The best ideological adventure books

I’ve always loved Hong Kong New Wave movies, but they often emphasize action and flashy melodrama over historical context. For someone wanting to dig a little deeper, the graphic novel Boxers & Saints is a look into the parallel lives of two Chinese teenagers during the Boxer Rebellion—One is a red-blooded patriot eager to fight Western invaders. The other is a troubled girl who finds liberation in Christianity. Both characters are carried along, motivated, and then betrayed by fanaticism. When their paths cross, they are forced to learn the difference between religious faith and religious mania. The simple artwork isn’t meant to be lingered over…I read all 512 pages at breakneck speed.

Poor Orwell, he just wants to go fight in the Spanish Civil War and kill some fascists. When he gets there he finds that the Republican “side” is wracked by infighting, manipulated by shady overseas actors, and misrepresented by the Anglophone press. Loyal friends are betrayed, thrown in jail, and executed. Also, everyone’s clothes are falling apart, the guns misfire, the passwords are hard to remember, and it’s cold. And Mrs. Orwell is along for the ride, although we don’t hear her side of it. While there is no obvious moral, as there is in Animal Farm, (“Don’t do it again,” maybe?) it’s an incredibly entertaining book. Orwell’s prose is so clear and crisp that I forgot I was reading. 

If the other books on my list are about disillusionment, Asterios Polyp provides a good counterpoint as its message runs in the opposite direction. Sometimes people are better than you think. Asterios is an obnoxious architect whose worldview starts with the assumption that everyone else is wrong. After a series of crises (thrown out by wife, apartment fire) he has to flee the city and rent a room in the home of a rightwing redneck married to a hippie, just the sort of people he would never associate with by choice. He learns humility and goes about fixing his life. It’s all pretty predictable but the mix of elegantly cartoonish art and funny storytelling kept me engaged (even when I wanted to smack the hero.)

Written in Soviet Russia in 1972, but only published in 1989, this is the story of a bizarre experimental city populated by strangers from all over the last century. All have made a deal with mysterious mentors who are trying to find out…something, by subjecting the city’s inhabitants to apparently arbitrary torments like plagues of baboons. Our hero, Andrei, tries to take it in stride like a good Soviet boy, but finds himself increasingly doubtful as the conditions of the experiment just get weirder and weirder. The humor and situations are very Russian while the emotions will be familiar to anyone dealing with seemingly incoherent orders from above. Reading it at the height of the pandemic was certainly a trip.

In the first half of the 20th Century, before Fantasy was taken over by Tolkien imitators, some very crazy novels were written. My favorite is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, about a man exploring a world where people’s bodies reflect their worldviews—one’s philosophy might require one to grow new eyes, new arms, or even a few tentacles. The characters inhabit a constantly shifting landscape of wild space creatures. The overtly Gnostic message is presented with such clarity and color (several colors unknown on Earth!) that I find it an exhilarating read, even if I disagree with it. The book undermines its own Manichaeanism by showing us an amazing world that I guess we’re supposed to recoil from, but much of the time I find myself thinking “Isn’t that cool!”