Brett Riley, Lord of Order
Given the popularity of religious dystopia like Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Amazon Prime’s of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, one might wonder whether this particular sub-subgenre flirts with oversaturation. To any such doubter I would point to Brett Riley’s stunning Lord of Order as evidence that this particular vessel is far from overfull. Really, there is always room for another great tale.
As Lord of Order, Gabriel Troy protects and oversees the principality of New Orleans under the authority of the Bright Crusade, a globe-encircling Protestant fiefdom born in the long-ago past of a genocidal cleansing of the world’s unbelievers, memorialized among the faithful as the “Purge.” When Troy captures a leader of the dissident Troublers, he’s made uneasy by her claim of a new Purge in the offing — even as they speak, she tells him, the Crusade is driving suspected heretics in the thousands toward his city, there to be imprisoned, or subjected to something worse still. The arrival of an emissary from Supreme Crusader Matthew Rook confirms the Troubler’s assertion. Troy and his deputies understand this measure will damage irreparably their city and the many citizens they’re sworn to protect. By degrees, they struggle to abandon the obedience they have always practiced, to resist even the demands of their faith.
Riley’s New Orleanians are vivid and well-drawn, each torn by the agony induced by acting out of accord with lifelong belief, by making room for a dose of Troubler spirit in their own quaking souls. (An exception to this is McClure, a deadly teenage orphan and expert tracker whose closest companion is an enormous Rottweiler. An unbeliever, McClure suffers no scruple in ignoring the Supreme Crusader’s mad edict.) It’s in Riley’s examination of the difficulty in knowing the will of the dematerialized Hebrew deity with Whom Allah and God share DNA, that Lord of Order transcends the adventure novel to become literature. He — God — is, above all, silent. One can never truly know His will.
This struggle to know falls most harshly upon Deputy Lord Gordon Boudreaux, whose indecision and reluctance to resist dooms him the role of Rook’s torturer and collaborator, a role that burns his soul to ash.
“The skeleton strapped to the torture table knew nothing…that had been clear as soon as they had dragged him in by his wrists and thrown him on the table like a cut of meat. Yet there lay the man’s teeth, and here were the pliers, in Boudreaux’s hand…now, after so many trips to this blight of a room, he could believe anything about anyone, especially himself…The things he had done had poisoned his dreams, his faith. No love or charity here. No Godliness, unless God’s insane. If this is justice, it’s sick and perverted. So are my friends, who passed me this cup. None of them so sick as me…God had been silent, and for the first time in his life, Gordon Boudreaux could not accept the mystery…Everyone was vile. Everything was senseless.”
The physicist Steven Weinberg has averred that “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion (https://rtraba.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/adesigneruniverse-weinberg.pdf).” An honest rendering of history would reveal a situation that’s considerably more complex (consider Stalin’s USSR, the Khmer Rouge, the French Terror, and the subtlety of evil in each of us), yet Weinberg’s words contain an element of truth. In Boudreaux’s case, the edicts of his Supreme Crusader scour his soul hollow.
Interestingly, though the Roman Church persists in Lord of Order only as a battered remnant, the Protestant Crusade has adopted many of its trappings. The Crusade bows to a leader of popish infallibility. Lords of Order and their Deputies submit to vows of chastity. The condemned are subject to torture in the hope they may recant their sins and find a place in Heaven, echoing the logic of the Roman Church’s autos-da-fé. These, Riley may hint, are measures a religious movement that seeks to hold the world in its authoritarian grip must embrace.
Lord of Order achieves its denouement in a lengthy battle scene of Homerian scope and Cormac McCarthyan specificity. For some readers, these scenes might prove difficult. I would argue, however, that war is, above all, horror, and as horror it ought to be portrayed.
This is a novel that could not be more timely, given the political climate we currently endure. The attraction of right-wing conspiratorial thinking by conservative evangelicals (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-qanon-has-attracted-so-many-white-evangelicals/) and the partial religious underpinnings of the January 6th invasion of the United States Capitol ( https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/biblical-attack-capitol?fbclid=IwAR04QgsD0hSP_7M3st1WM3Ctodg3TPPJxhqFy7EhP0wmEk3GmbISPZIae-E) underscore the authoritarian longings that grip many evangelical hearts.
Perhaps our recognition of this, however inchoate, accounts for the resonance engendered by Atwood, Pullman, and now, conspicuously, Brett Riley. They are prophets of the terrible could-be. I was blown away by this book, and I want you to read it. Buy it at your local bookseller (best) or at bookshop.org (still pretty good). But buy it. Do.
