Q&A: D.S. Lliteras
By Tamara Butler -- Library Journal, 2/1/2007
D.S. Lliteras has always been a spiritual novelist. Although his early Llewellyn trilogy (In the Heart of Things; Into the Ashes; Half Hidden by Twilight) reflected the author’s experiences as a combat corpsman during the Vietnam War, it also offered a Zen perspective. His later historical novels (The Silence of John; Jerusalem’s Rain) probed the human and spiritual impact of Christ’s crucifixion. His latest biblical work, The Master of Secrets (see review, p. 56), follows a young boy who has just witnessed Jesus’s death as he is seduced by a charming charlatan into fleecing gullible audiences.
Your biblical novels revolve around the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. What is it that keeps bringing you back to this event?
This is Christianity’s starting point. Without the Crucifixion and without the people who witnessed this event, Christianity would not exist—the Gospels would not exist. It is also a great source of spiritual and artistic inspiration to me.
In The Master of Secrets, the charlatan Jeshua, whose name is a Hebrew or Aramaic form of Jesus, seems to represent the opposite of what Jesus symbolizes. Did you intend for Jeshua to be only a villain, or is he more complex than that?
Jeshua is an extremely complex and intelligent man: a secular pragmatist and a cynic who rejects dogma, challenges hypocrisy, mocks religious contradictions, skirts the law, and rebels against the harsh conditions of his world. In a way, he is a man of truth even though he does not know, “What is truth?”
Would you categorize The Master of Secrets as a coming-of-age story because Addan loses much of his boyhood innocence through his relationship with Jeshua?
Yes. But it is also a coming-of-age story because Addan has a spiritually mature religious awakening that launches him into adulthood. In other words, Addan loses his boyhood innocence by replacing it with adulthood innocence through his relationship with both Jeshua and Jesus and, therefore, remains a child of God.
Does your own experience as a Vietnam War veteran influence your writing and, if so, how?
I am certain that my Vietnam experience has influenced my writing, since nobody returns from a war the same person. However, I am not certain in what way. Since I spent a full combat year with the First Reconnaissance Battalion, First Marine Division, and I was deployed on 20 long-range patrols and 80 combat dives, it is likely that the war gave me a visceral understanding about life and death and suffering. I suppose the most enduring influence of my war experiences has been that they are responsible for my lifelong quest to understand, “What is the truth?”
What do you hope your readers experience with your novels?
I hope my audience responds to the immediacy of the story as well as feels the emotions of the characters involved and sees the results of their actions. If a novel is going to make any sense concerning matters of the spirit, it should be grounded in the drama of earthly stories about flesh-and-blood people. I also hope that my readers experience themselves by bringing their own belief systems and intellectual paradigms to my novels. I have endeavored to convey a universal respect toward readers of any faith or no faith.
Finally, I hope believers realize—despite their possible uneasiness with the flawed behavior and the ordinariness of the imperfect saints who inhabit my gritty and often dark biblical novels—that the bright Christian message is not diminished. And I also hope, through the same humanness of my characters, that I’ve demonstrated to nonbelievers, that it is not necessary to be “religious” in order to engage in the humanity and spirit of a Christian event so powerful that its story has transcended 2000 years of history.
