Fake Jesus and Free Buffalo
Despair and desperation. A history denied and misrepresented. A colonial legacy that still stains the lives and landscape. These describe the setting of Conor Kerr’s new novel Prairie Edge. Set in the Edmonton, Alberta area of Canada, its two primary protagonists are indigenous Metís young people angry and frustrated with a world that gives them More
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Despair and desperation. A history denied and misrepresented. A colonial legacy that still stains the lives and landscape. These describe the setting of Conor Kerr’s new novel Prairie Edge. Set in the Edmonton, Alberta area of Canada, its two primary protagonists are indigenous Metís young people angry and frustrated with a world that gives them little to no credit and even less hope. Cousins somewhat separated, they find themselves living in a single-wide trailer when the book begins. The young man in the story, nicknamed Ezzy, has lived a life moving from foster home to foster home. It is obviously not a life that excels at providing its inmates much of a future beyond the one that Ezzy is living. It is a life defined by drinking Lucky Lager and playing cribbage with his housemate and cousin Grey, a young woman dedicated to fighting for Native rights and against fossil fuel company destruction.
That is, until one night when the two steal a truck and move a small herd of bison from a park outside of town and let them loose in a down park in the city of Edmonton. The motivation behind the action seems straightforward: give the bison and what they represent a chance to thrive again in a world ever more rapidly dying. The results of the action are considerably more complicated. The media does its usual worst in defining the spectacle while the police fumble through their motions of asserting control. Protestsdefending the bison and opposing fossil fuel extraction and the denial of indigenous rights grow in size in the city. Neither results is much of anything. Meanwhile, Grey and Ezzy find another herd and attempt a similar release. This one doesn’t go as well. The bison are moved, but evidence is left behind. A boyfriend of Grey’s from the past appears and, just like he did earlier in Grey’s life, spins her head slightly and makes the protest his own. Not because he necessarily cares about the bison or the issues, but because he sees the protests as an opportunity for ego gratification. Grey seems to know better, but walks back down the path this man Tyler led her down once. Ezzy goes back to his old ways of drinking and drifting.
The story takes a series of brutal turns that result in Ezzy in the hospital with multiple fractures, Grey killing a man who tried to rape her and, ultimately, Ezzy strung out on painkillers given to him by the doctors at the hospital. The story ends on a low but honest note. 
Then there’s the idea that the modern world is merely a hyper-drive version of the madness inherent in the human condition. Religion and government, law and economics. It’s all nonsense designed to convince us that we have a purpose both as individuals and as a species. Ancient Babylon to Manhattan, animism to Catholicism; the show goes on only because we believe it must. Jesus was a savior for some when B.C. crossed over into A.D. For others, he was blasphemy. Today, it could be argued that his name is spoken more in vain than in any other conversational form. Cardinals and con men all claim to know his word while they turn that word into cash dollars and other coin. Men whose lives mirror the suppositions we have about Satan claim the mantle of the Lord Jesus Christ while lost souls blindly attach themselves to these men’s words and give them their votes and their bank accounts. In other words, religious faith is just another transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy.
This is the situation one discovers as they began John O’Kane’s hilariously hallucinatory new novel titled The Accidental Jesus. A man who looks like the white Jesus we’ve all been sold as the real thing arrives in the city of San Pedro for his high school reunion. At one time a Jock for Jesus, the fellow has let his hair grow, continued his interest in seeking spiritual wholeness and lives on a commune dedicated to that search with several others. After leaving the reunion festivities somewhat disillusioned—not unexpectedly—he decides to leave town, but not before checking out a couple old haunts. That’s when things get weird.
The escapades he describes are as innocent as a conversation about spirituality with a man living in an RV near a camp of the unhoused and as wild as an orgy of spiritual revolutionaries in a church. Bikers in a bar compete with bible-thumpers determined to crown the protagonist’s presence as the Second Coming just because he looks remarkably like the Jesus they’ve been sold. All the while, police and their military cohorts rain chemical from their copters and block off streets in an attempt to control the insanity unfolding all around them. O’Kane’s descriptions of the fictional events are simultaneously hilarious and crazed; I was reminded of the pages of a Watchman comic. Utterly unbelievable and quite believable all at once. This reader found the book humorous, beyond belief and wishing it was real, The Accidental Jesus is a psychedelic carousel ride fiddling with, ridiculing and challenging the concepts of religion, perhaps as part of a search for genuine meaning.
The current state of the US can perhaps be considered to be the sum of madness and tragedy. Trump’s involvement in US politics has turned a sideshow into a shit show. As noted before, religion is an obvious joke and the rich have those who make their profits convinced that the wealth of the wealthy is a benefit for them. Children look up to human mutations like Elon Musk because he’s rich and national armies commit genocide in slow and fast motion. These two new novels do a damn good job of portraying this state of affairs. Prairie Edge captures the state of depression too many humans consider normal. The Accidental Jesus reveals the madness that we know resides barely underneath the surface.
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