And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:4-5)
Karen Hancock’s The Enclave is set at an institution that’s high-tech and groundbreaking, modern in every sense of the word except cynicism, for the Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute isn’t a cynical place. It’s a place where men are using science to create a new world, to reinvent themselves, to defeat mortality and make men into gods.
But the roots of what’s happening at K-J go all the way back to Genesis. From the moment Parker Swain, a villain who reminded me of Left Behind’s Nicolae Carpathia (but more interesting), opens his mouth, we know he’s not content to be human the way most of us are. Swain may have weaknesses, but he will overcome them; he is smarter, more daring, more godlike than ordinary men. Ordinary men like his father, who was a pastor.
“He was a fool,” Swain said now, hanging the cloth on its hook. “Did not read — except the Bible, of course. Did not think! Heaven forbid he should ever seriously and thoughtfully entertain a concept that challenged his belief system! He had no interest in developing his brain. My mother was even worse. Anything they didn’t understand — which was almost everything — they ascribed to the devil.”
And the devil, in Swain’s view, was nothing but a construct of Christianity. A nonexistant bogeyman used by one group of men to control another — which was the true purpose of all religions as far as Swain was concerned.
Free of God, free of the devil, free of anyone’s control, Swain will bring his own kingdom come, his own will be done. He does have one weakness, of course; he’s mortal. But through science, he plans to change that too.
In stark contrast, Lacey McHenry has fought her way up from a broken past to a position in the K-J animal lab, where she wears a lab coat with the name “Carlos” stitched on the pocket, battles stress and fatigue, and wishes desperately she could fit in. Her eventual ally, Cameron Reinhardt, is a post-traumatic geneticist who may be more intelligent than the average man but has as many clay feet as a mud-caked centipede.
Her fellow staff members had made it very clear that she was junior staff — welcomed warmly, but hardly fit to kiss the feet of the exalted priests and priestesses of research who were the heart and soul of Kendall-Jakes, the brilliant men and women who would usher in a new age for mankind. Men like Cameron Reinhardt, who couldn’t get his socks matched, rarely cleaned his glasses, forgot to shave more than half the time, and couldn’t even remember to close the lid on the frog tank.
And that, her conscience informed her, sounds very much like bitterness.
In The Enclave, a woman who vacillates between wanting the truth and just wanting to live for herself teams up with a man whose first reaction to evil is to run away and change his name. On their side, they have God — the Creator spoken of in Genesis, toward whom they are both a little bitter for getting them into such a mess, but whom they have no choice but to trust. On the opposite side is a man who has never accepted that he is not God, that he cannot be God, that after all, eating of the knowledge of evil is not enough to transform him.
It was in this look at the human heart, of the ways we respond to a God who is greater than we are, that I felt The Enclave became most significant. In many ways, all of human history is a refusal on the part of man to admit that he is man and that God is God. Those who admit to being what they are, fallen, fallible, and helpless, can be saved. Those who do not are unreachable by grace.
In the real world, science has long been one of the primary battlefields where these truths play out. In fact, Karen Hancock says that a real-life experiment in the 1980s provided the inspiration for Kendall-Jakes’s dirty little secret, an underground enclave where science has gone too far. Hancock tackles many of the ways in which man tries to be God, from cloning to manipulation to self-glorification, and she does it with the stamp of truth.
In the end, the great irony is that in trying to become God, we reveal how much we have misunderstood Him. When God became man in the person of Christ, He was a perfect man. When man tries to become God, he becomes a monster. He becomes more intolerant, more controlling, more cruel than any man-made pagan god of the past. He becomes Parker Swain, who is everything he claims to hate.
And all the while, those human beings who accept their limitations, who carry thorns in their flesh and cry out for grace, who cast themselves on God’s will, help, and love — these become, little by little, more like God.
Thanks to Karen Hancock for writing a novel that highlights our great irony — and God’s great grace — so clearly.
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