The Animal Kingdom | Peter Bart, Thy Kingdom Come

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As every author knows, the blurb on the dust cover of a book is of vital importance, because many reviewers read nothing else. I found the blurb of Thy Kingdom Come invaluable after reading every word of its 380 pages, because only the blurb tells what the book is about.

When I taught a course in the art of writing for the San Mateo adult education program, I stressed the importance of letting the reader know, as quickly as possible, what the story is about, after which, feeling oriented and comfortable in being acquainted with the situation, he can follow it through to see how things come out.

This is only Peter Bart’s second book, and he hasn’t learned about this basic rule of the craft. Matter of fact I found it extremely difficult to hammer the point across with some students of my class; one woman handed in chapters of a novel during the school year, and my comment each time was, “What’s it about?” I was mean enough to bring her to tears, sobbing with her head on the desk, but she finished the book—which was well-written otherwise—without giving the reader a clue as to what the story was. 

From the jacket blurb, I learned that Thy Kingdom Come was about “The Mormon nation, powerful, wealthy and obsessively secretive,” this being 

the focus of this sweeping and dynamic novel about power and its potential for corruption. At its heart is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where all doubts are banished, all questions answered and no member need ever stand alone. Nurtured by its vast welfare system, which renounces federal support, and by a superbly run educational system, which zealously upholds the Church strictures against drinking, smoking, and premarital sex, it is an island of safety amid the maelstrom of American Society. 

But then comes the teaser: “And yet, something is amiss,” the blurb says. “Like the secrets of its history—a history of bizarre paradoxes—turmoil seethes just beneath its calm surface.” 

Dog-gone me, with a blurb like that the Mormon reader is hooked. Unfortunately, however, the book doesn’t live up to the promise of the hype. The novel has no central character. There is no central theme. While there is much to-do about some complex business deal, it is so complicated that I was thrown off at a curve. And, whatever the book is about, there is no payoff. 

It is, I believe, the first novel since Vardis Fisher’s Children of God (1940) to deal with the highest echelons of the church hierarchy. Its characters (under fictitious names) include the First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, and other high-level movers and shakers of the church bureaucracy. The antics of this cast provide shock value, if nothing else.

A major character is Tad, clean-cut, well-connected, who has married the right girl at the right place, the temple. Tad is a rising young executive in the church business enterprises, hard-working, hard-drinking, and foul-mouthed. When he was a young missionary in Tonga, he had attended booze-and-sex parties aboard a yacht. Now, with a model family in Salt Lake, he visits his mistress in Los Angeles, because his wife won’t indulge in kinky sex and the girl friend knows all the tricks of turning a trick. All in all, Tad is just your typical returned missionary, rising through merit and nepotism in the church bureaucracy. 

Tad’s mother, Eliza, is head of the Church Relief Society, highest office held by a woman. She is a widow, and is having an affair with Turner, who is the head of the Church Public Communications Department. 

Turner, in turn, is secretly supplying confidential information to Hiram and Gussie Cobb, who are publishing a sam izdat periodical. We instantly recognize the Cobbs as Jerald and Sandra Tanner of Modern Microfilm, dedicated to exposing Mormonism as a fraud and delusion. 

The Cobbs are secretly subsidized by, of all people, Cora Snow, matriarch of a popular singing family who have a motion picture studio at Provo and are producing a TV series featuring two family members doing a toothy brother and sister act. Guess who that could be? 

Then there is a Howard Hughes-type billionaire, Dana Sloat. “As the novel opens,” the blurb says, 

the Mormon Apostles have convened and designated an industrialist named Dana Sloat to head the Church’s vast financial and political activity. Only a few know that Sloat is a fanatic who believes the time has come for the Church to fulfill its own Manifest Destiny as the guiding force in American society and who has his own blueprint to achieve this end. 

Dana Sloat becomes First Counselor in the Presidency. And how does he get the office? Well, the First Counselor resigns, stepping down to make room for him. Dog-gone, for a Gentile Peter Bart really knows how the church is run, doesn’t he? But that’s not all. Dana Sloat has a son who is head man of a Fundamentalist colony in the Arizona Strip patterned after Ervil LeBaron’s group. Its male members are Danites who have a hit list. On the list is the samizdat publisher, Hiram Cobb, who is kidnapped and murdered while being tarred and feathered. 

Finally the church hierarchy decides that Dana Sloat has got to go. But instead of just pulling the rug, the Church President calls the secret Council of Fifty to assemble in the temple and give Sloat the mitten, for reasons I can’t fathom except that the author had to get the Council of Fifty into the book, if by the hair of the head. 

Had enough? Well, there’s more, if you’re still with me, including some of the crudest four-letter dialogue you’ll find in a Mormon book. Maybe high-level church members talk that way. I dunno, because I’m merely a low-level member myself. In fact, I suspect my bishop gave me a job with an imposing title (titles don’t cost anything) in a desperate attempt to activate me. Poor guy. 

At last report, Peter Bart was trying to sell his book to Hollywood, and claiming that church pressure was keeping it off the screen and tube. If so, I wish the Church would back off. The book would be a marvelous companion piece to Super man, Star Wars, Tarzan the Ape Man and other fantasies. It has about the same basis of fact. I have written considerable fantasy myself, but never anything as wild as Thy Kingdom Come. I think Hollywood might change its mind if Bart could get Bo Derek to play the Relief Society President, with her boyfriend, Robert Redford, cast as the head of the Church Public Communications Department and Marie Osmond playing the kinky girlfriend of Tad. With such a cast, he’d be in like Flynn. 

Thy Kingdom Come, by Peter Bart. New York: The Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1981. 380 pp; $13.95