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Originally Posted by issybird
There's a version of Christianity in the US that says that God rewards prayers with material prosperity. On the one hand, that seems an extreme example of what Carroll deplores, doing good in the expectation of reward. At the same time, he's careful to put no limitations on God or the efficacy of prayer. However, people of religious bent have to be comfortable with paradox and Carroll is manifestly even more so than most. I thought him unnecessarily hard on Eric, who lives an upright life and even saves Bruno, where the believers were impotent. Clearly Carroll was no fan of secular humanism.
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I was in my first year at university when I had a religious friend tell me that it didn't matter how good a person was, or how "correctly" they lived their life, if they didn't believe in God then they were damned. So Carroll's view of the world doesn't surprise me.
Excluding Eric on the grounds of lacking belief does seem harsh to me, but it is not unrealistic, then or now (although being excessively realistic is not something Carroll is too concerned about). But it does make the text more difficult to approach, and the moral positioning more obscure, unless you share that view.
Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I thought that Carroll signaled that at the very beginning, when the Lord Chancellor seemed to address Mister Sir directly, although Mister Sir immediately became incorporeal subsequently. Or, one thought that was with me, why not assume that others were shifting between worlds as well, so anyone's seemingly irrelevant remark might be addressed to yet another world equally real or unreal. Once you have more than one universe, there's no reason not to infer multitudes.
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I actually thought it may come out to be more direct than that. A number of times I thought I was seeing links between the Outland characters and the contemporary world characters, that there may actually be others shifting in and out to the same Outland, if not at the same time ... indeed I got the feeling that, early on, Carroll may even have considered this. I think it might have made the book more interesting if he had done so.