After reading The Tempest Tales (published in 2008) by Walter Mosley, I’m ready to believe in the hereafter. But only if I can go there with someone like Tempest by my side.  This book is fabulous! Totally different from Nothing to Be Frightened Of (which I liked and which I reviewed yesterday), in Mosley’s book there is no fearing death or wondering about an afterlife.  Mosley presents a concrete afterlife where you will come face to face with Saint Peter; your sins will be weighed against your acts of goodness, and, the best news of all, you only go to hell if you accept that you belong there. (Now that is good to know.)

Our hero, Tempest Landry, is the first man ever, in all eternity, who argues with Saint Peter that he most certainly does not belong in hell (although apparently it took quite a bit of time to separate “sin from saintliness in the arrogant Joan of Arc”).  Mosley’s hero takes afterlife by the horns, refusing to go to hell for transgressions he argues were necessary for his survival and the survival of others. He argues his case to Saint Peter so well that he is sent back down to earth, together with heaven’s accountant of souls (named appropriately “Angel”).  It’s Angel’s job to convince Tempest that he has sinned and should go to hell.  But it’s not long before Tempest’s take on life as a black man in Harlem, sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking but always charming, has Angel twisted and turned and almost human.  I was rooting for his humanity and Tempest’s soul all the way.

I like pretty much everything I’ve read by Mosley (and he’s written a lot) and this book is right up there with his best Easy Rawlins novels.  Like the Rawlins novels, The Tempest Tales give a rounded and earthy view of what it’s like to be Black and poor and a man.  Tempest is a hero not because he escapes poverty but because he sticks around his neighborhood and helps others get through it; the only free will he has is what he can do to make the best of the conditions placed on his life, given his economic status, his race, his gender.

But this novel is not about race.  Just as Angel explains that the Jews in the Bible are a metaphor for all humanity, Tempest is also a metaphor for all humanity.  We all have two absolutes in common: we are all born and we all die.  Every single human being shares the coming fate.  Our individuality is in how we choose to live but even there, our free will is confined within the circumstances often out of our control.

Mosley raises a very interesting and difficult question about the nature of time allotted to us in life.  In heaven, there is time pressure:

“Time was an inexhaustible commodity on the heavenly plane.  If something needed to be done, then it was done.  If a thought took an instant or a thousand years, or a thousand thousand years, it was no matter.  But on earth every moment fled leaving you with desperation, frustration, and fear.”

Yes, life is short and eternity is forever.  It is a challenge for us as humans is to make life with its precious minutes worthwhile.  But how to do that without pressure?  How to live each day fully without arriving in bed at night thinking, “Oh no, didn’t quite live fully enough today.  Better try harder tomorrow.” It is a conundrum and a vexing one: how to live well and fully and as if you had all the time in the world, so as to enjoy it all, and yet knowing that time is actually the one thing none of us have?

Mosley also raises the question of what is our responsibility towards stopping evil in this world.  Can we really make a difference against horrors that do not touch us, evil that we can choose not to see? Angels asks Tempest if he cares about the fate of the world and Tempest answers,

“People be dyin’ by the thousands every day, Angel…they dyin’ in Sudan an’ Congo an’ Iraq just t’name three places.  But if you go out here in the streets you see people buyin’ Christmas trees and video games like they was gonna run out any minute. Nobody care if the world goin’ down in flames, just as long as their house don’t catch fire.”

Angel argues that such apathy is wrong but Tempest counters with what could anyone actually do, and asks what Angel is going to do about it.  Angel answers that stopping evil is not his job (Ergo, not God’s job) and Tempest shoots back,

“Well, if it ain’t your job, then how in hell can it be mine?”

Good question. So is the answer, “do what you can in your own little world and hope the goodness spreads”?  I don’t know.  But that is what Tempest does and to me, he is a hero.

Great book, great read.