Disclaimer this book review containers spoilers for The Charlatan’s Boy by Jonathan Rogers.
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I remember the first time I heard the music of the band, Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was around 14 years old, which is too young to listen to the Chili Peppers but somehow always the age that people hear them for the first time. I also remember the first time I heard The Police: I was blown away. And I remember the first time I read a book by Jonathan Rodger, I had an eerily similar experience.
Why? What does this book, The Charlatan’s Boy, have in common with a funk-punk band with mildly concerning lyrical content? Or with the reggae-pop-jazz fusion group of the 80’s? The commonality exists in my experience of all three as genre bending, and ultimately having a bend towards wholeness, a fulfillment of their form; a beautiful completion. As I read The Charlatan’s Boy I felt the strange blend of so many worlds. And in that blending, an alternative vision of what it means to be beautiful.
As Andrew Peterson said about the book, “Imagine a Southern version of a C.S. Lewis story or a Christian version of a Mark Twain Tale.” I think you could also say that it reads as if the entire genre of Southern Gothic took a healthy swig of The Wingfeather Saga. Jonathan Rogers has written a book that somehow feels like equal parts Wendell Berry, Rahl Dahl, Lemony Snicket, all dragged through some muddy version of the Stations of The Cross. The Charlatan’s Boy is charming in the way that small, often seemingly abandoned southern towns are charming as you drive through them. Because for those with a keen eye and a warmed heart, you do in fact, see the sadness of a town so abandoned by the rest of the world, but you also see that beauty beholden within the ugliness. That while the world may have abandoned that town, that place experiences a reprieve, a grace of living outside of the speed-industrial complex we have built for ourselves in the suburbs and in the cities. It takes a burning heart to see that marred, bloody face and recognize the bleeding glory.
On the first page, the main character, a boy named Grady, who’s been told he is a swamp creature called a “feechie” says, “I don’t care who you are–when it comes to knowing where you come from, you got to take somebody else’s word for it”.
This is a book about identity. And it is also a book about the Gospel, which is the same thing. Though I hope I’ve come to that conclusion the right way, not by reading onto Roger’s story a particular subtext (see the preface to Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry), but by entering into the story itself, or rather, by letting the story enter into me. Seeking not to handle the book but to be handled by it.*
In The Charlatan’s Boy, Grady is the companion of a man named Floyd, who is mostly referred to as “Perfesser Floyd”, no that’s not a typo it’s written “perfesser” throughout the book. I am glad that in building this world, Rogers went ahead and crafted a grammar to go with it. Grady is consistently put down, abused, and used by Floyd. Grady is used for many of Floyd’s Charlatanian fanatics but most often for his characteristic ugliness, so ugly he can convincingly play a swamp creature and win bets with entire townships as to whether he is the ugliest boy in the world.
Throughout the story Grady is routinely taken advantage of, but you wouldn’t quite describe him as a victim. Grady chooses to return to Floyd over and over. Recognizing that while Floyd is a far cry from a loving presence in his life, Grady makes an intriguing remark in a conversation with Barbara, the daughter of another local Charlatan: “But I love him anyway.” Barbara said about her father, “You love Floyd?” Barbara asks Grady “Grady thought on that one. “I reckon. A feller’s got to love somebody, don’t he?” “I don’t know about that. I’ve known plenty of folks didn’t love anybody but theirselves.” Barbara said, “All right then,” Grady said. “Ive got to love somebody. And I got nobody but Floyd.”
Grady recognizes that he is not merely a thinking-creature or a feeling-creature but that fundamentally, he is a loving creature. To love is not a choice we make but an impulse we surrender to, even when that person we love shows no sign of emotional hospitality towards us.
At the end of the book, after a tragic and triumphal conflict between Grady and Floyd, Grady is swept away by a clan of feechies, the mythical creature he had played the role of as a hoax to earn the money of bystanders. As it turns out, Grady really is a feechie, a “genuwine he-feechie”.
As Grady is reunited with his family, him and his mother exchange these words: ”…and then she touched me on the ticklish spot behind the knee, which made me yowl and jump, and she said, “Harvo, it’s him! It’s our Cato!” “Oh no, ma’am,” I said. “You got me mixed up. I’m Grady.” The she-feechie wrapped me up in a hug so tight I couldn’t breathe or talk. “Wait a minute,” I groaned. “I don’t know any Cato, I’m Grady.” “Oh no, son. You ain’t Grady.” “Son?” I asked. “I ain’t anybody’s son. I’m just Grady.” The she-feechie held me at arm’s length, where she could look at me. “You ain’t just Grady,” she said. “Somebody might have called you Grady, but you ain’t Grady.”
As I read those last words “Somebody might’ve called you Grady, but you ain’t Grady.” I thought of our identity in the Lord Jesus and his claim on our lives, and I heard this gentle voice say “Somebody might’ve called you “sinner”, but you ain’t “sinner””, and as I looked up to see who spoke, that gentle voice had that same marred face from Calvary; it was ugly and it was beautiful.
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* Thank you Chris E.W. Green for this language.
Editor’s Note: This title was received by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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