Ah, Christendom…my lost baby. The rise of the New Religious Right! Holy War in the Middle East! A fundamentalist American president! How unlikely this all seemed, in the dog days of the Clinton presidency.
Re-reading it, I think all the elements are there — one chapter, A Christian Gunman In The Rameses Hilton, is certainly as good as anything I’ve done since. Oh, I don’t know; there’s stuff in here I’m still proud of. But if I was going to write Christendom today, I’d do it very differently.
For a start, and most importantly, I’d get into the story much faster. I’d make things easier for the reader. But in its favour, once Christendom gets going, it’s impassioned in a way I’d find difficult to muster now.
I was single, in my twenties, living in London, awaiting publication of my first novel, and I was still using amphetamines to write. The first draft was composed more rapidly than in retrospect seems possible. I nearly killed myself, but I thought that might be kind of cool.
I assumed this was going to be my masterpiece, so if it killed me then — yay, whatever.
What reviews it received were good, but Christendom baffled and alienated Mr In-Between’s readership and was a commercial failure. It hurt at the time, and it hurt for a good while after, but it was for the best.
It would still make a great film, though.
