Picture from Josh Applegate via Unsplash
I’ve just seen acomment in which someone likes the book because they believe it promotes a particular religious view. I’m glad they liked it.
Authors are well advised not to pick fights with reviewers. I will phrase my response this way.
When I created the orphan alien boy Cory, in Our Child of the Stars, I was not putting forward a view as to the likelihood of aliens existing. I was writing a story about families, difference, and what an outsider might think of human beings.
With the Crooked Medium books, writing about death and the afterlife offers opportunity to grappling with issues such as redemption and restitution. The way I handle this is not cut and dried enough for some. Dying, inheritance, death, and families are all amazing topics to address in fiction.
Mrs Ashton is a Christian, a rather hit and miss one, but trying. She has lived as a fraud, who nevertheless takes time to help people where she can. Christ came for sinners, she says. Most modern fiction has a one dimensional view of faith.
As a spiritualist woman preacher, her views are not welcome in many places. She’s been refused communion in High Churches and asked to leave in Nonconformist ones. The Bishop of London despises her.
Braddie is a vehement atheist who sees organised religion as a strategy of the owner class. She will be baffled when Cardinal Manning openly supports the dockers. Maisie is a sceptic willing to pretend to believe to get on. In Victorian London you could see Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and those following the Chinese religions of Confuscianism, Taoism and Buddhism.
I approach the issue of the afterlife in three ways. As a sceptic, I am not inclined to believe in it but I’m not dismissive of those who do. As poet and writer, I understand the power of grief and hope, the closeness we sometimes feel to those who have gone, and the enormous creative possibility of the ideas. I’ve had profound experiences which shape me, which some might call spiritual. As a human being, who has lost three loved members of my family this decade, I treat grief with respect. But I want us to live as we live too.
If you read the books and think “We could be less awful to each other” then that’s fine. You might also pick up “what society does and doesn’t proscribe is often arbitrary” and “we are individually responsible but some evils are collective and we should look at causes”.