C-SPAN did a special on Ms. Rand a few weeks ago, and followed up the next week with one on Whittaker Chambers that was very good. His book "Witness" looks to be an important read that I have overlooked. I had not realized how influential he was with Buckley's National Review, and how influential that magazine was to American politics.
I think Ms. Rand and Mr. Chambers have both experienced evil, that is Marxism. And they both present their experience to a reader, but in a different way.
I think Brust does as good a job of describing the nature of evil as I have ever seen, though. But, I think other books I have read, like Blatty's "Legion", helped me grasp his meaning.
Here's is an interview with Blatty, that may cast a little light on what I am trying to say:
It's always seemed to me that The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and Legion formed a sort of "unofficial" trilogy -- with The Ninth Configuration serving as a thematic bridge between the more overt horrors in The Exorcist and the intensely introverted struggles of Kinderman in Legion. Do you view the three novels as a trilogy? If so, why? And if not, why?
Yes, they form -- at least in my mind -- a trilogy. Taken together, they are all about the eternal questions that nag at Woody Allen: why are we here? what are we supposed to be doing? why do we die? is there a God? The Exorcist approached this last question, which is the heart of all the others, by seeking to confirm the existence of "demons" and the power of religious faith to deal with them. The Ninth Configuration approached the problem via what I call "the mystery of goodness": if we are reducible to matter without spirit, to soulless atomic structures, then we ought to be always rushing blindly and irresistibly to serve our own selfish ends. Yet how is it that there is love in this world -- love as a God might love -- and that a man will give his life for another. The astronaut Cutshaw's search for irrefutable proof of such pure self-sacrifice forms the underlying plot. But then in Legion, Ivan Karamazov's greatest barrier to religious faith -- the suffering of the innocent: the "problem of evil" -- is met head-on by Lt. Kinderman.
I know from previous interviews that you were "compelled" (a euphemism, that, I know) to change the ending of Exorcist III so there would be more horrific action, but when you describe your original ending -- Kinderman shoots Karass, then the shot of the bird flying across the face of the setting sun -- I was struck by the fact that the incredibly moving "Hurrah for Karamozov" coda in Legion seemed to have never been considered for the film. Why did you choose not to use it?
In the novel, the coda was needed to put a button on what the novel was all about -- Kinderman's rescue of God's goodness via his theory of "The Angel," which hypothesized that the fall of man was premundane; that before the Big Bang, mankind was a single angelic being who fell from grace and was given his transformation into the material universe as a means of salvation wherein his legion of fragmented personalities would spiritually evolve ("Can there be a moral act without at least the possibility of pain?") back into the original single angelic being, back into himself, a process foreshadowed on the opening page of The Exorcist ("that matter was Lucifer upward groping back to his God").
I feel obliged now to quote from A Man for All Seasons: "I trust I make myself obscure." Dear God, what a wonderful line! Meantime, all on its own, I felt no place for the coda in the film, for the film had Kinderman firing a bullet into the brain of Patient X and between that moment and a coda, we would have had a need for an investigation and a trial. The film had to end where it did.
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