Robert A. Heinlein is one of the best and most important science-fiction writers in history. His most well-known and influential works include Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about a human raised on Mars coming to Earth and challenging its “backwards” society, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which is about a lunar revolution against its authoritarian rulers based on Earth, and Starship Troopers, simultaneously Heinlein’s most famous and infamous work which centers around the military of a soldier fighting in an interstellar war against an alien species. In all of his works he tends to slip into polemic more than once as he they all challenge prevailing social customs of religion, sex, and government in the exact same way and present the exact same “solutions” to what Heinlein sees as “problems.” It is no different in this novel, Job: A Comedy of Justice, his third to last novel published in 1984. In fact this book may just be his magnum opus on these issues. Having just completed it I wanted to review it, not just to explore Heinlein’s social ideas and religious criticism, if it can indeed be termed such, but also to see what gems do exist in the book that may make it worth reading and which may inform our ideals of justice, mercy, righteousness, and society.
The Story
A warning before we go any further. I do not intentionally attempt to spoil anything about books (or movies) but nor do I intentionally attempt to avoid such spoilers. I include or exclude them based solely on necessity in reviewing the work in question. That said, considering this book is 37 years old, old enough to be the father of some of my readers, I doubt any limits on spoiling which may have existed still apply.
The story begins as Alexander “Alex” Hergensheimer, a highly stereotypical conservative Evangelical Christian minister who heads up the Churches United for Decency, takes a bet to walk on some fiery coals during his vacation on a South Pacific Island. After accomplishing the task, Alex passes out and wakes up in an entirely different parallel universe. Here he looks exactly like Alec Graham, a wealthy socialite who has won the affections of one Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson, a beautiful woman who has no problem with casual sex, open nudity, or, as the novel implies later on, sexual swinging and incest. Alex falls in love with her after a very short relationship and having sex. It is after this that he and she are transported from her universe into another where they are thrown overboard from the cruise they were on and end up being saved by the Royal Mexican Air Force.
From here the story becomes a series of almost vignettes as Alex and Margrethe are transported from universe to universe, seemingly at random intervals. They quickly realize that anything not touching gets left behind, so after a few mishaps of being caught naked and having to hitchhike or beg help while nude, they learn to keep their money and their clothes with the at all times. In each universe they meet people who they try and help along the way and whom help them in return. All along the way Alex is terrified for Margrethe’s immortal soul as she is an Odinist and he is convinced that their troubles are signs of the End of the World as predicted in the Book of Revelation. While Margarethe agrees that it is the end of the world she thinks it is Ragnarök and that Loki is behind the breakdown of reality that they’re experiencing. (And in case you’re wondering, no, the book never deals with Odin’s status as a god of war and history of human sacrifices. That is conveniently hand waved away the single time Alex asks Margarethe how she can worship him while denouncing the Christian God for being supposedly blood thirsty.) Learning that Margarethe isn’t a Christian scares Alex because unless she is a Christian he believes she can’t be saved and therefore won’t be in Heaven with him when the end comes. After a number of hijinks where they get help from various people the actual Rapture happens and Alex ends up in Heaven.
This is where the story really begins to coming unraveled as Heinlein’s reach exceeded his grasp. You see, the ultimate finish to the story, one you can see from a mile away, is that Alex and Margarethe have to end up together, no matter what. But she isn’t a Christian, doesn’t get Raptured, and doesn’t end up in Heaven. Alex, on the other hand, doesn’t just end up in Heaven, but it is revealed that he is actually a Saint. Heinlein has to invent a reason for Alex to hate Heaven in order to get him to reject it and go searching for Margarethe. So what does Heinlein do? He basically turns Heaven into a second rate corporate retreat. Everything is great for everyone, in theory. But all the angels are jerks, humans are second class citizens, and God seems largely disinterested in everything. Everything is one big city and there aren’t even any parks. So Alex abandons Heaven and goes to the only other place where she could be – Hell. He spends an unknown amount of time in Hell having sex with a former nun who was damned because she died just a little before a priest could give her Last Rites and has been partying it up in Hell having as much sex as she could imagine. She and Alex have what we are assured is crazy sex while he writes his memoirs for Satan, who he then gets to meet.
At this point Satan is revealed to be someone we have already encountered in a human form and Lucifer rails about how his brother, Yahweh, has been screwing around with Alex as part of a huge cosmic gambling bet. Alex is the new Job and Lucifer refused to take part, so Yahweh must have cut a deal with someone else. Lucifer promises to get to the bottom of it though, which he eventually does. Alex is taken by Lucifer to meet a sort of God of Gods, the person in charge of both Yahweh and Satan. Yahweh gets taken to task when Odin and Loki show up. Odin has claimed Margarethe’s soul as his own and Loki was the one behind their troubles. (And no, the story never explains how Odin can exist after it repeatedly makes clear that Yahweh is the only God of Earth.) The God of Gods rules that Yahweh was being unfair and that Margarethe was unfairly excluded from Heaven and that she should be restored to Alex. Then there is a hard cut back to Earth and Alex and Margarethe are reunited, running their own soda shop together and the book ends. And no, we never actually find out what happened to Alec Graham when he and Alex switch universes.
The Good
Heinlein’s prose is on point. His writing style is pretty captivating and he knows really well how to capture your attention. He does a great job at introducing these characters and helping us to develop some attachment to them, not just as they pertain to Alex and Margarethe’s story, but for who they are themselves. All of his side characters have personality and their lives feel lived in. They aren’t just props or NPCs for the main characters to interact with in order to further their quest. At least not in the first part of the story. This means when they all show up again in Heaven, all saved in some part thanks to their encounter with Alex, it feels meaningful and deserved. Perhaps my favorite little character bit has to do with Saint Peter, aka the Apostle Peter, who is the head of the heavenly department which takes care of resurrected human needs. His affection for Coca-Cola and his agreeable personality make you immediately like him and wish you could spend some more time with him.
This is true not only of the characters you meet but the worlds they live in as well. None of them are really fleshed out. The book doesn’t have time for that, but it leaves you wanting more. A few times in the story Alex goes to a library and reviews the history of whatever world he is in and each time it is just enough to whet my appetite for the world and its people. The closest we come is after Alex and Margarethe are rescued from being shipwrecked by the Royal Mexican Air Force and are sold as indentured servants to pay off the debts they accumulate towards the state during said rescue. This process gives us insight into the way that the society of that culture functions and how much they have developed technologically. But then, just as it gets interesting, everything shifts to a new world. As a storytelling tool this is fine. But every time it happened it left me wanting to find out more about each of them, especially since it seems like most of the worlds were technologically behind our own universe. Only one seemed to be farther ahead, and then not by much as it had regular space travel and self-driving cars. In other words, it was set maybe 50 years after Elon Musk, Space X, and Tesla.
The world shifts also allow him to slip in his political ideas. For example, the characters repeatedly get stuck with worthless fiat currency. Paper money issued by the Royal Government of Mexico has no value to the Republic of Mexico, next world over. But gold and silver coins can always be used, no matter whose face is on them. The ability of Alex and Margarethe to face the literal world changing problems they face and take care of themselves through their own work and the charity of the people they encounter also testifies to Heinlein’s own personal belief in individualism, though his general political ideas themselves tended to vary throughout his life.
The Bad
It becomes very clear, very early on, that Heinlein’s grasp of Christian history and biblical theology is effectively nil. Multiple characters express the same thought repeatedly throughout the book – that the Abrahamic God is a jerk who likes to kill babies and torture people. The straw man he uses to prop up this exposition is the most stereotypical, conservative, Evangelical Christianity you can think of where no one thinks, has any critical reasoning skills, blindly believes whatever they’re told to think, and can just “get saved” by confessing Jesus after having lived a life of doing horrific things. It is the most juvenile concept of Christianity and Judaism (Yahweh both speaks and acts like a stereotypical Jewish man) you can have. Not even being an Evangelical I know that this isn’t how being “saved” work theologically. And it doesn’t even hold up as the aforementioned nun lived a life of strict compliance, was definitely “saved” as Alex explains even Catholics get saved, and still ended up in Hell because she died during a plague without Last Rites even though she would have been what Alex calls a “state of grace.” Under the rules that Heinlein lays out, she should have been in Heaven. But why isn’t she? Because it helps Heinlein push his agenda to the detriment of his story.
Likewise, Alex is from a world where Christians all consider Darwin to have been evil and have rejected his “lies,” no doubt Heinlein’s attempt to make Christians seem anti-science and ignorant. Yet, in reality, the Roman Catholic Church, accounting for over 1 billion members world wide and fully half of all Christians, has taught that evolutionary theory accords with the Bible since 1950. The Orthodox Church, perhaps the oldest Christian organization on the planet, even accepts the basic truth of evolution. I get that Heinlein is trying to satirize Judeo-Christian beliefs, but satire only works if what you’re satirizing actually matches up with the satire you’ve constructed. And it doesn’t here. Christian theology is broader and deeper than Heinlein understood from his narrow American experience with one small sect of Christianity. That he can’t even follow his own rules just makes it worse.
This total lack of understanding is also why he falls back on to the oldest trope in this kind of writing. Heaven is big and boring and dumb. Hell is cool, everyone parties, and it is easy to get laid. It is a largely disappointing lack of imagination from someone who has been lauded his entire career for being a highly creative science-fiction author. But it is the only way Heinlein can finish his story. After all, if Alex got to Heaven and was immensely and immediately joyful eternally then he wouldn’t want or need to go hunt down Margarethe and the story wouldn’t end. In order for it to continue without her being “saved” then Heaven has to suck. This lack of imagination and understanding is also why Heinlein falls back onto the old dualistic notion of competing and equal gods by elevating Satan from fallen angel status to godhood. A God who is good living in a place of eternal joy who rewards His servants with eternal joy, theosis, and exaltation, in other words honestly dealing with Christian claims instead of discarding them almost entirely, would have led to a very different end for the novel but it wouldn’t have pushed the message of Heinlein’s own borderline atheism. This results in a largely flat and rushed ending having to utilize a deus ex machina like a God of Gods who just decrees everything fixed.
This gets at the real flaw in the book: Too often he is preaching his own ideas instead of letting the characters develop their own voices. And it is preaching. Not once is Alex competent enough to explain any of his own beliefs and no one else every steps up to do so. So again and again Alex is told that his ideas of modesty, sexual fidelity, morality, and faith are stupid, backwards, and idiotic and he just takes it, like one big punching bag. Alex, who was an engineer before he entered the ministry, is basically a stand in for Heinlein himself, who was an engineer before he was an author, and the book essentially becomes his older self lecturing his vision of his younger self for being so naïve. As irrational, back-patting polemic this works. But anyone with even a basic grasp on the facts isn’t going to be persuaded and anyone with any faith – of any sort – is just going to dismiss it as the drivel it is and not be persuaded in any way. This has an overall poor effect on his characters because at times they stop being actual characters and become sock puppets for his philosophies.
No character is more negatively impacted by this than Margarethe herself. She is a vivacious character, but she never fully develops because she has to remain Heinlein’s ideal sexual swinger lady. At one point she even makes out with another man in front of Alex, who she thinks of as her husband he thinks of her as his wife. And when he dares to question her on it she talks down to him like he is a child. Sexual loyalty and fidelity are thus dismissed by every single character of note in the book. But with Margarethe it really limits her growth. Alex falls in love with her not because he knows her, but because she is very attractive, a fact mentioned repeatedly in the text, and willing to sleep with him recreationally, something his wife in his universe of origin would not do (another Christian trope: the cold fish wife.) Her sole role is to have sex with Alex, be attractive to others, and to lecture Alex whenever he expresses evil sexually conservative ideas like monogamy and being against incest. Even in the end she doesn’t choose to be with him. When Alex is with the God of Gods, Alex finds Margarethe encased in a block of ice. Odin tells us she can choose what she wants to do. Then the hard cut comes to their soda shop where everyone gets a kiss from Margarethe on their birthday and they all worship at the Church of the Divine Orgasm. Yes. That is in the book. It all ends the literal worship of the flesh and idolization of sex. Ultimately, this all prevents Margarethe from developing into the full character that she could have been which is hinted at during various moments in the book where she is just allowed to be herself.
Lessons To Be Learned
In terms of planting seeds in people’s minds about how well the government does or doesn’t function and monetary policy, the book does a great job. The fact that paper money is worthless is made again and again in the book without Heinlein having to point a huge flashing neon arrow at it. There is a scene where Alex and Margarethe buy jewelry in order to wear their wealth so that it doesn’t get left behind when they transition between universes and because they can always sell a gold necklace no matter where they end up, but paper money is as worthless as toy money. This illustrates well the importance of money having intrinsic value in order to function as a good medium of exchange. Connected to this the book repeatedly mentions the cost of things. In every universe where precious metals are the common medium of exchange the prices of things are extremely low. Everywhere that paper money is the money people are forced to use prices skyrocket. This demonstrates well how using precious metals as money keeps inflation very low while paper money allows the government to simply print money, causing prices to grow dramatically. Again and again the book shows that paper currency only benefits the wealthy and those in political power. There is also a good scene where Alex gets paid only have his expected income after tax deductions which demonstrates the ways that taxation harm the poor by robbing them of their money, decreasing their standard of living by giving them less to survive and thrive upon, and how it benefits those in power over the common man. These are all valuable lessons about state ran economics.
The book also does a good job showing the power of individualism. Alex and Margarethe are dirt poor for most of the book. But they never give up working. Alex understands that as long as he is willing to do manual labor he can find some kind of work. That will help him stabilize and then give him a foundation upon which to rebuild his life. Margarethe does the same. At the same time we see how many people are willing to help Alex and Margarethe in their times of need. From the Salvation Army to random people who pick them up hitchhiking and buy them meals and give them money, private and personal charity is extolled all over this book. Both of these story elements demonstrate the beautiful power of individualism. Unlike a lot of anti-individualist propaganda, which insists that individualism is “atomistic” and causes a breakdown in society and community (an idea that strikes me as being very close to Marx’s silly idea that working for wages “alienated” the laborer from his/her community and the product that he/she produced), this book demonstrates the community building power of individualism. Community and society are based on voluntary relationships that improve the lives of those involved in them and individualism allows for the best setting for those connections and values which best promote community and society to flourish. That is why we see so many private charities, organizations, and societies in individualistic cultures. Individualists value the individual humanity of each specific person and develop cultures which build people up and empower them. You see that here in Heinlein’s writing.
Conclusion
The book reads very quickly. Most of it is very entertaining and it lays a good foundation of some basic free market and voluntaryist ideas about money, state power, human rights, individualism, and community. On the other hand, it often clumsily preaches Heinlein’s own ideas about sex and religion that are in obvious contradiction to basic morality and even those ideas are presented and defended lazily. The book falls apart in the third act as the Rapture occurs and it becomes clear that Heinlein has no idea how to wrap up the ending at all. It all comes off the rails and it becomes clear that Heinlein is now talking about ideas way beyond his intellectual grasp. So he rushes it and uses a poorly thought out out deus ex machina to try and end the story. And it is all handicapped by Heinlein’s need to promote his own masturbatory worship of the flesh over ideals of self-discipline and sexual self-mastery.
My final conclusion about this book is that it is a C+ or B- book. It isn’t great, but I’ve read far worse and far better.