Is your writing imbued with a certain religious tone: themes and patterns in my favourite books

I had never considered this before, until I kept having to pitch my books to agents with a suggestion about what books they would sit next to on the shelf of the book store in the query. This led to several questions; is this solely predicated on the genre? How important is genre? Is there anything else at work when we write?

Take the book I have just finished writing. Well I have written the third draft of my WIP. I couldn’t find a book that was like it. I stumbled on Kazuo Ishiguro’s KLARA & THE SUN when I was researching and writing my dissertation because that was the question I was answering for that, and I thought, ‘oh no, someone has written something similar’. But that isn’t true. What is true is that someone has written a book about a robot, a mother and a daughter, which, coincidentally, is the subject matter of my book THE MOTHERBOARD https://herziloph.substack.com/ written at around the same time during the pandemic and reblogged (you can read an extract here). But the tone is different. When I was reading Ishiguro’s recent work, I was trying to work out why it is different from my work and what I would say is that the POV of the robot, Klara is quite naive; there are blind spots in Klara’s thinking, and whereas Ishiguro is exploring the complex problem of what makes us human in his work, in my book THE MOTHERBOARD, I am more interested in our relationships with one another in the sense that I believe we are often operating in a superficial sense, governed by rules and society, which makes our actions predicated on a controlling force of which we are not fully aware, something that Freud and Jung have both written about. And this is what influences our behaviour.

As the writer James Baldwin points out in GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, Penguin, (1953), we have physical needs which seem to be at war with society’s, and in this book, god’s, expectations. With this sort of thinking we are bound to subdue our natural impulses in favour of what is right.

Freud differentiated this by dividing the personality up into the id, the ego, and the super ego. One holding the other in abeyance, and it is thus in Baldwin’s work.

In Octavia E. Butler’s FLEDGLING, Headline, (2005), there is something else at work in the power struggle between the sexes depicted here, and that is the power that money wields in relationships. The currency that Renee has in this work is the ability to provoke desire, and to withhold the ability to quench it at the same time.

The tension in Butler’s work makes it more similar to my work THE MOTHERBOARD, although the subject matter is very different. In this work the subject, Renee is undead and reborn as a woman with latent power. Power which she seems simultaneously both aware of and unaware of, since she is in thrall to those whose desire she is the object of. This then is an exploration of the subconscious. I touch on the subconscious in my literary sequel to JANE EYRE, BERTHA’S JOURNAL: A PERFECT IMMELMAN [sic] TURN. See the link to a discussion on Blog Talk Radio below:

https://t.co/r18bD76HYK

But what got me thinking about this work was the need to market my children’s book, WOEDY BEAR. Desire features in this book, but only in the sense that the protagonist falls in love with a teddy bear and names him WOEDY. I was told by someone who had rejected it that it was a classic (aren’t rejections strange?). I wasn’t sure exactly how to interpret that praise. By the time I received it I had been querying it on and off with an air of restraint not unlike that of Emily Dickinson, for almost two decades. Was Woedy Bear like Paddington Bear? That too is a lost and found story about a bear. But paddington talked, and my bear, Woedy, doesn’t. Was there another work of fiction that was similar to Woedy Bear? The answer came in a surprising place, when I was sent a book recommendation by Kindle. J had download around 30 samples of books and read the first 7 pages of all of them. Only 3 had held my interest enough to make me want to read past page 12.

What I discovered, only this week, almost 40 years since my rejections for this work started to come in, was that WOEDY BEAR has the tone of a work which is imbued with a religious bent:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hermione-Laake/e/B00FCATON2/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

There is no reference to religion in Woedy Bear, unlike the work that was suggested to me, I suppose by a Kindle algorithm, that book was, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, but still the tone persists, in the syntax, style and dénouement. It is a tone I enjoy, evidenced by my current choice of books to read on my Kindle. I suppose some might call it archaic. But I like it. I grew up with writing like that. Something tells me that you may have too. And, after all, there is no accounting for taste. What has fashion got to do with anything?