by June Pulliam
Due, Tananarive. The Living Blood. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. 511 p.
Tananarive Due's latest novel, a recent winner of an American Book Award, picks up where My Soul To Keep left off. Jessica Jacobs-Wolde's exacting and seemingly perfect husband Dawit is actually an immortal. Unable to deal with his prolonged existence while he witnesses his loved ones die, he drugs Jessica and passes his condition on to her. At the time of her transformation, both Dawit and Jessica are unaware that she is pregnant. The Living Blood begins with the now immortal Jessica giving birth to this unnatural child, whose powers greatly surpass that of her parents, or any of the other handful of immortals, since she was born with the living blood rather than having it conferred upon her during a mortal existence.
The living blood itself is the blood of Christ, taken during the crucifixion. Khaldun, once a mortal shepherd, came into possession of this blood, and is now leader of the Brotherhood, a group of 59 men on whom he conferred immortality after enduring 14 centuries of loneliness. The Brotherhood has existed in secrecy in Somalia for 600 years, where the Life Brothers spend their lengthy existence learning languages, math, science, and music, and contemplating their unusual nature. While these immortals are truly indestructible, secrecy is important if they wish to continue to exist in the manner of their choosing, and thus they generally live away from the prying eyes of mortals. Some of the Life Brothers wish to explore the world and its fleshly pleasures, and spend decades with mortal women and the children they father until they are ultimately forced to leave before their failure to ever get ill or show any signs of aging gives away their true nature.
Jessica and her daughter Fana threaten the existence of the Brotherhood. They were created by a Life Brother, not as Life Brothers, so they are not bound by the Brotherhood's covenants, which would limit their interaction with other humans.
When the novel opens, Jessica has left her husband (who accidentally killed their first daughter in an attempt to make her immortal) and is now in Africa with five-year-old Fana and her (Jessica's) physician/sister, running a clinic that performs miracles. Just a drop of Jessica's blood will cure AIDS or cancer, and desperately poor people come from hundreds of miles away seeking help from the strange Americans. In a third world country where people live much the same way their ancestors did a thousand years ago, western medical technology does indeed seem supernatural, so at first Jessica's clinic draws little attention from outsiders who might comprehend the nature of this healing. But word gets out, and wealthy men from first world countries are willing to pay millions of dollars, as well as kill whoever might get in their way, in order to obtain this miracle drug. And while the immortals strange blood protects them from the ravages of time and re-grows severed limbs, it cannot completely protect them from mortals bent on containing them.
When Dawit journeyed to the United States over 200 years before the action of My Soul to Keep, he was captured, beaten and sold into slavery, unable to escape his condition until the war came. Now a wealthy child of an immortal, who stole several buckets full of his father's blood over 160 years ago, is searching for more to replenish his dwindling supply, and has Jessica's sister is kidnapped in his attempt to discover a new source. Meanwhile, Fana's powers increase at a frightening rate, and are difficult for the five-year-old to control. After a childish quarrel, she nearly kills a friend of hers just by thinking ill of him. Additionally, the evil spirits of the world, who would use Fana for their own ends, have been speaking to her during her mysterious trances, teaching her to make storms and to fly. One such instance results in the most deadly hurricane ever seen in the United States.
Due's novel presents a terrifying religious vision, something many horror writers have attempted to do over the past five years with the arrival of the new millennium. But for the most part, these visions have been silly, little better than William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Either the world is about to be overrun by Satan and his minions, or Jesus is coming back, and boy is he pissed. Granted, it's fairly difficult to write a story about the end of the world that's not so stupidly unbelievable that it can't possibly be chilling. Stories about everything in the world changing utterly, in almost the blink of an eye, generally ask the reader to suspend too much disbelief. But Due's novel is believable since it only deals with the possibility of cataclysmic change. Much like Carrie or world leaders with nuclear arms, Fana is in possession of powers she cannot easily control, especially at her tender age. Worse still, Fana is so powerful that those around her cannot completely control her. Yet the novel doesn't end with the complete destruction of the world. As the embodiment of the Second Coming, Fana can bring either Armageddon or world peace, or both.
Equally disturbing is the novel's debate about determinism versus free will, a theme that has taken up the intellectual energy of many denominations of Christianity. For centuries Khaldun has pondered why he of all people came into possession of the blood of Christ. After all, as a mortal, he wasn't a particularly holy man on a religious quest. He was a humble shepherd who met the man in possession of this blood, who was willing to share it with him. Khaldun believed it was the good fortune of humanity that he accepted this gift, since he fully appreciated the awesome responsibility that came with the blood, which could fall into the hands of someone who would use this immortality to terrorize mortals. After 14 centuries of loneliness tempered with deep contemplation, Khaldun created the Brotherhood, believing he could prevent the Life Brothers from harming humanity. When Dawit violates the Covenant of the Brotherhood in two ways, by sharing his immortality and a sharing it with a female capable of creating an entirely different type of immortal, Khaldun still believes that he has some control over events in that he permitted Fana to exist, rather than send one of his Searches after her pregnant mother to prevent her coming into the world.
But now Khaldun has reason to reconsider his belief that the universe does not function by free will with occasional divine intervention. According to him, even Judas Iscariot did not choose to betray his master; instead he was bidden to do so by Christ as the price of his faith, since the Crucifixion was a necessary step in Christ's rising above the flesh, becoming in effect, the first Life Brother. Now the existence of Fana has caused Khaldun to question the nature of the universe. Perhaps everything is intricately controlled by a divine intelligence that allowed the living blood to come into his hands in the first place so that Fana can ultimately be born.
Due's novel is finally about the frightening
ramifications of theology itself. Due's God is not the monster of
John Milton's Paradise Lost, in possession of omniscience, yet giving
his creatures the illusion of free will, thus setting them up for a spectacular
failure that can only be reversed through the torture of His only son.
Instead, her deity, who never really makes his or her presence known to
humans, has created an intricate and tightly controlled world whose structure
is incomprehensible to our very limited human perspective. Even immortals
with the advantage of centuries of experience have difficulty comprehending
the nature of this universe. Ultimately, the possibility that humans
can never fully this understand the nature of the world and their roles
within it, and that they aren't completely in control of their destinies,
is far more frightening than any raging deity rapidly accumulating a body
count.