Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Left Behind Classic Fridays, No. 69: ‘This is London’

Left Behind Classic Fridays, No. 69: ‘This is London’

Last updated on: February 19, 2016 at 7:42 am by Fred Clark

Left Behind Classic Fridays, No. 69: ‘This is London’ 2016-02-18T19:45:36-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Originally posted November 5, 2005.

You can read this entire series, for free, via the convenient Left Behind Index. This post is also part of the ebook collection The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 1, available on Amazon for just $2.99. Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook, completing all the posts on the first Left Behind book, is also now available.

Left Behind, pp. 171-186

Jerry Jenkins sets the tone for Chapter 10 with a Bulwer-Lytton-worthy opening sentence:

Cameron Williams convinced himself he should not call his and Dirk Burton’s mutual friend at Scotland Yard before leaving New York.

This chapter features Jenkins doing his best impersonation of Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum: Late-night globetrotting flights, coded phone conversations, a rendezvous in a seedy London pub — all presented with that unique Jerry Jenkins flair.

Buck is headed to London to talk to Alan Tompkins, a “midlevel operative” at Scotland Yard. (DCI Tennison, this is MLO Tompkins …) He doesn’t call Tompkins on the phone from New York because he’s afraid someone might be listening in. So Buck flies to London, checks into a hotel, and then calls Tompkins on the phone.

Buck took both his real and his phony passport and visa — a customary safety precaution — caught a late flight to London out of La Guardia [sic] Friday night, and arrived at Heathrow Saturday morning. He checked into the Tavistock Hotel and slept until midafternoon. Then he set out to find the truth about Dirk’s death. He started by calling Scotland Yard and asking for his friend …

We’ll forgive Buck for not sleeping on the plane, considering what happened the last time he did that. Buck never seems to think about that, however, which is strange. If your week began on an overnight flight to London and that flight was interrupted and rerouted to Chicago due to the still-unexplained disappearance of some 2 billion people, followed by scores of plane crashes around the world, rail disasters and untold death and mayhem, then you might take a moment to reflect on that a few days later as you once again boarded an overnight flight to London. Buck doesn’t.

This guy is obviously not Rapture-worthy.

In fact, as he arrives in London and begins his investigation of Dirk’s supposed suicide, there’s no sign that anything at all unusual had happened earlier that week. London seems utterly unaffected by the calamity that turned New York City into a postapocalyptic disaster zone. The entire Buck/Alan storyline, in fact, seems like it’s occurring before the disappearances.

One way of reading this would be to interpret it as a condemnation of the Anglican Church and UK Christianity in general. The C of E, LaHaye and Jenkins might be saying, is so thoroughly secularized that no one in England would be among the disappeared — that the country wouldn’t even seem to notice the disappearances had occurred.

This would be a slap not only at the Anglicans, but also at England’s vibrant evangelical community. Evangelical Christianity in the UK is quite different from its Americanized version. British evangelicalism traces back to the Wesleys and never abandoned the Wesleyan concern for the poor. And, since they’re not American, they never began to confuse America with the kingdom of God, and thus have not conflated their faith with a reactionary, uber-patriotic politics. Nor have they been caught up in some of the uniquely American heresies that characterize evangelical Christianity on this side of the Atlantic — such as young-earth creationism and, well, premillennial dispensationalism. British evangelicals have even been known to drink beer. For all these reasons, L&J probably don’t consider these British evangelicals to be “true Christians,” so they probably would get left behind along with the Anglicans.

But there’s another, more likely, explanation for the strange disconnect between the spy-thriller storyline in this chapter and the disaster-movie storyline that went before it: Jenkins is a Bad Writer who pays no attention to continuity. The earlier chapters were about plane crashes and disappearances. This chapter is about something else, so he abruptly drops all that other stuff.

This disregard for continuity makes it difficult to read Left Behind as a single, coherent narrative. It forces the reader to regard the text as a collection of disparate, discrete stories — some of which apply to one set of storylines, others of which apply to another set. This is, of course, exactly how dispensationalists read the Bible. (It’s a complex, difficult system, but it allows you to pretend that the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t apply to you.)

Alan and Buck, Jenkins assures us, are old pals who get together, along with Dirk Burton, whenever Buck is in London. You’d think Buck might have Alan’s direct number, then, but let that pass. Buck is worried that the nefarious, powerful people who killed Dirk might be listening in on his phone call to Alan. “He tried to communicate to Tompkins in such a way that Alan would catch on quickly and not give away that they were friends — in case the line was tapped.”

What follows is Buck’s idea of a non-suspicious sounding phone call:

“Mr. Tompkins, you don’t know me, but my name is Cameron Williams of Global Weekly.” Before Alan could laugh and greet his friend, Buck quickly continued, “I’m here in London to do a story preliminary to the international monetary conference at the United Nations.”

Alan sounded suddenly serious. “How can I help you, sir? What does that have to do with Scotland Yard?”

“I’m having trouble locating my interview subject, and I suspect foul play.”

“And your subject?”

“His name is Burton, Dirk Burton. He works at the exchange.”

“Let me do some checking and call you back.”

It’s hard to imagine a more suspicious-sounding phone call.

Buck meets Alan “just inside the vestibule at Scotland Yard” and they drive furtively to “a dark pub a few miles away.” Once there, Alan urges Buck to go home and forget he ever knew Dirk Burton. Dirk, he says, was On To Something. He Knew Too Much and so he was killed.

“Cameron, you know what this is about.”

“I don’t!”

“Come, come, man. Dirk was a conspiracy theorist, always sniffing around Todd-Cothran’s involvement with international money men, his role in the three-currency conference, even his association with your Stonagal chap.”

“Alan, there are books about this stuff. People make a hobby of ascribing all manner of evil to the Tri-Lateral Commission [sic], the Illuminati, even the Freemasons, for goodness sake. Dirk thought Todd-Cothran and Stonagal were part of something he called the Council of Ten or the Council of Wise Men. So what? It’s harmless.”

“But when you have an employee, admittedly several levels removed from the head of the exchange, trying to connect his boss to conspiracy theories, he has a problem.”

Buck sighed. “So he gets called on the carpet, maybe he gets fired. But tell me how he gets dead or pushed to suicide.”

This is an odd bit of inoculation. End Times enthusiasts often wind up embracing weird conspiracy theories about the Trilateral Commission and the Illuminati. L&J poke fun at this tendency, even as they describe their own conspiracy theory involving something called the Council of Ten.

Alan goes on to explain why he believes Dirk was murdered. Over the next few pages, he outlines several subtle clues. Dirk, for instance, was left-handed. (“He was such a klutz because he was left-handed,” Buck says.) Yet the gun used in his supposed suicide was found in his right hand. After all this CSI-type discussion, Alan explains the final subtle clue that led him to suspect Dirk was murdered: Todd-Cothran admitted having Burton killed and threatened to kill Tompkins, too, if he tried to do anything about it. Tompkins, a trained investigator, picks up on clues like that.

After a thug visits Tompkins at his home and threatens him (“I was visited by what you in America call a goon.” “A heavy?” “Precisely.” “He threatened you?” “He did.”) Tompkins had visited Todd-Cothran at his office:

“Well, I get right down to business. I tell him, ‘Sir, I believe you’ve had an employee murdered.’ And just as calm as you like, he says, ‘Tell you what, governor’ — which is a term cockneys use on each other, not something people of his station usually call people of mine. Anyway, he says, ‘Tell you what, governor, the next time somebody visits your flat at ten o’clock at night, as a certain gentleman did last night, greet him for me, won’t you?”

“What did you say?”

“What could I say? I was stunned to silence! I just looked at him and nodded. ‘And let me tell you something else,’ he says. ‘Tell your friend Williams to keep out of this.’ I say ‘Williams?’ like I don’t know who he’s talking about. He ignores that because, of course, he knows better.”

After a few explicit threats about Buck and Alan’s family members, by name, Todd-Cothran calls Tompkins’ captain (or “high-level operative”):

“He said to him, ‘Sullivan, if one of your men was to come to my office and harass me about anything, what should I do?’ And Sullivan, one of my idols, sounded like a little baby. He said, ‘Mr. Todd-Cothran, sir, you do whatever you need to do.’ And Todd-Cothran said, ‘What if I was to kill him where he sits?’ And Sullivan said, ‘Sir, I’m sure it would be justifiable homicide.’ Now get this. Todd-Cothran said, right over the phone to Scotland Yard, where you know they tape every incoming call, and Todd-Cothran knows it just as well, ‘What if his name happened to be Alan Tompkins?’ Just like that, plain as day. And Sullivan said, ‘I’d come over there and dispose of the body myself.’ Well, I got the picture.”

One hurdle in the writing of any good innocent-man-embroiled-in-an-international-scheme thriller is to explain why our hero can’t just go to the police. The classic devices for dealing with this are to either have the hero be unjustly accused of some crime or to have a few corrupt police officers involved in the international scheme. Jenkins here has chosen the latter approach, but he’s taken it a bit over the top. He doesn’t just suggest that the head of the London Exchange is a corrupt man who has bought off a few inspectors at Scotland Yard, he suggests that England is a lawless oligarchy along the lines of North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq. Todd-Cothran’s confidence that he can kill with impunity is impressive, I suppose, but his naked threats are inelegant. I’d have preferred something more sophisticated — like using the corrupt Sullivan to plant evidence implicating Buck in Dirk’s murder.

In any case, Alan has been threatened into warning Buck off the story — lest something nasty happen to him and his entire family. It’s kind of odd, then, that Alan’s earlier impulse to hearing Buck’s voice on the phone was to “laugh and greet his friend.”

Buck Williams, the GIRAT, isn’t cowed by these threats, but he does, wisely, decide it might be safer to pursue this story from somewhere other than London, so he uses a pay phone in the pub to book the next flight out of the country using the name on his fake passport, “George Oreskovich.” While he does this, Alan heads out to the car to turn off the overhead light that he didn’t remember leaving on. Despite all they’ve been discussing, neither of them finds this suspicious.

As Buck hung up, the door of the pub was blown into the room and a blinding flash and deafening crash sent patrons screaming to the floor. … Buck stared in horror at the frame and melted tires of what had been Alan’s Scotland Yard-issue sedan. … A leg and part of a torso lay on the sidewalk — the remains of Alan Tompkins.

As the patrons surged out to get a look at the burning wreckage, Buck elbowed his way through them, pulling his real passport and identification from his wallet. In the confusion he flipped the documents near what was left of the car and hoped they wouldn’t get burned beyond readability. Whoever wanted him dead could assume him dead.

That last move isn’t bad. Buck crawls through a window out of the back of the pub, runs down a few alleys and catches a cab. When he sees police cars at his hotel, he tells the cabbie to take him straight to the airport where, as “Oreskovich” — “a naturalized Englishman from Poland on his way to a holiday in the States” — he boards a plane to Frankfurt, Germany.

Thus concludes Chapter 10, a strange little interlude that seems to have little to do with the rest of the book. It doesn’t advance the plot or reveal character. There’s little here that’s particularly religious, or that seems to deal very much with the End Times. Todd-Cothran, after all, is a mere midlevel operative in the rising one-world government of the Antichrist. L&J never really resolve or revisit this part of the story, it just becomes a not-quite-convincing excuse for Buck to turn to Nicolae Carpathia for help. All told, this chapter reads like a conventional thriller, poorly executed.

Buck’s Jack-Ryan-esque visit to London seems to have happened only to provide vicarious thrills and a sense of adventure. As such, it’s not tangential after all. The whole obsession with the End Times — with supposed prophecies of the culmination of history — is a desperate attempt to create significance and meaning for people whose lives are woefully lacking either. The End Times mania promises adventure for the bored. It says that your seemingly meaningless life matters because you are living in The Most Critical Time in the History of the World.

Tracking these End Times prophecies is a form of escapism — something to keep the idle faithful from getting bored until they finally escape for good.

Uncategorized

Left Behind

Previous Post

February 18, 2016

So let the time keep rolling on

Next Post

February 19, 2016 It's a sin to kill a mockingbird

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What Christian group follows the "Watchtower" publication?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Baptists Jehovah’s Witnesses Pentecostals Seventh-day Adventists