Brian Christopher More’s “Beneath the Silent Heavens” is a book about a man who was “daring, willing to endure risk and ridicule for the sake of a hidden Good.” It is a story that teaches that even “the child who cherishes the love of an animal is already weaving a thread in the wedding garment. No love is barren, even if the joy of it is profoundly hidden.”
Beneath the Silent Heavens: A Fantasy, by Brian Christopher More (250 pages, Angelico Press, 2019)
“Words are power, words are life, / With memory rife, and taste, and feel, and dream,” wrote an anonymous poet recently in Dawn Tears, Spring Light, Rood Peace. The author of the moving novel Beneath the Silent Heavens knew this truth as well. Brian Moore’s historical fantasy of Noe and the building of the Ark is, at times, almost more poetry than prose. Playful, profound, delirious with reality, Moore’s book felt like reading 40 pages, not 250. I have to say at the start that this gem from Angelico is a must read for all lovers of literature, regardless of their faith.
Such a dream-like, boundary shattering, and heart-stirring book is hard to summarize: it is a voyage into the heart of man, into the deadness of evil, and the throbbing of love. At times, Moore’s prose glistens with unconventional imagery: “A memory or two, fragile as the wings of a long-dead moth, were floated upon the silken evening air.” Or: “For a moment, the lightning sparkled like cool kisses, like the caress of a soft breeze fragrant with the scent of citrus and spices. It felt as if they were held in the embrace of a watchful, loving gaze. The sentinel of Eden was said to be no simple guardian, its terror the sublimity of pure love.”
Moore follows Noe from his childhood to old age in brief snapshots of his life, often hundreds of years apart. Noe is the last man who can understand the speech of animals; parallel to Noe’s story are tales of beasts. The world before the flood is a contemporary world; it is a world of lawyers and shops and Darwinian materialism. It is a world where God is forgotten by men as a “nice story,” where even the beasts think that “the Throne of Adam”—Noe—is an old wives tale. Rhumirrah, a beautiful tigress, wants to know if men are anything more than “pants wearing apes”.
Noe’s relationship with God is real but vague; ultimately trusting yet lacking the concreteness he and his family and friends wish. He doesn’t have hard answers to give them, especially about this Ark of his. “It was then, on the way home, that Noe felt a sudden compulsion to build a boat. He could not explain the whim, but it made him feel better, to measure and cut wood, to shape the prow, to see first the skeleton of the vessel and then the body of the boat at the end of his skill and effort. He built first a small boat for fishing.” But Noe feels like he needs a bigger boat, somehow, for “himself and his sons to sail upon a sea.” “It was then that the voice came to him. There was never any question of projection of hallucination. He had never heard another voice more objective and real. At least, that is what he told himself in the long years afterwards. The voice said, ‘You need a bigger boat.’”
The building of the huge ark, on top of a mountain, pouring of Methuselah’s wealth into it and years of labor, darkened Noe’s reputation: “He became the subject of confused sadness or, more frequently, open derision.” This is a psychological safari as well as a fantasy novel. The minds of Noe and his family all struggle with themselves, before and during the flood. The evil that roams the earth is not just outside of them, but inside. The last of the nephilim—the children of fallen angels and human women (c.f. Gen 6:1-4)—are battled both in flesh and spirit. The ideologies of the ante-deluvian world are the same and as pervasive as they are today: when a group of liberal, relativist and feminist college students try to “dialogue” with Noe about why he is building the ark, their feminist representative is rather put down. “You couldn’t get much more patriarchal than old Noe, after all.”
Noe confronts incarnated evils under different forms, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally, sometimes in a dreamworld of vision that melds with the physical in a stream of consciousness delirium. The nephilim play mind-games with Noe, or try to slay him, or argue nihilistically. Their goal is mutilation, perversity, and ultimately non-existence. Yet somehow they are always thwarted. In a Screwtape-like passage, Moore parallel’s Lewis’ conception of these devils’ minds: “Perhaps every time they [the nephilim] reached the place of comprehension, the Enemy [God] poured in from some hideous bag of unquenchable largesse, more freedom, more random, untidy drama, so that never should they bring the riot of gulping, breathing, sexing things into the simplicity of the void.” Some of Noe’s contemporaries are collaborators of the nephilim—whom they call “The Comforters” or “The Brights.”
Often Noe overcomes these morphing and illusory beings through down-to-earthness, rather than argument. “After all your struggles,” one of them says to the discouraged Ark-builder, “it would be a shame for you to give way now. It doesn’t really matter if no one get it [the point of the ark]. It’s your truth, isn’t it? Isn’t that what matters?” To which Noe’s response is, “Crap.” And the conversation ultimately terminates with Noe mocking the fiend.
Beneath the Silent Heavens is a romance as much as it is anything. Noe and his wife Priyanka have a deeply loving yet rocky relationship. They need each other and yet their lives diverge in many ways. Moore’s sensitive, luscious, and penetrating descriptions are a delight to the heart. Noe comes to “understand that a retreat was necessary for her. Out of her silences and mysterious ponderings came her warmth, her new words.” One of the most beautiful passages in the book describes a weekly horse ride “date” that Noe and Priyanka take in the months leading up to the deluge. After riding over fields where the horses “did not know that never again would they meditate this land with joyful hoof and eye”, the patriarchal couple retreat to “a meadow they treated like a secret garden.”
Then the horses were left to feed and wander freely while Noe and Priyanka lay upon a blanket forgetful of time. A small basket provided strawberries, cold quail, cream pastries and a fizzy drink just strong enough to take the edge off. Then there was song of songs. Afterwards, Priyanka lay flat, peering without thinking into the soft sky. Noe reclined upon his side watching the rise and fall of her bosom, breathing in the light scent of jasmine that drifted from her lambent skin.
Old Testament stories and characters are given such life under Moore’s pen. Where the book could have been cliched, forced, ro saccharine, the unexpected and frolicking creativity of the author challenges and delights the reader instead. Lamech remembers meeting Eve, and again the lines dance, verse-like:
When I saw her, she was an old woman. But still beautiful, the way a few old women can be. Not beautiful like an ingénue or a woman in command of her poised skin, her full, beckoning breasts, lithe limbs. Her beauty was in her eyes and in the way she carried herself and spoke….She said what she thought. She punctured sacred cows. I like being looked at by her. There was, I admit it, a certain wild and impish arousal. Unspoken, mind you. Not unmannerly. she smiled with just that gleam of recognition, as if she realized she was still sending out the perfume of desire.
This book is a book about men and women, the preservation of life, and the course of salvation bequeathed by the Ancient of Days. Masterfully weaving stream-of-consciousness passages into the narrative, Moore portrays Noe seeing into the future, meeting people of the 20th century, meeting the three wise-men, and others of still greater importance. There is a Woman whom Noe glimpses both in the present and the future, as time and space meld and warp between the pages of this tale, who is the Ark of life herself. “She had long black hair and gamine eyes, was radiant as the day with a new child thriving in her womb. She smiled as if listening to a soft, amusing song that only she could hear.”
“It is the human way to encounter the eternal in the prosaic and particular details of our earthly lives. It pleases God to coax us, however unwilling, from our many hiding places,” is a thought that Moore brings across the disjointed void of conversation snippets on the ark and that summarizes the genius of his book perfectly. Beneath the Silent Heavens is a book about a man who was “daring, willing to endure risk and ridicule for the sake of a hidden Good.” It is a story that teaches that even “the child who cherishes the love of an animal is already weaving a thread in the wedding garment. No love is barren, even if the joy of it is profoundly hidden.”
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