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Job: A Comedy of Justice

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Back in 1942 Heinlein wrote an amazing short story, "The Unleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." It was an astonishing story for its time and genre. It was out of print for a number of years, but is now available in "The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein." I mention "Jonathan Hoag" because as he often did in the last decades of his life, Heinlein returned to some of the themes of earlier books. He returned to some of the ideas of "Jonathan Hoag" in this remarkable book, "Job."

Read at one level, this novel is a updated biblical Book of Job. The main character is put through the wringer because of a wager made by his Creator. Read at another level, it is the story of transformation: religious bigot and all-around prig Alex Hergensheimer is transformed into a much better person, even if that may not have been anyone's intent. But at another, deeper level, Heinlein illustrates what is really important, what really matters, what really endures. Because Alex discovers, over the course of the story, what real love can be, and how real love is the most important thing in the universe. More important than the dubious Heaven he finds when, about to lose his wager, the Creator pulls the Last Trump and Alex ascends to sainthood and Heaven, without his true love. He abandons Heaven and harrows Hell to find her. Heinlein couldn't have put it much more plainly.

My favorite scene: when, risen into Heaven as a Saint, Alex asks Heaven's help in finding his wife. And Heaven produces his wife. His first wife. From before he found real love. She's a harridan, and the transformed Alex is appalled. Even the angels are embarrassed for Alex.

The denouement hearkens back to the denouement of "Jonathan Hoag." For me, it works, but I can sympathize with those who find the ending, quite literally, too deus machina.

Like "Jonathan Hoag," you are never sure where this story is going to end, and I won't spoil it for you here. Except to say that the implied limits on human understanding are bittersweet. We can find true love, Heinlein seems to be saying, and we can live lives filled with love, but we cannot really understand the universe.

This is Heinlein at his best. No pontificating all-knowing protagonists, very little of the political polemics that started with "Stranger." Just an excellent story that invites deeper thought. Highly recommended.

I've been kind of hard on Heinlein on the last few books of his that I read but that ends here. Farnham's Freehold might have had a better slate of ideas and Friday might have had a better main character but this book has them both beat hands down. Heinlein manages to keep doing what he was doing in those other books, which was make comments about society and aspects of it as a whole . . . but here he remembers to have a sense of humor and drops the somewhat snide tone that colored the other two books (ie the "all the enlightened people will see that I make sense and agree with me" feeling). Our hero, Alex/Alec is a devout and orthodox preacher who goes firewalking while on vacation and from there starts bouncing randomly from world to world. By the second world he's picked up a girl and is starting to detect a pattern . . . it must be the devil's fault because he's preparing for the upcoming end of the world. The story starts out as standard science fiction and Heinlein whips out worlds in a few pages that lesser writers would have spent entire series detailing . . . about two thirds through it becomes something utterly unexpected and just as good. What remains constant is the aforementioned sense of humor, Alex has some interesting views because of his faith that make him seem a bit narrow minded but all in all he's a likable character who really wants to help people (or "save" them by bringing them to a "state of grace" so they'll go to Heaven) . . . he's a typical Heinlein protagonist in that he's always resourceful and resolute, even when it doesn't seem that way. His gal, Margarete isn't as clearly drawn, she has her good moments but she spends too much time in the "my darling love" mode, but then that's something to be expected from Heinlein's portrayal of women by now . . . still the free love stuff isn't beaten to death like in other novels, he merely makes his point and moves on. The satire on religion is probably the core of the book and he raises several good points without being needlessly offensive, anyone with half a brain will find something worthwhile here to mull over. Simply put, probably one of his top three books after Stranger in a Strange Land (still got that soft spot for Moon is a Harsh Mistress, sorry) and definitely renewed my faith in the man, he had plenty of other stuff to say in the latter part of his career and could still do it with an ease that blew everyone else out of the water.

As Heinlein got older, he seemed to become a better and more focused writer, instead of peaking when he was younger. "Job: A Comedy of Justice" does not have the usual kinky bisexual characters or aliens with odd names that make his other more popular books so hard to follow, if you grok what I mean. I highly recommended this if you want a different slant on a Biblical story.

This late-period Heinlein work is one of my personal favorites of his, although I don't think it's one of his absolutely top-drawer novels. Heinlein kept experimenting right up to the very end; this is his last novel but two, and the final two were just as daringly experimental.

This one is essentially a retelling of the story of Job, with Alexander Hergensheimer as the put-upon protagonist. The outcome, too, parallels the story of Job, but I can't tell you how without giving away the ending. Let's just say that Heinlein borrows from, and builds on, some of his own nearly-forgotten early fantasy/horror works, particularly 'They' and 'The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag'.

It's also a grand homage to two of Heinlein's literary forebears -- James Branch Cabell (_Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice_) and Samuel Langhorne Clemens ('Mark Twain'; 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'). You don't _have_ to know this in order to appreciate the story, but it helps.

You probably already know the plot. On a bet, Hergensheimer undertakes a firewalk and comes out the other side in a different world, one in which people keep calling him 'Alec Graham'. Level One plot: Who is Graham and how did Hergensheimer come to take his place? And what's up with this world-changing business?

Hergensheimer is also a minister in a conservative Protestant sect, and he's married. But in his new world, he's got Graham's girlfriend: a stunning Danish beauty named Margrethe, with whom he commits all sorts of 'sins' and for whose soul he is deeply concerned (she worships Odin). Level Two plot: How does Hergensheimer handle all the moral quandaries, and how does he grow and change in the process? (I'm sure you can guess that he 'grows' toward a more Heinleinian tolerance and open-mindedness; much of the religious satire here is directed at the usual suspects, who of course denounced the book as soon as it was published.)

I can't say much about the Level Three plot because it has to do with the aforementioned structure of the biblical book of Job. However, I will tell you that readers who think that structure falls apart in the end don't know Job as well as they think they do. If you're still puzzled after you read (Heinlein's) _Job_, you may want to skim over the excellent introduction to Stephen Mitchell's fine translation of the (Hebrew) book of Job. At any rate, it has to do with the nature of reality and what's really of the most central importance to human beings.

Note: there's a little bit (by a Heinleinian standard, i.e., compared to 'a lot' in his other late-period works) of preachery here, and also a little bit (by the same standard) of sex; none of it (i.e., neither the preaching nor the sex) is in conformity to the moral codes of the major branches of Protestantism. Neither will surprise or bother any of Heinlein's regular readers, but both will probably upset the targets of Heinlein's satire. If that's you, be warned.

I first read this book as a teenager. Perhaps this was the best time I could have opened the cover to Job, a time when I was questioning many of the things I had been taught. My mind was pliant clay where ideas were constantly clashing. I was a youth who suspected that society was rife with hypocrisy and lies.

Why do we believe what we do? Why are certain parables regarded as examples of morality? Have we been conditioned to believe that great evils were in fact just and moral? What the heck is morality anyway?

These are a few of the questions that Job will challenge you with. It is a book that left an indelible impression on me, and caused me to reject many of the things I had been force-fed as a child.

If you are looking for Heinlein's typical science-fiction, you won't find it here. Instead you'll find a story spun from Heinlein's ascerbic wit that navigates the human system of beliefs and values, and does so with greater incisiveness than he's done in any other title.

At the end of Expanded Universe, Robert Heinlein promised that he would keep whistling at pretty girls and kicking sacred cows. Job: A Comedy of Justice fulfills that promise on a grand scale, as it whisks us along on a fast-paced, wickedly irreverent tale.

It tells the story of Reverend Alexander Hergensheimer, an engineering school dropout who became a fundamentalist minister instead. But rather than spending Sundays in the pulpit, Hergensheimer pushes paper for "the greater glory of God," as head of C.U.D.-Churches United for Decency. It's a Christian special interest group that lobbies the leaders of his country on such social issues as whether to use "the Alaska option for the Negro problem," or to eliminate all research in astronomy. Hergensheimer hails from a godfearing world, and he aims to make it even more fearful. But now he's on vacation, on a cruise through the South Pacific, and utterly relaxed-until he takes a bet that he can walk through a fire pit [rotected by his faith. Terrified, but praying fiercely, Hergensheimer walks over a bed of hot coals only to faint away at the very end of it. When he awakes, the world has changed around him.

Back aboard ship, Hergensheimer is shocked to discover a drastically changed set of mores, including paganism, foul, heretical language and even nudity. Hergensheimer's country, the theocratic North American Union, no longer exists, nor does the technology he grew up with. Worst of all, only he seems to have noticed the great world change-everyone else is slapping him on the back and calling him by a different name.

What follows is a study in human virtue and human folly, as some unseen force plays cat and mouse with Hergensheimer, and as Hergensheimer falls in love and gives in to the deadliest of sins. World change follows world change, and his torturer finally leads Hergensheimer to Heaven, to Hell, and to the ultimate audience with the God of Gods, Mr. Koshchei. Heinlein wrote Job in the grand tradition of American satire, taking cues from James Branch Cabell (Jurgen: a Comedy of Justice) and Mark Twain ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"). Critics almost uniformly praise Job, and the book earned itself a sound condemnation from Falwell's Moral Majority, whose activities are so lovingly parodied by Hergensheimer's C.U.D.

Along with the well wrought satire, in Job Heinlein delivers skillful studies of human nature and portrayals of various walks of life. Highly recommended. ---Beth Ager of ...

Heinlein's _Job: A Comedy of Justice_ is a good example of why some people prefer S-F, meaning possibly 'speculative fiction' versus Sci-Fi for the genre. There is damn little science in this book, unless you count dishwashing among the sciences (those who enjoyed the book might excuse the pun, if you don't see the pun, read the book). Job starts out as an unremarkable preacher, in an future USA which is theocratic. As a man, however, Job is not quite unremarkable, he has a bit too much integrity, and a lot more resilience, though Heinlein might have credited the average person of his acquaintance with as much. Job takes a South Pacific cruise, which is pleasant, until he tries firewalking, on sort of a dare. He doesn't get burned then, but he does shortly afterward. As the saying goes, "Then everything started happening." He winds up in a slightly alternate universe where he had been a gangster. This might be a textbook example of the dictum "To give your readers a good time, give you character a bad time." Eventually the only skill transferrable to his new environment is dishwashing. Job, like his Biblical namesake, eventually is rewarded--he finds out that Heaven and Hell are real, although not quite what he or you or I learned in Sunday school. "Job" is among the very best of Heinlein's post-Stranger in a Strange Land fiction, and does not merit the criticism of preaching to the converted that slightly taints much of his later fiction.

I had a great time reading this book. I originally read it in high school, and liked it, but didn't really get all the things it was saying. I recently re-read it and enjoyed everything I'd missed the first time. Heinlein toys with the ideas of religion, life, death, love, human suffering, and alternate realities in an entertainingly blasphemous, fast-paced story. I highly recommend it to anyone who's ever questioned what they've been told.

This book pleasantly surprised me. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't the deliciously wild satire I got. The book started out as a fairly typical (though thoroughly enjoyable) Heinlein "stranger in a strange land" story. But then, about half-way through, the book took on a completely unexpected twist, I for one had no idea the book was going the direction it took. The book was very good and it kept me glued to my seat. Outside of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which most consider Heinlein's peak, I'd call this the very best of RAH's post-Stranger fiction.

The novel, being a satire at heart, has some seemingly very deep themes in it, it focuses heavily on religious aspects and is somewhat irrevant. The many underlying themes have their meanings that I think we can each take in our own personal way, though what Heinlein's actual intended message was is anyone's guess. Read it and judge for yourself.

This book has been much more influential than has been impressed. I've heard quotes from this book, and the theme of jumping from universe to universe has been used in a multitude of hollywood television programs. I usually don't like book titles with a colon in them, but in Heinlein's case, it's an apt title.

There's a strong sense here that Heinlein is responding to all the criticisms of his past novels. Friday had too sexy and too sexually liberated of a protagonist and too off-handedly spurned religion, now in JOB the protagonist is a rather sedate in temperance and sexual experience and is a religious reverend to boot. Past books had too much pontificating cited by critics, here the protagonist learns from other people. Past characters were rich and lived cushy lives, here the protagonist is thrown literally universe to universe where he has to be out among `the people' and live and rely upon them first hand. It's as if Heinlein is parodying all his numerous critics and saying, `what!, you don't think I can write about that' and that if he wants to write about something, he'll write it. This is perhaps the most mature work of his I've read since Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It starts out a bit slower, is not as exciting or fun as let's say Friday, but in the end more meaningful.

As you may have ascertained, this is a novel with a heavy religious bent. It's a present day version of the Book of Job in the Bible. However, it's probably more for those that aren't especially religious, especially for those that may groan and roll their eyes at the mention of religion. For Heinlein isn't trying to shove religion down your throat, in fact it's the opposite, he's criticizing heavily some of the aspects of religion, especially the trials and tribulations of Job. What kind of God is it that would put all these tasks before people to be able to get into heaven, in the worst case being Job, where God allows Satan to make Job's life absolutely horribly miserable over a lousy bet. And towards the end, in what I think is a respectable way, the question of that wisdom is put to trial is a way, with there being different levels of omnipotence and omniscience. This section is the most powerful part of this book.

This novel was one of the six finalists for the 1984 Nebula Award and one of five finalists for the 1985 Hugo Award. Heinlein wrote a few more books before his death in 1988, but this was the last novel to be a nominee finalist for either award. At first, one might think that it may be due to sentimentality for the famous Heinlein, while in actuality this novel shows why he's such a well known, well read author and awarded the title of Grand Master.

JOB: A Comedy of Justice, published 1984, 439 pages, four full stars.