Interstellar and Adeodatus: Diverging visions, converging hopes

Freedom by Michael O’Brien, 2003

I’m on a transatlantic flight, sandwiched between a two-hundred pound man and a six-foot-three teen, doing something I never do. Reading. Of course I read, but usually by audiobook, usually in more comfortable surroundings. But today is different. Today I received an unexpected email from Ignatius Press.

Ignatius, with whom I’ve previously published, occasionally sends me a novel, asking me to read it and provide a blurb. Most of the time I decline, as I’m just too busy, but today is different. Today they’ve asked me to review Michael O’Brien’s forthcoming novel, Adeodatus.

O’Brien is a Catholic writer, and though I am not Catholic, I’ve read many of his books and had the honor of speaking with him personally on several occasions, including an afternoon tea in his garden, and have always been struck by his humility and wisdom. He is a writer, a painter, a man of faith. He has lived among the Inuit in the Arctic, and survived Canada’s notorious residential school system. O’Brien is not naive to the ways of the world. Many of the characters in his stories, including the central figure of Adeodatus—a mysterious boy, terribly burned—endure great suffering, but become beacons of hope.

The 747 takes off from Zurich airport, nosing into the sky. Around me passengers begin tapping their seat screens, cueing up movies. Babies are crying and somebody is coughing violently. I ignore it all. I read.

Glancing up after a while, I see the landscape through a window, the Roche corporate towers rising over the Rhine River like shards of white glass. Later comes the patchwork of the French countryside, Paris sprawled under a heat wave, fringes of England, Ireland, until the last vestige of Europe is gone and nothing remains but the pelagic blue of the Atlantic.

I’m reading O’Brien’s novel off my phone. I never read on phones. I never read ebooks. But O’Brien’s story has me hooked. The world has suffered a calamity, the sort of thing you often see in dystopias, the cities blast zones, highways clogged with cars of dead. Two survivors, a middle-aged woman and a burned, mute boy, make their way through the chilling ruins of the country on foot. The journey is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, less unsettling, but more meditative. If the world has been destroyed, and you’re one of the few survivors, then what is the meaning of it all?

Why me? asks the woman, looking down at her disfigured companion. Why has this . . . this tragedy been thrust into my life?

They meet other survivors, including the pilot of a Twin Otter airplane, a thoughtful, Indiana Jonesy figure. They fly westward because that is where the spiritual signs have pointed.

Signs.

I look up.

Somebody is watching Interstellar in the row in front of me—a film I’ve seen once or twice before. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) are in a spaceship, talking about their mission to save humanity.

Eureka! Interstellar, like Adeodatus, is about a dying world and a search for salvation. Surely it’s a coincidence?

Or a sign?

Either way it gets me thinking. The global dystopia in Interstellar is caused by an environmental catastrophe. The problem is non-spiritual. In Adeodatus the world is destroyed by a mysterious fire. A heavenly fire, maybe. But this raises questions.

If God is love, why would he send a destroying fire of such magnitude, with so many victims? By the looks of it, a huge portion of mankind had been destroyed. On the other hand, if he had not directly sent the chastisement, clearly he had permitted it. Hidden beneath the question was our human tendency to blame others for our own follies. And God was surely the primary Other…

Interstellar’s solution to the dystopia is technological: leave doomed Earth, and find a new planet for humanity. Adeodatus’ solution is spiritual: stay on doomed Earth, and trust God to remake the Earth. O’Brien—as if he knows I’m thinking about Interstellar, as if he’s transported himself through space-time to write into my present moment—seems aware of the Interstellar-type solution and rejects it: “The kingdom of God isn’t a convenient escape pod from the burning spaceship Earth. It isn’t a trite film…”

Maybe he’s seen the movie too?

I can’t believe I’m reading off a smartphone. Seriously, this is so un-Peco. The phone is perched sideways on my food tray, my thumb scrolling through the digital pages, my bloodshot eyes seeking occasional rest through the window. The white mountains of Greenland rising behind a roof of cloud. The rugged landscape of Labrador, where ancient glacial claws gouged up blue fords and lakes and waterways. And as I fly, the Twin Otter of Adeodatus flies, now and then touching down in search of more fuel and picking up more survivors, each with their own story and struggles.

When I finish the novel after six or seven hours, I feel nourished. As if I’ve come out better than I went in. Which is often how I feel after reading Michael O’Brien. How all art should make us feel. Elevated.

Then I tap my seat screen and watch Interstellar. What hits me on this viewing, surprises me actually, is that its underlying hope is closer to O’Brien’s than I had remembered.

I want you to imagine somebody—a man. Here are his qualities: he might seem to be a ghost, but he turns out to be a person. He can pass through higher dimensions of time and space. He works through the power of love. He reveals his identity through signs. He is on a mission to save humanity. If you’ve read the Gospels, you’ll know that all of these qualities describe Jesus; yet the same qualities describe the hero of Interstellar, Cooper. It’s as if the worldview of the film wants to have it both ways. It wants to believe that science will save us, but it also insists that there is a mystery, which is love and relationship, which is beyond our world and our true salvation. Interstellar refuses to call this mystery God, as that would subvert non-religious worldview of the film. But it’s there, unmistakable.

The aircraft descends with queasy lurches, a lake looming up below, a golf course, subdivisions, highways, the airport. If there’s a shared message in Interstellar and Adeodatus, it’s that our technology will only take us so far. We sense there’s something more out there, or in here, transcendent, good, true, our Source. Our bedrock.

My flying machine touches down, tires striking tarmac with furious glancing blows. The teen next to me, my son, says, “We should clap.”

I smile, thinking, he’s right. And we clap.

Everybody starts clapping.

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