh, so that's what's been going on for nearly 600 pages! What this
insight has to do with Hunter's skirt-chasing, I don't know, but his relationship
problems are likewise resolved by the novel's end.
In constructing his messianic scenario, Kleier exhibits a baffling
combination of knowledge and ignorance. On the one hand, he seems to know
quite a lot: He is obviously familiar with the Gospel accounts of Jesus'
life and cleverly builds parallel events into the life of Jeza. Even her
possible status as a clone can be construed as a sort of technological "virgin
birth." Kleier also knows his way around the apocalyptic prophecies of both
the Old and New Testaments and has Jeza fulfill many of those associated
with the Messiah's return, just as Jesus fulfilled prophecies of the Messiah's
first advent. Moreover, Kleier seems familiar with messianic beliefs in modern
Judaism as well as the Catholic tradition of purported "special revelations."
(I say "seems," because as a Protestant Christian, I am not sufficiently
familiar with either to judge the accuracy of Kleier's depictions.) Finally,
Kleier depicts the Vatican and its ritual pomp convincingly enough, at least
for a reader who admittedly has experienced them only in television broadcasts.
On the other hand, the things that Kleier gets more or less
right make the things he gets wrong all the more glaring and his ignorance
that more perplexing. Why, for example, this treatment of the name of the
purported new Messiah?
As if that weren't silly enough, there is the idea that everyone
all over the world would pronounce Jeza's name the same way. Nice try, Mr.
Kleier, but this just isn't the way people deal with names in foreign
languages. Even if we grant that the worldwide media coverage of Jeza would
mean that billions of people heard her pronounce her name, that doesn't mean
that everyone could pronounce it as she does. For example, Germans say "YAY-zus"
instead of "JEE-zus," because their language doesn't have the "dj" sound--hence,
they can't pronounce that sound without special instruction and practice.
Spanish-speakers say "hay-ZOOS" for similar reasons. And even if we
can pronounce an exotic name, we often prefer not to. We would
rather "domesticate" it by changing the spelling, the pronunciation,
or both to match the norms of our own native language. For instance,
most of us English speakers could probably pronounce the Spanish
name Cristobal Colombo if we wanted to, but we don't.
Even though the name isn't very hard to say, it looks and sounds "funny"
to us, so we change it to something more familiar: Cristopher Colombus.
So why "Jeza," universally pronounced "JEE-zuh"? In all likelihood,
the name would be both pronounced and spelled in a number of different ways
around the world. I suppose Kleier could be intentionally "bending the rules"
to underscore Jeza's special status, but I suspect the real explanation for
Jeza's silly, improbable name and its silly, improbable pronunciation
is just linguistic ignorance on Kleier's part.
Similar silliness characterizes Kleier's treatment of the Bible. At
one point, di Concerci shows Litti "
'an original Latin manuscript of the Gospel of Saint John' " (p. 223). Later
on, Jeza accuses the Vatican of hiding and supressing
countless manuscripts, among them, " 'recorded in Hebrew, the original Gospels
of Matthew and the lost Apocrypha of Thomas' " (p. 370). These statements
raise a number of questions: Why "Gospels of Matthew"?
Is or was there more than one? And what is "the lost Apocrypha of Thomas"
supposed to be? Does Kleier mean the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas ?
If so, it's not lost--English translations of it can be found in paperback
anthologies readily available in most any bookstore. And why gospels written
in Hebrew? The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but the early Christian
texts, both canonical and apocryphal, were written mainly in Koine Greek,
because of its widespread use in much of the territory that Rome took
from the successors of Alexander the Great. In the fictional world of his
novel, Kleier seems to be suggesting that the New Testament documents were
actually written in Hebrew (the liturgical language of Judaism) and that
these original texts were then replaced by doctored versions in Latin (the
liturgical language of Roman Catholicism). Granted, The Last Day
is a work of fiction, so Kleier may be altering historical facts
for effect. But I'm not sure what the effect is supposed to be, and once
again, I can't shake the suspicion that plain old ignorance is at work here:
Does Kleier even know that the early Church used Greek?
Normally in writing reviews of fiction I try to avoid giving
away any major plot twists, but in the case of The Last Day I
have to make one exception: The author allows Pope Nicholas, who seems to
be a basically good but fearful pontiff, to "forget" or subconsciously supress
his knowledge of when the Third Millennium truly begins. Because his secret
book of prophecy makes the timing of the arrival of the purported new Messiah
(before or after the beginning of the new millennium) the litmus test of
her authenticity, Nicholas's "forgetfulness" leads him to make the wrong
decision about her. This turn of events is so unbelievable as to be silly.
How could any pope not know when the millennium begins? After all, it was
a 6th-century monk who proposed a calendar
based on the life of Christ rather than one based on the reign of a Roman
emperor, a pope who ratified it, and another pope who modified it slightly
to give us our current calendar. Without this Christ-oriented calendar, there
wouldn't be any millennium. Moreover, I would hope that any pontiff would
also know that the monk's calculations were slightly off and that the Third
Millennium actually began quite uneventfully a few years ago. To base something
as momentous as the authenticity of a purported Messiah on the difference
between the years 2000 and 2001 is just silly, as is assuming that a pope
wouldn't know these things. I can only assume that Kleier is either ignorant
of these facts or chose to ignore them for the sake of his story.
While we are on the topic of the pope, I must also point out
that the author depicts the Vatican's interaction with Jeza in a way that
seems not just silly but downright stupid. Essentially, the Roman Catholic
Church tries to overawe Jeza and blunt her criticisms by displaying its full
pomp and pagentry. Given that Jeza has consistently preached in support of
the poor, this strategy does not seem likely to succeed. Perhaps we can blame
Nicholas's stupidity on his fear, but di Concerci, whom Kleier consistenly
depicts as a sort of criminal mastermind in ecclesiastical garb, certainly
ought to have known better.
Roman Catholics will find very little to like in The Last
Day. While a few individual Catholics (mainly Litti) are pious
Christians and decent human beings, the Catholic Church as an organization
takes a real drubbing. Kleier depicts a Rome guilty of hoarding great
wealth while millions of people starve and stooping to executions and the
suppression of inconvenient religious truths to maintain its authority.
On the other hand, the novel will offend Protestants and Orthodox Christians
by granting the Vatican precisely the sort of leadership role it constantly
arrogates to itself--Kleier allows Pope Nicholas and his closest advisor,
di Concerci, to represent all Christians in dealing with Jeza. Jews who read
The Last Day may well be offended to note that some Jewish
characters are depicted as acclaiming Jeza, a figure heavily influenced by
the Christian tradition, as God's true Messiah. Kleier truly is an
equal-opportunity offender!
Finally, there is Jeza's messianic program: As I mentioned
early on, it is trendy, by which I mean that it slams organized religion
and espouses a number of politically correct stances on current issues. Her
take on theology is a major plank in her "platform" and is easy to summarize:
Theology is bad.
Wait a minute. Aren't the Talmuds (there are two )
themselves interpretations? Doesn't Jeza know that Jews resent having their
scriptures called the "Old Testament"? And just what is "God's
message" that is supposedly in all these texts? Since people of goodwill
often can't agree on the central message of any one of these religious
traditions, how are we supposed to agree on their common message--especially
if we are forbidden to discuss or interpret them? All such discussion or
interpretation constitutes (as Feldman later puts it) "prying at God with
the crowbars of theology" (p. 602), and should be replaced by discussion
of the mind of God as revealed in nature, science, and mathematics (pp. 307-08).
Oh, yeah, that will work.
So there you have it. Read The Last Day if you must, but
beware! Using stereotypical characters, stilted dialogue, clumsy prose, and
sheer ignorance, Kleier has mixed up a veritable Plague of Silliness, and
it will be poured out on all who peruse this portentious tome!
1For a taste of this critical
acclaim, visit the Writers
Write Website and read
Claire
E. White's interview with Kleier. Then there's also the
Last Day
Website, which might just be better than the novel
itself.
2For detailed information, see the
entry "Jesus" in the second edition ofThe Dictionary of Deities and Demons
in the Bible, p. 467.
Copyright ©2000 by Steven R. Solomon. All rights reserved.
BEWARE, INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH, THE MILLENNIUM IS UPON YOU!
The Last Day dawns, and as the prophets of old fortell, that Day shall be
. . .
This talk of Judgement Day set the agitated assembly on further
edge. (p. 306)
Di Concerci narrowed his eyes at this surprising creature.
(p. 308)
Feldman buried his face in his hands as the huge bascilica
reverberated with soulful agitation. (p. 439)
Feldman's mind churned, failing to assimilate this puzzling
information. (p. 465)
An uncomfortable Intelligence Commander David Lazzlo sat next
to a solemn ex-Chief of Staff General Moshe Zerim. (p. 469)
The bewildered onlookers had drawn close in dumbfounded regard
to witness this unprecedented exhibition. (p. 580)
"I have a name. The name God has chosen for me is Jeza. My
name is Jeza." She turned and was gone again.
There was no universal agreement on the
correct spelling of her name, as she didn't bother to clarify it. Hereafter
it was often spelled "Jeeza," "Jeze," "Jesa" or "Gisa." But there was no
disagreement on the pronunciation. It was "JEE-zuh." (p. 150)
My, my, God certainly has become media-savvy in the last 2,000
years. He gave His first Messiah a Hebrew name, yehosu'a (or
yesu'a ), even though the Jews were a conquered people and their
language was thus not a "power language" in the mighty Roman Empire. It was
not until the Messiah's followers began to spread the new faith throughout
the Empire that their Master's name became known in the lingua franca of
the time, Koine Greek, as Iesous, from which the English form,
Jesus, ultimately
derives.2 But in the meantime,
God has obviously grasped the advantages of a name in English, the current
lingua franca and power language of worldwide electronic communication. So
although she is an Israeli Jew and logically ought to have a Hebrew name,
God cleverly gave His new Messiah a name based on the English Jesus
instead of on the Hebrew yesu'a. Presto! A media-ready
Redeemer. Good idea, o Lord!
"In this manner shall you spread God's Word,"
[Jeza] replied: "To all you meet, give the writings of the Koran, the Talmud,
the Veda, the Avesta, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible--all the great
spiritual texts of the world. God's message is in all of them. But do not
interpret God's Word for others, for that is how the corruption begins."
(P. 307)
Edited February 12, 2000. Revised November 13, 2000.
Please send comments to
srsgm@pacbell.net.