not wanted on the voyage
...ke a travelling circus, moving on to his death. But there is violence in this wondrous place as well. Findley does not ignore the faults of this lost world, even as he takes Christianity and its stories to task for their own shortcomings. Japeth, one of Noah's sons, has a run-in with a roving band of cannibals and is turned purple as a result of it, creating an ever-present reminder of the violent world the ark-dwellers are leaving behind. This is not a toothless pastoral paradise. It is merely an enticing otherworld, beautiful in its unattainability. The novel traces the progress from the mythical to the mundane, beginning with this exciting and exotic world before the flood and ending in a place devoid of wonder, crippled by a new, insidious kind of corruption every bit as horrible as the old corruptions that provoked the flood. In this world, God is dead and the moral of the story is the potential immorality of the story, making this all seem a little like a nihilistic fairy-tale. But that only tells part of the story, and to do so would be to commit the very crime Findley is condemning in this novel. The novel's position on the state of God on earth is merely a fraction of what Findley is trying to convey. Much of the dramatic force of the novel comes from the domestic power struggle that is played out in this setting of apocalyptic fantasy. The chief conflict is between Noah and his wife, who fight a battle of wills on the ark that divides their family. Noah is a patriarch - a harsh, authoritative figure who uses his position as God's agent to control his family and make his wishes law. He stands for the empty rituals and arbitrary orders, a hollow life emptied of imagination and filled up with obedience. His wife is defiant, struggling against the "purification" of the world. She defies the sacrifices and rebels against the notion that the new world will have to built upon the bodies of the old one. Quite obviously, there is a deeply mournful element to the novel. Findley laments the loss of a sense of endless possibility that seemed to exist before Noah and his values of cruel practicality took charge of the world as God turned his head and washed his hands, almost literally, of the whole mess. Fragments of pagan stories, exemplified with unicorns, faeries, dragons, and talking animals, are drowned out by the singular Christian tale in this ver...