Your Humble Blogger is a huge fan of James Morrow. As it happens, I was in Salem, Mass., in fact at the House of Seven Betty Grables, well, in the gift shop thereof, and lo! there was The Last Witchfinder. I purchased it, using the whole of our family’s buy-crap-with-no-inherent-value-but-to-which-we-will-give-value-by-adhering-our-memories-of-the-great-time-we-had-shopping-for-some-crap-with-no-inherent-value budget. Fortunately, I had already purchased tea at Ye Olde Store Of Worthlesse Crappe—Special Extra-Witchy Outlet Malle of Colohhhhhnial Deathe across the street. Don’t get me wrong—I adored Salem. It’s just a little ... well, when Mr. Morrow suggested that the town fathers could add to the Haunted Happenings such family activities as Cat Pressing on the Common and the Dorcas Good Memorial Leg-Irons Race, I was happy.
The book itself is not exactly what I had expected, or wanted, even. It’s James Morrow by way of John Barth and ... somebody else. I swear I had somebody else in mind when I started that sentence. No, I have no idea who it was. Mostly John Barth, anyway.
Be that as it may, it’s a good book, and an entertaining book, entertaining enough, anyway. I think Mr. Morrow may have lost his interest in Scripture and Scriptural religion, or have lost his patience for it, or something. One of the things I really liked about, say, Only Begotten Daughter or Towing Jehovah or some of the Bible Stories for Adults was the way he engaged with Scriptural religion. He provoked it, rather than rejecting it, and by turning it inside-out and upside-down, he made it an effort to put it back the way it was before, and really it never did go back quite the way it was before, you could always see the scratch marks where it got stuck. That was a good thing, or at least it was a good thing for me. For me, my love for Scripture gets stronger, or at least more passionate, with every scratch mark that gets left on it.
In Witchfinder, though, Mr. Morrow just ridicules the vicious pre-Enlightenment figures and their adherence to Scripture, and then he lets them drop. There’s no reconciliation, here. Not, ultimately, that there is much worth reconciling with in that last gasp of Unreason (which of course was not the last gasp of unreason, which was his fucking point, I get that), but there isn’t anything seductive or comforting in it, either. The book is a thing separate, opposed. It stays on its own side. Which disappointed me, because I have been on either side of the fence, and spend much of my time looking from my side to the other through the gaps, and that’s where I want my James Morrow to be.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.