Book Review: A Giant Comes

Title: A Giant Comes

Author: Aj Saxsma

Date: 2023

Quote: "The boy's father was laid across the couch when the boy entered the apartment."

The boy and his derelict father seem to live in a place like contemporary India, where a lot of boys work instead of going to school and the only female they seem to know is the boy's judgmental aunt. The boy is the good family member who enables his father's alcoholism; the aunt is the disagreeable one whom the father can blame for it. The boy works as a courier, which his father tells him is the family's traditional occupation.

When the boy is asked to deliver a message to an old man, however, we enter the twilight zone. The old man tells the boy a story that takes up most of the book and seems to take place in medieval Europe; the old man specifically mentions that religious teachers there talked about the glory and the demands of God instead of teaching people how to meditate, and the religious teacher he has to contend with is specifically identified as a priest who quotes Scripture.

When he was a boy, the old man said, his neighbors were warned that a giant was coming. This giant was not simply a big man in the mundane Manute Bol sense; it was a mythical monster that could pop humans into its mouth and chew them up, or start earthquakes by stamping its feet. The brave men in the neighborhood set off to slay the giant. Meanwhile the boy who is now the very old man bonded with the traveller who brought the warning as they tried to help a lot of people who called themselves refugees, who were locked up, denied food and drinking water, and tormented by malicious local folk. When relieved, the refugees gratefully admitted that they were in fact travelling thieves, not refugees from places destroyed by the giant at all. So was there a real giant? Let's just say that, in the reality of the story, there was. 

Without spoiling either the old man's story or the boy's, let's just say that this is not a cheerful or uplifting book. Nobody is heroic, or even consistently nice. The priest is especially repulsive, and meets an especially repulsive end. Nearly everybody in the story is male. There is a brave woman who makes an heroic speech on behalf of abused people, and gets killed. The aunt promises to help the boy and doesn't. A movie version of the story might make it look as if the boy were at least showing love and loyalty to his father in the only way he knows; the story as written makes it clear that he's showing no such thing, that he's coexisting with his father because he doesn't see any easy alternative.

Then we come to the note at the end in which Saxsma identifies as "a queer writer," and that seems to account for a lot. The grim world in which these stories are set is the world as it appears to the Men Who Can't Love...the ones who want to use women, and the ones who prefer to use men, without any "obligation" to show love or loyalty or self-sacrifice in any way. The priest, and his loveless, self-serving version of the Bible, are what they--especially but by no means only the "gay" ones--are in bitter rebellion against. (The priest denounces "the sodomites" and, though the boy and the traveller seem pretty fully occupied with other things, he describes the boy's show of--is it loyalty to the traveller, or despair plus contempt for the priest?--as "lecherous.") But the bitterness consumes their spirits. The boy in the present time of the story, and the boy the old man describes himself as having been, who might be seen as innocent or idealistic, are neither; they do some kind things, even some brave things, but they're not kind. There is relief from the depths of suffering and despair, but there's no joy. They dwell in a darksome land, wolf-cliffs wild and windy wilderness...

If that's a world you want to visit, you might enjoy the mythical quality of the story. It's not pretty but it is consistent, and vividly evocative. Saxsma's ability to tell a fairytale in the grand manner is outstanding...think Tolkien minus all of the ideals and beauty and joy that people reread Tolkien for.