Christian Fiction: the Classics

Novels, by people who converted as adults — and most of them are the same act performed twice. A man writes his own conversion and gives the man another name. Psichari’s return to the faith in the Mauritanian desert is told of an officer called Maxence; Huysmans’ is told of Durtal; Kagawa’s fifteen years in the Kobe slum are told of Eiichi Niimi. The disguise is thin and was never meant to hold.

They are here rather than among the testimonies because a narrator who is invented is not a witness, whatever the author borrowed from his own life — and the shelf next door keeps a first-person rule that only holds if nothing bends it. They are not apologetics either. A novel does not argue; it shows a man to whom something happened.