A Children's Bible

“The great house had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.”

The vacation house rented by “the parents” for their college reunion is a Gilded Age mansion built over a century ago by New York tycoons as a summer retreat from the heat of the city. The renters are middle-class professionals whom Evie accuses of retreating from their obligations to the environment and to the future; they use the vacation house as a way to shelter from the consequences of rising global heat, and their escape is aided by liberal doses of drugs and alcohol. The “vague circles” of their listless wanderings in the house mirror that of their narcissistic, ineffectual lives, which have done little or nothing to make the world a more sustainable place.

“We were strict with the parents: punitive measures were taken. Thievery, mockery, contamination of food and drink.”

Millet’s novel reverses the usual parent-child dynamic. Here, the children are strict with their parents, punishing their irresponsible or embarrassing behavior with underhanded tricks. Their “contamination of food and drink” is a passive-aggressive recompense for the parents’ own contribution to the pollution of the planet.

“Those old initials could harsh my mellow fast. Maybe the offspring of the robber barons themselves had carved them—the scions of the emperors of timber or steel or rail, long since turned into baggy triple-chinned matrons of the Upper East Side.”

The idyllic treehouses that provide a haven for Evie and her friends are carved with initials from past generations: a sobering reminder that all children age, often ignobly. Here, Evie betrays a grudging respect for the “robber barons” of yore, contrasting their pioneering strength and sense of purpose (“timber or steel or rail”) with their “baggy, triple-chinned” offspring, which she connects with the impotent aimlessness of her parents’ circle of friends. In her mind, at least the robber barons built things such as “the great house” and had some consequence in the real world.

“My own small brother, Jack, was a prince among boys. When we contracted poison ivy he came only to me, refusing to ask a parent for assistance. I felt proud. Jack had a sense of duty.”

Evie admires her nine-year-old brother for recognizing her as the responsible member of the family. According to her, Jack shows unique insight for his age; his “sense of duty” is not only toward his sister but also toward the natural world, which has been neglected by their parents. In turn, Evie gives Jack the nurture and regard that their parents’ generation has failed to pass on to the young.

“Those wings were baller, man. Icarus totally ignored the specs. Basically, the kid was a dick.”

The novel’s teenagers discuss the myth of Icarus, whom the pompous Terry proffers as a model of a visionary and innovator because he soared toward the sun on artificial wings. However, the tech-savvy David points out that the wings were actually invented by Daedalus, Icarus’s father, who warned his son not to fly too close to the sun—a “spec” that Icarus ignored, to his doom. The anecdote is a reminder that science and technology can easily be misused by the reckless or greedy, leading to disaster.

“Politicians claimed everything would be fine. […] That was how we could tell it was serious. Because they were obviously lying. […] We knew who was responsible, of course: it had been a done deal before we were born.”

Evie claims the moral high ground in the climate change debacle, rightly blaming the looming eco-apocalypse on previous generations. However, this notion that disaster has long been a “done deal” echoes her parents’ sense of futility and powerlessness; and if it was all decided before Evie was born, her parents’ own responsibility for it must be minimal (as a father later points out). Both generations have their own unconstructive coping mechanisms: drug- and alcohol-fueled denial for the adults, anger and passive-aggressive “punitive measures” for the teens.

“The parents insisted on denial as a tactic. Not science denial exactly—they were liberals. It was more a denial of reality.”

The rage of the novel’s teens and of the novel itself is aimed not at misinformed deniers of climate change, but at aging “liberals” who know the truth but hide their heads in the sand and lie to their children about the catastrophes to come. Refusing to follow their example, Evie makes it a point to tell her younger brother the truth as she understands it about the global situation.

“That was the sad thing about my molecules: they wouldn’t remember him.”

Evie, an apostle of science, does not take refuge in religious promises of an afterlife. She values Jack, her big-hearted brother, above most other things in her life, and so she laments that her memories of him will die along with her body. Though her molecules themselves may long endure, her individuality as a thinking being will not. These sad reflections foreshadow her revelation at the novel’s end, when she tells Jack that “art”—humanity’s way of seeing—will always survive in some form.

“It’s like, if you have a nice garden to live in then you should never leave it.”

The message that Jack takes from the story of Adam and Eve is the same as the novel’s. He perceives Eden (or Earth itself) as a beautiful, nurturing habitat that should be regarded as a miracle and protected, not destroyed or abandoned. Within the context of the novel, the older generations’ failure to grasp this simple truth represents a second “Fall of Man,” and Jack’s instant understanding of the situation suggests that children may be more open to the Bible’s lessons than adults.

“Then Kay picked up a rock, leaned over and bashed her sister on the head with it. Hard.”

Kay’s assault on her sister Amy echoes the biblical story of Cain’s attack on his brother Abel, purportedly the world’s first murder. Luckily, Amy is not killed but merely concussed. Additionally, Kay and Amy are fighting over a baby doll, which may allude to King Solomon’s judgment (1 Kings 3:16-28) on the two women who fought over a baby. (Pointedly, there are no metaphorical “Solomons” among the novel’s adults to mitigate the conflict and pass judgment.) Thus, although much of the novel’s action appears in the form of explicit biblical parallels, Millet also suggest that even as events repeat themselves, people refuse to learn from history and parables alike.

“The robber barons might have shot him and used him for a rug. But now I could see him as a bear of the future, when men had disappeared from the hills and fields, their old paths overgrown. And the bears and wolves were masters again.”

Evie looks at a painting of a bear in the “great house” and envisions a future in which wildlife has reclaimed the world from humanity. Just weeks earlier, she saw the painting differently, as an image of a long-dead bear who was a victim of rapacious humans. However, the recent catastrophic storm has caused her to see humans as the endangered species. It is unclear whether her reimagining of the work is a vision of hope or merely a portrayal of realism.

“‘Evie,’ said Jack. ‘We have to save the animals. Like Noah did.’”

Jack, who has had no religious upbringing, nevertheless sees the real-world relevance of certain stories in his copy of A Child’s Bible, particularly at this moment of near-biblical crisis. Knowing that animals will be endangered by the storm, he takes inspiration from the story of Noah, who saved the world’s animals from the Great Flood by sheltering two of each in a massive ark.

“‘They found a guy in some reeds in my book! A baby, though. They brought him to the princess of Egypt,’ he told us.”

With the appearance of a stranger (Burl) on a small raft in the reeds, the biblical parallels continue. An obvious Moses figure, Burl will lead the children on an exodus from the great house to safer ground. In a sense, the novel’s biblical allusions are hopeful, serving as a reminder that humanity and the natural world have been through numerous cataclysms and have always endured.

“‘Not sure what species, actually,’ reflected Burl. ‘It had these bright-orange flowers.’”

Moses’s “burning bush” makes a brief appearance in the form of a singular shrub with fiery blossoms, swarming menacingly with mosquitoes. (These mosquitoes will presumably be the source of the adults’ dengue fever, a “plague” like those that Moses and God visited upon Egypt.) Just as the burning bush in Exodus spoke in the voice of God and told Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, this bush tells Burl that it is time to leave.

“We read how the storm had flooded the subway tunnels in New York, and in Boston the river had overflowed its banks.”

The protagonists receive the news that their cataclysmic storm and flood are not local but national disasters, which is unprecedented for the modern age. This is a turning point in the story, for rather than merely having idle conversations about a future cataclysm, the characters must face the fact that global warming can no longer be denied or wished away. The disaster also augurs a breakdown in social and civil order, which in turn raises the specter of anarchy and mass violence.

“First rules. Uh. She’s the owner. So we gotta do what she says. And also respect her.”

At the farm where the group has taken refuge, Burl and Val deliver the owner’s 10 rules to the others, just as Moses brought God’s “Ten Commandments” to the Hebrews after their flight from Egypt. Significantly, the owner’s first rules correspond roughly to the Ten Commandments themselves, and only when these rules are broken does the owner herself arrive and set things right.

“As I watched them run and throw, the glide of the disk through the air, things felt normal for a second. I had a quick flash of suspicion: maybe we’d invented the rest. Made it up for a lark, the storm and falling-down trees. The dead mother.”

Like many who have suffered tragedy or trauma, Evie flirts momentarily with denial—the comforting fantasy that the disasters and trauma were merely imagined. Ironically, her brief lapse reflects the attitude that her parents’ generation has adopted for decades. However, Evie’s position also implies that it is far easier to deny what lies ahead than what has already happened.

“The more time passed, the more any flat image began to seem odd and less and less than real. Uncanny delicate surfaces. Had we always had them? […] We’d had so many pictures. Pictures just everywhere, every hour, minute, or second. […] But now they were foreign. Now we saw everything in three dimensions.”

Deprived of their devices—their secondhand windows into the world—the children are learning to process and appreciate direct experiences, focusing on the “topography” of the world around them rather than getting lost in the labyrinth of the screen. Thus, the disaster proves to be liberating for them, even revelatory. It deprives them of their technological devices and suggests renewal as they embrace a “land of milk and honey” and learn to see the nuances of others’ behavior and become more forgiving.

“They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs. Each one had special needs.”

As she grows to see matters in “three dimensions,” Evie begins to let go of the anger and contempt that have long defined her relationship with her parents and their friends. She now realizes that, like everyone else throughout time, her parents “wanted to be different” (140) but had been disappointed. What goes unsaid is that Evie’s own hopes for herself may someday fail as well, and then she may need someone else’s sympathy and forgiveness.

“See this, Juice? Science comes from nature. It’s kind of a branch of it. Like Jesus is a branch of God. And if we believe science is true, then we can act. And we’ll be saved.”

Jack draws a new revelation from his Bible storybook, claiming that if nature is God, and science is humans’ understanding of nature, then Jesus (God’s incarnation in a human body) must represent science. From this perspective, if believing in Jesus will result in salvation, then science alone can save mankind. Of course, as David observes of Icarus, science and technology are a double-edged sword, for their improper use has doomed mankind to increasingly hostile climate events.

“Blood ran down his hand from a staple right through the center of his palm.”

As if to confirm Jack’s identification of nature and science with Jesus, the biologist Mattie is subjected to a version of crucifixion, as the farm’s invaders torture him by driving staples through his palm and tying him to a tree. Years earlier, a broken bottle went straight through Mattie’s foot, so this latest wound makes his stigmata more or less complete.

“Once we had let them do everything for us—assumed they would. Then came the day we didn’t want them to. […] Still later we found out that they hadn’t done everything at all. They’d left out the important part. […] And it was known as the future.”

Evie recalls her traumatic disillusionment with her parents’ generation, whom she once assumed had done their best to protect their children and prepare them for the future. The fact that these “so-called figures of authority” have failed to achieve this goal—their most sacred duty—for reasons of sloth and greed, is a brutal awakening for her.

“‘Look! See? The promised land,’ I said to Jack, and nudged him to glance up from his tablet. […] ‘We already had the promised land, Evie,’ he said softly.”

As the caravan of children and parents enters the exclusive gated community where Juicy’s porn-director father has his mansion, Evie tries to cheer up her little brother with a reference to Moses’s “promised land,” but he is having none of it. Looking up from his “tablet” (another Mosaic allusion), he refers wistfully to the life they have left behind, where they were living side-by-side with animals on a farm: a harmonious “peaceable kingdom” that was destroyed by the armed looters.