A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Decoding For Beginners

A Children’s Bible reads like one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books updated for the 21st century. The children still live in their own world of adventure and discovery but sex and drugs are now incorporated as commonplace. Parents are no longer benign background figures but largely absent in their own world of alcohol and drug-induced haze and sexual exploits. The kids hate them and spend most of their time commenting about how unfortunate it is to have patents at all.

These modern children are not only aware of the sins of their parents, they also know that their greed, selfishness and general disregard for the world is destroying their future. Their parents essentially have no behavioural boundaries. But the young people - age from 8 to about 17 - instinctively know that civilised life requires rules (the one who has turned 18 is simply out of control and so beyond hope, already practising adulthood). So they invent various games and establish criteria for merits and demerits among themselves, thus inverting the conditions of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The narrative, appropriately held together by a girl named Eve, is peppered with biblical allusions - to the Hebrew Captivity in Egypt, the Exodus, the Flood, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, and the Saviour’s arrival, among others - rearranged, intertwined, and reinterpreted. There’s even a pretty good development of a theory of the Christian divine Trinity. It makes an interesting introduction to the process of exegesis, and not just of the Bible. It is simultaneously an interpretation of current social conditions as seen from a child’s perspective - essentially the futility of the unending attempt to shelter ourselves through wealth.

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