Georgia Writers Association

On This Side of Heaven
By Pamela Jackson
Ivy House, Raleigh, 2006
279 pp., $23.95

On This Side of Heaven was this year’s GAYA winner for best first novel, and an engaging novel it is. From the very first, we are plunged into the world of the Reverend Bob Buck, a sixty-something minister of the United Covenant Church, sent to a small, dying country church as punishment for dicey financial shenanigans. It’s expected that he’ll close the church and end his checkered career.

Bob doesn’t want to take this lying down, though. Full of resentment at his demotion, he latches onto a smarmy, flamboyant music director with crowd appeal, drops liturgy right and left, and vows to build a “contemporary” church to rival the megachurch of one Uriah Jonah. To this end, he connives at persuading an elderly church widower to donate a prime parcel of land “in memory of his wife.” Buck envisions a huge 8.5 million-dollar building on the land.

Will he succeed, or will the concern of a young assistant pastor, Ben Montague, manage to derail his self-aggrandizing scheme? And exactly why does Ben look so much like Bob Buck? Let us pray--

The author, a Local Pastor Candidate in the United Methodist Church, knows her subject well, and she is particularly good at delineating the secondary characters—Bob’s long-suffering wife, Peggy, his friend and supporter Tom Warner, longtime member Miss Mary, and music minister Ashley, to name a few. The question in the book—is the church, in its zeal to attract members and grow, in danger of losing its soul—parallels the question of whether Bob Buck is also on that slippery slope.

I like the book so well I’m reluctant to point out its weaknesses, mostly a matter of craft.  For one, I found all the different points of view distracting. For another, there are too many unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases; too much use of “was”; and too many short choppy sentences that could/should have been combined for a smoother flow. I kept wanting to reach for my blue pencil.

It’s a compliment to the power of the narrative that these factors didn’t slow me down too much. A nagging unanswered question is the character arc that changed Bob Buck from the young, idealistic preacher he was at thirty to the self-deluding charlatan he seems to have become. I want to know what went on in all those years before we see him now. And the ending—hmmm—a suspicion of Deus? Oh yes, and he stays in the shower too much. Once is enough as a literary device.

Despite all this nitpicking, I’ll have to say Ms. Jackson has written a necessary book. As a former vestrywoman and church volunteer, I know these people—all of them. I’ll probably buy copies to give away.

Anne Lovett, a Georgia native, began her writing career with a humor column for her high school newspaper, hoping to write science fiction. She was educated at Emory and Georgia Tech, receiving a Ph.D. in natural products chemistry. She helped to found a manufacturing and technical supplies company now doing business nationwide and eventually made her way back to writing, though not science fiction. A member of Georgia Writers, Georgia Romance Writers, AWP and Rosemary Daniell’s Zona Rosa Alpha Babes, her short fiction has appeared in Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature, The Distillery, The Jewish Women’s’ Literary Annual, and Red Wheelbarrow. Non-fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared locally, and several novels are in the pipeline. She is a regular contributor to the online journal The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon (www.barbaraknott.net).