Wise Blood [Paperback]

Flannery O'Connor is one of the strangest and most disturbing writers I've read. When I finish reading her work I'm overcome by a profound unease. Her stories don't immediately satisfy, but are complex, painful and mysterious. Wise Blood is more upsetting than a gruesome horror novel because it truly explores isolation, violence and despair. None of her characters here have true friends, and the only ones with family, blind preacher Asa Hawks and his teenage daughter Sabbath Lily, don't love each other.
Her protagonist, Hazel Motes, is an ex-soldier who returns from World War II to find that his home town no longer exists. The grandson of a travelling preacher, his years away have rendered him a bitter atheist, and he shacks up with a prostitute in a new city, determined to blaspheme.
Motes is a cold and joyless man, who despite his antireligious beliefs chooses a suit which makes him look like a preacher. He's mistaken for one even by a taxi driver taking him to the known prostitute's home. This infuriates him, though he becomes a preacher for his own church, a Church Without Christ, which proudly proclaims that Jesus was a liar. In his new city he meets Asa and Sabbath, who beg strangers for money and distribute Christian leaflets. Hazel begins harassing them, unaware of their true motives and natures, which become apparent over time.
He also comes across Enoch Emery, an eighteen-year old zookeeper who's lived alone since his father abandoned him. Emery is no less tortured than Motes, and also driven by blasphemy. Emery believes he has "wise blood," which pushes him towards revelation without spiritual or intellectual guidance. His blood leads him to a mummified dwarf in a museum on the zoo's grounds, and tells him that this ancient creature is the "new jesus."
It's interesting to note that O'Connor doesn't capitalise "Jesus" when used in connection with Emery's dwarf; I think she's emphasising that this saviour isn't real. What Emery becomes provides the true revelation, that his "wise blood" has led him to a false idol and down into nothingness. His last scene is also my favourite in the novel. Driven mad by loneliness, he can only be pitied. This city he's found himself in is hostile and unwelcoming.
The second half of Wise Blood is the most disturbing, because Motes' and Emery's respective obsessions finally consume them. Motes descends even further than Emery, who's essentially an innocent, and turns into a gross, twisted monster. The tortures he inflicts on himself in pursuit of blasphemy and a godless universe grow darker.
Wise Blood is a very grim novel with few likeable characters, but it's also beautiful and thought-provoking. O'Connor's prose is elegantly crafted, and conveys her sense of sadness and doom with unflinching vision.

Flannery O'Connor is an author whose writing I have always wanted to explore. Her writing style has been categorised as `Southern Gothic' being influenced by her home environment of the American deep south of the 1940s and 1950s. Wise Blood offers her interpretation of the religious fervor that existed in the old South. The novels main character is Hazel Motes, a young man who has been raised in an extremely conservative God fearing household. However, after serving in the army and fighting for his country Motes returns home with his faith totally destroyed. Flannery O'Connor uses her main character to explore the theme of loss of faith as Motes creates his own church; the Church without Christ. The sole aim of this church being to save people from Christian salvation. As Motes embarks on his itinerant ministry he encounters an eclectic mix of characters and madcap situations that the author uses to portray the complex picture of life in the deep South of her youth.
The narrative is both beautifully descriptive and humorous without being detrimental to the overall message that O'Connor was wanting to portray. One minor point to make is that as the novel was written in 1952 some of the language and imagery could be perceived as offensive in the present day.

The story opens with Hazel Motes, a man recently discharged from the Army, on the train to the fictional town of Taulkinham, Tennessee, where he's "...going to do some things I never have done before." Hazel has never been to Taulkinham and once he does get there and has sorted out his lodging, he goes about trying to start `the church without Christ' by street preaching.

Hazel believes that he can be saved from evil by believing in nothing. If he has no soul to save then there is no such thing as sin and therefore he can do whatever the hell he likes. By avoiding sin this way he will get to meet Jesus (or something like that).Of course in doing this, Hazel just proves himself as a believer and other characters are used to argue different aspects of theology.

Other characters in the book include a preacher who may or may not have blinded himself with acid, his daughter who only believes in self-gratification and Hazel's follower Enoch who is trying to find the new physical Jesus. It's a strange strange book which brings in one grotesque character in after another and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it all.

I am glad I read it, the characters were all thought provoking and there was a large amount of black comedy throughout. However I don't think I really connected at all with the story and found the narrative quite strange and out of place in parts.