Beautiful Revolutionary Laura Elizabeth Woollett Scribe) $36
It seems that there is renewed interest in print and on film about mystic, religious and pseudoreligious cults. Osho, the RollsRoyce guru, and his Rajneesh movement are the subject of Netflix series Wild, Wild Country; Charles Manson’s murderous crew is central to TV series Aquarius; documentaries on the Gloriavale Christian Community in Haupiri, Westland, seem to be on constant TV replay; and a CBS News
documentary on the 1993 Waco siege features a New Zealander, who escaped death there, talking about her sister, who didn’t.
To this mix add Beautiful Revolutionary, by young Australian author Laura Elizabeth Woollett, the 2014 winner of the John Marsden/Hachette Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for several literary awards.
Woollett’s focus here is the Peoples Temple of crazed charismatic leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, and events culminating in the 1978 mass suicide of his 909 disciples – adults and children – after drinking cyanide-laced KoolAid.
The book is the author’s interpretive fictional account, overlaid on a well-researched framework of fact and first-person description.
The two central characters are young married couple Evelyn and Lenny, he a go-with-the-flow, wishy-washy type and she – a minister’s daughter – an intellectual and countercultural romantic, the ‘‘beautiful revolutionary’’ of the title.
On finding and joining Peoples Temple, Evelyn becomes a devoted Jones zealot, sucked in by his ‘‘voice like moonshine’’ and the allure of his evangelical passion. She abandons Lenny and becomes
Jones’ sexual plaything, his second wife in all but deed, and handmaiden in the dissemination of his publicity material and dictatorial edicts to the Jones
‘‘family’’. Woollett has peopled her closed society with individuals, groups within groups and breakaway factions, all distinctly identifiable.
Over some 380 pages, she teases out the intricacies of communication among the cult’s various strata, tracking the descent from benign sectarian togetherness to panic-ridden confusion under a mercurial leader.
That the disciples are strictly regimented, overworked and increasingly food- and sleepdeprived adds to their confusion.
For those on the outside, there is a horrid fascination in observing the pattern of mass hypnosis of the
naive and gullible – seen before in history and bound to be repeated.
Woollett has done a superb job of adding to our understanding through her recreation of the grim goings-on at Jonestown.
Were this not about an actual event, dissected often in various media through the years, the book would still stand alone as a horrific example of dangerous cultism.
Her writing is thoughtprovoking and at times luminous, and while some passages could have been edited a little more tightly, the story leads the reader by the hand towards its ghastly and inevitable conclusion.
Woollett has done a superb job of adding to our understanding through her recreation of the grim goings-on at Jonestown.