The Flame Tree by Richard Lewis tells the story of Isaac Williams, the twelve year old son of American missionary doctors in Java, Indonesia. His best friend is Ismail (get it–Isaac and Ishmael?), a Muslim boy who is beginning to be caught up in Nahdlatul Umat Islam, a fundamentalist Islamic group with terrorist ties. Isaac is at first confused when Ismail says that they can no longer be friends unless Isaac submits to Islam. Then things get even worse when a faction of the Nahdlatul Umat Islam captures Isaac and holds him as a hostage. Finally, after facing malaria, cruelty, fear, and degrading treatment, Isaac is released, but then he must decide what to do about his captors and about his bitterness toward God for allowing him to suffer at the hands of evil men. The entire book is an interesting lesson about what can happen when Islam and Christianity clash, and the characters in the book demonstrate that people are complicated and difficult to understand. The Islamic hostage-takers are not one dimensional, stereotypical evil terrorists, but rather men, and women, who are sometimes kind, sometimes very cruel, caught up in a religion that allows fanaticism to grow and at the same time preaches peace. Isaac himself is not sure who he is after his captivity. “Maybe, just like he was neither a Javanese nor an American, he was no longer a Christian, but not quite a Muslim.” Later, he comes to see that, unlike Muslims who have no choice but to submit to the will of Allah, he has choice, and he chooses, by the grace of God, to be a Christian and to forgive. This is a difficult book in the sense that the author describes Isaac’s treatment during his captivity in more graphic terms than I was comfortable reading, but I realized after reading about the cruelty of some of the terrorists that perhaps I needed to be made uncomfortable in order to appreciate the miracle of forgiveness that comes in the ending.

At first I didn’t think that the second book I read this week had much in common with The Flame Tree. The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer is historical fiction/fantasy set during the 8th century AD on the coast of England and in Scandanavia. It includes Viking raids, trolls, dragons, talking animals, and magic spells. However, there are at least a couple of points of similarity. Jack is eleven when the Northmen, berserkers, raid his village. He, too, learns that people are not all bad nor always to be trusted. Jack, like Isaac, is a captive, and any time he begins to trust and even admire his captors, he is reminded of their cruelty and otherness. Jack is Saxon, and his village is Christian. The Northmen are worshippers of Odin and believe in seeking a glorious death in battle which will send them straight to Valhalla, a “heaven” that sounds a lot like an everlasting drunken feast. Jack remains a Christian, mostly because he doesn’t seem to think he has any choice, but he does learn to care about the Northmen even though they are not to be trusted to act in accordance with Christian morality, but only to act as their own pagan religion tells them to in order to maintain their honor. Jack, like Isaac WIlliams, returns home at the end of the book. Unlike Isaac, Jack doesn’t deal with the choice between bitterness and forgiveness; he just feels happy to be home, although he does wonder if he should have given kindness to one of his enemies when he was a slave to the Northmen. His teacher reassures him that “no kindness is ever wasted, not can we ever tell how much good may come of it.”

It seems to me that both of these books teach the same lesson: peace and forgiveness and understanding, as important as they are, can only go so far. At the end of the day, if those who follow a different god are determined to be obedient to their own evil desires and to revel in cruelty, we must defend ourselves and our families and villages even as we forgive and try to understand their blindness (there but for the grace of God go I). Hell is real because some people choose it. Not even God forces forgiveness on those who do not believe they need it, those who believe they have done nothing wrong, those who practice cruelty and sin in the name of Odin or Allah . . . or Jesus.

I have a problem. I’m getting lots of good recommendations for books to read from bloggers, too many ideas for the time in which I have to read them. However, that’s not the problem. I just finished these two books that I saw recommended somewhere maybe a month or two ago. I have no idea who recommended The Sea of Trolls nor The Flame Tree. Thank you, though, and be sure to comment if you gave me the tip on either of these.