Writing with conviction

A few months ago in en Esther Lowry lamented that there was so little Christian fiction around*.

Or at least so little good Christian fiction. She’s right: many of the novels on the shelves of Christian booksellers are clichéd and sentimental, stories in which things always work out neatly for the godly. There’s plenty to be said about why this is the case: there’s the legacy of 19th century evangelical squeamishness about entertainment and art, and the relatively small market for these kinds of books.

Maybe, though, the biggest problem is our feeling that God what really wants is a salesman or woman with shiny white teeth to do his job, one who can supply the before-and-after photos that show repentance as a perfect antidote to the struggles of this world.

What is Christian Fiction

But there’s another question we need to ask: what do we mean by Christian fiction? Are we talking about novels written by Christians, or novels which have explicitly Christian themes? Or even novels published by Christian publishers, especially those with soft-focus photos and swirly font on the cover? Because whilst there some very badly written books around which cover all these bases, there are still a good number of excellent works which fit the first two and others well worth reading which maybe tick just one of these. We just sometimes have to look further than our evangelical camp.

A gift

One new book which seems to cover both is Pachinko by Korean-American Min Jin Lee. I was given it for Christmas by a family member. Nothing in the Sunday Times (‘a rich, moving novel’) and Guardian (‘vivid and immense’) reviews or on the book cover suggested a gospel dimension, but when I started reading I found characters who were active Christians, flawed, but not caricatures, and a plot which, delicately and in parts, had echoes of Bible narrative.

Pachinko is a family saga which begins in Korea in 1910 with a poor couple and their child, Sunja, a naïve teenager who is seduced by a wealthy business man and falls pregnant. Sunja is saved by a Korean pastor who marries her and takes her to Japan where the novel ends in 1989, still focused on Sunja and her complicated, extended family.

Pinball lives

Through this narrative we learn something of the history of Japan and Korea, and especially of struggles of Korean migrants in Japan. The word Pachinko refers to a pinball game popular in Japan and played in arcades often owned by Koreans. Pachinko is important in the plot, but it also acts as a metaphor for the precarious lives of the characters; the machines are manipulated by the arcade owners so that some win, but not too many, and yet the game still looks like chance.

This is not a neat, moralising story. There is material which is hard to read and sexual detail some readers may find uncomfortable. It hasn’t been written to convert or even to comfort hearts, but it makes you look again at the world and explore a Christian world-view, and the history of Christian people.

In a fascinating interview on The Atlantic website Min Jin Lee describes her rejection of the subjectivity which is common to so much fiction, especially in first person story-telling, which makes the reader empathise completely with characters. Instead she seeks to retain a distance and so allow the reader to question motives and actions of characters, as well as to consider bigger issues of justice in society. What led her to this, she says, is the story of Joseph, especially the key verse ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, what is now being accomplished, the saving of many lives’ (Genesis 50.20). She says ‘I’m interested …in… the ways goodness comes through suffering. And in creating radical empathy through art.’ A greater empathy can come, she contends, when we lift our eyes away from the individual.

In this attitude Min Jin Lee stands in the fine company of Marilynne Robinson or Flannery O’Connor, two writers who have written with Christian conviction and fearlessness (and who are lauded by secular critics). I have to admit that Pachinko isn’t up there as a Great Classic Novel, but it does entertain the reader, stirring heart and head. And it is an encouraging reminder that there are artists in the 21st century who are ready to think hard about faith in fiction. Is it a Christian novel? I don’t quite know what that means, but it is a novel worth reading.

*’The Problem with Christian Fiction’, January en.