The Dickens Challenge: An Update

Five years ago, when I began writing this blog, America’s future seemed pretty dismal. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had been elected—this time without the help of the Supreme Court (though almost certainly through fraud and vote suppression in Ohio and other states), and the Christian Right was ascendant.

Mystery writer Tim Hallinan issued what he called the Dickens Challenge late in that year of 2005. Charles Dickens wrote his many of his novels one chapter at a time, as the books were serialized in magazines before being published in book form.. Dickens couldn’t go back and revise; he had to keep writing. Several of us, including Tim Hallinan and fellow blogger Lisa Kenney started novels through the Dickens Challenge.

In my Dickens Challenge novel, Things Done and Left Undone, since retitled See You in Chicago, I imagined a world in which an idealistic Christian cult of the 1960s had evolved into an authoritarian church, whose charismatic leader became a power behind the government and was on the verge of creating a totalitarian society.

The narrator, Timothy Rymer, goes to church on the Sunday after Epiphany, 2005, where he encounters his former lover, Helena McKechnie, who is now an Episcopal priest. She asks him to change something that went terribly wrong. He takes a harrowing train journey from Philadelphia to Chicago, where the Mage of Union Station sends his soul back into his eighteen-year-old 1968 body. Much of the story takes place during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Today, it seems that the Christian Right, though still powerful, is less of a threat than those who, in the words of theologian Harvey Cox, see “The Market as God.” One sees it in such books as Freakonomics and in the cultlike Ron Paul movement. In spite of the worldwide economic disaster brought about by unregulated markets, devotees of the Divine Market are everywhere, especially in the TEA Party movement.

Meanwhile, the churches, especially when they take note of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, or Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, seem less of a threat. Right-wing commentator Glenn Beck recently warned against churches with a message of social justice. Many evangelical churches have a tradition of the Social Gospel, and seem to be backing away from the gospel of greed.

Thus, See You in Chicago needs a major overhaul. (Some of the original first draft can be found in this blog: keyword “Things Done and Left Undone.” A more updated version is on the authonomy website.) While I loved writing about time travel and the Station Mage (Chapter 11, second half), the story needs to be reworked. I see it as three independent narratives, told in third person, from three different points of view: Timothy’s, Helena’s, and the putative villain’s, which will converge in 1968 Chicago. In any case, I won’t be stuck in the 2005 time reference. But I’ll need to go back and replace the 2005 narrative with more 1960s background. I still see the story as a work of magical realism sans time travel.

It’s on hold right now as I work on a less ambitious piece—a romance/mystery set in 1972 Iowa City. Thanks, Tim, Lisa, and all the other Dickens Challenge people. I’m hooked on this stuff.