A Children's Bible

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Animals

In a story concerned primarily with outlining humanity’s devastation of the natural world, animals feature prominently as reminders of the widespread consequences of global warming. Evie’s conservation-minded brother Jack has learned about the “sixth mass extinction”—a calamitous dying off of countless species and genera due to human activity—and A Children’s Bible dramatizes the growing vulnerability of the many animals that people often take for granted. As Jack points out, animals are not at “fault” for the growing dangers of human-caused storms, floods, and widespread environmental damage. Throughout the book, Jack takes on the role of the animals’ Noah-like savior, as if to do penance for the sins of his own species. Significantly, the parents possess knowledge of animals, and show off this expertise by comparing Val, an avid climber, to a variety of monkeys such as gibbons, macaques, capuchins, and marmosets. However, they tellingly expend their knowledge in ersatz wit instead of putting it to more constructive use; this pattern highlights their general betrayal of science and the potential of the human mind. By contrast, Jack and his friend Shel become the novel’s moral center as they go to heroic lengths to find shelter for countless animals threatened by the storm. After armed looters invade the farm, Jack and Shel risk their lives to shield the goats from the trigger-happy militants, and as Jack tells Evie, “‘We’re not supposed to sacrifice the animals. We’re supposed to save them. I’d rather sacrifice me” (162). Jack is indiscriminate in his love for animals, showing equal tenderness for skunks, snakes, and doves, as well as opossums and mice. A Children’s Bible therefore identifies all animals as crucial (and increasingly fragile) roots of the tree of life and frames the shortsighted indifference of humans to animals’ welfare as a mortal sin.

Substance Escapism

A theme of A Children’s Bible is the human tendency to deny what is right in front of one’s face, and the more catastrophic this unwelcome truth, the more desperate the crutches used to prop up the specific character’s “business as usual” self-gratification and complacency. “The parents,” who have chosen to party the summer away in a rented mansion rather than facing their responsibilities to the natural world, spend almost the entire novel in a more-or-less oblivious fog of intoxication. As back-to-back crises rock their fragile outpost and egos, they simply increase their use of substances (alcohol, cocaine, Ecstasy). Although they are well apprised of the climatic catastrophes to come and their own partial responsibility for them, the parents do not find ways to contribute solutions as the children do. Instead, they smugly refer to their months-long reunion as their “last hurrah,” as if they are well aware that this season could be the last temperate and survivable summer of their era. As the situation continuously worsens, they find ever more self-indulgent ways to escape reality until they ultimately “vanish” from the narrative in quasi-magical fashion.

The adults are hardly alone in this urge toward escapism. The children, who are portrayed as being far more ecologically conscientious than their parents, and are more responsible toward each other, nevertheless pilfer and imbibe their parents’ substances whenever they can, and accept high-grade marijuana from the wealthy kids they meet at the beach. For the children, self-medication seems less a response to guilt or fear than it is a way of numbing their boredom and disgust with their parents, who have set the worst possible example for them. The kids’ use of these chemical distractions is also much less frequent and destructive than their parents’; for instance, in times of peril, they mostly remain sober and alert so that they can focus on solutions, and they never fully surrender to the escapist fog of drug-fueled denial.

The Great House

The large, old, ornate mansion that the parents have rented for their bacchanalian “last hurrah” symbolizes the fragile and unsustainable infrastructure of modern civilization itself, which has been built on ecologically destructive policies and industries. The mansion, which is festooned with kitschy bric-a-brac that appropriates and banalizes nature, such as a wooden pig in a baby bonnet and a tuxedoed duck with “creepy blank eyes” (11), was built by “robber barons” of the Gilded Age: industrialists who greatly escalated the burning of fossil fuels. When an epochal, nationwide storm hits—the culmination of two centuries of carbon-fueled global warming—the formidable-seeming “great house” is shaken to its foundations and almost falls apart. Likewise, far beyond the house’s crumbling walls, vast swaths of the once-great United States collapse into famine, disease, and anarchy as roads and bridges are washed out, the power grid fails, and the supply chain is destroyed.

Significantly, the great house is merely rented—not owned—by its irresponsible and insouciant residents, implying that human civilization itself may have taken out a short-term lease on its own existence. One of the paintings in the house depicts a bear standing on his hind legs, as if “begging,” and Evie at first interprets him as a victim of the 19th-century robber barons, who may have turned him into a rug. However, after the storm hits, she sees him prophetically as a “bear of the future” (67) who is reclaiming his mastery over the natural world after humankind has gone extinct. As the great house’s walls splinter under the wind and rain, humanity’s lease is close to an end; and other, less self-destructive species are newly liberated and are more than ready to fill the void.