Click here to read the corresponding review written by teenager Aoife Martin
Would Christianity survive a dystopian future? The Second Coming of Jesus is the promised final chapter of this world but that hasn’t stopped storytellers exploring an apocalyptic future born from humanity’s self-destruction. The Terminator warns about artificial intelligence. The Hunger Games preys on our fears about the thin line between civilisation and barbarism. And George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four eerily predicts the rise of totalitarianism, Newspeak and the erosion of freedom.
Into this heavily crowded genre comes Andrew Moody’s The Blood Mile. Billed as Mad Max meets John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, this fast-paced young adults novel is part–Christian allegory, part–adventure.
Barbarians At The Gates
The story opens with 18-year-old Chris Walker staring down his rifle scope at an armoured truck ‘full of wild men waving spears and machetes and spiked clubs’. These Savages are in hot pursuit of a van marked with red, crossed syringes hurtling towards Walker’s post-apocalyptic hometown of Spillan in the Autonomous Zone. The chased driver is an Agent tasked with warning each town that their entire region is about to undergo a Total Cleanse and Reconstruction. Think total annihilation.
Why? Because everyone is infected with the Tox—not just the Savages as always believed. A free cure is available to all who head the outpost of Crux. But unfortunately that means walking through hostile wastelands and into the arms of the accursed enemy.
The Blood Miles
Andrew Moody
Pilgrim’s Progress meets Mad Max in this post-apocalyptic roadtrip. On the day he saves his fortress town from raiders, Chris Walker makes a devastating discovery that will overturn everything he believes and force him to leave the safety of his home. As he heads out into a shattered land, Chris must fight for his life and battle his own demons. Will he find a cure for the Tox that is spreading through his nervous system? Will he finally learn the terrifying truth of its origin? Can he put his trust in the mysterious Envoy and his promises?
That enemy is Central, run by the Pantarch and the Envoy—two figures who are almost universally despised. Not only have they been at constant war with the Autonomous Zone, but they also control the region’s only water pipeline.
No one’s buying what the Agent is selling, except our hero Walker, who begins a perilous journey through bogs, mountain ranges and junkyards, encountering along the way Savages, drones and psychotic jailers in the hope of bringing the cure back to Spillan.
Honouring a Beloved Classic
Moody, the former editorial director of The Gospel Coalition Australia, writes a punchy page-turner with an evolving cleverness. He quickly flips reader expectations on their head. We learn that the bad guys are in fact the good guys. Tox is an allergory for original sin. Central is heaven. The Pantarch is God the Father. And the Envoy is God the Son.
Christians are called Travellers, each equipped with bullet-proof coats (armour of God, Eph 6:13), machairas (sword of the Spirit, Eph 6:17), and the Roadbook (the Bible). Their role is to point everyone to Crux (the crucifixion) where the cure for the Tox (mercy and obedience) needs to work through your system. Or the “blood miles” as it’s known—a double wordplay on the atoning death of Jesus and the harrowing pilgrimage Walker undergoes. It’s the Envoy’s blood that is the cure for the Tox—a cure only given to those who accept the Pantarch’s pardon and swear allegiance to him.
Moody provides a worthy homage to The Pilgrim’s Progress, following others who have trodden its path before (notably C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress). Canny readers will enjoy unlocking the allusions and wordplays throughout the novel, such as Chris Walker (Christ walker), the Gaians (back-to-naturists more interested in saving animals than people), and Ockham (a scientific town that burns books and rejects any supernaturalism).
The social commentary of modern thought is brief but biting. ‘You fight the Tox simply by thinking about what is most conducive to your own happiness and that of others. And then doing it,’ one Ockham leader says, echoing the humanist thought currently infecting modern society.
Amused to Death
The Blood Mile’s best chapters are reserved for the aptly named Addle and its surrounds—Moody’s version of The Pilgrim’s Progress‘ Vanity Fair. It’s a cutting criticism of sleepy Christians (Matt 25:1–13), who are depicted as Travellers in pyjamas who seek comfort inside a city-sized tent and underground bunkers. It’s also home to compromised Travellers, who represent Christians who decry the Bible or twist it to appease the world.
Core to the city is a theme park formerly named Story World, complete with waxworks depicting death, which no one takes seriously, and a courthouse, which, ironically, once hosted the old puppet show. Furries (humans dressed as animals) even get a look in via a gang known as The Lions: confused young people catcalling Travellers with make-believe offence. Again, it’s clever storytelling.
When we learn of one Traveller’s attempt to cut down the tent, Moody delivers one of his strongest lines: ‘So people would remember that there’s a world outside it.’ That’s a powerful challenge to the Fortnite generation.
The Road Less Travelled
Quibbles with the novel are minor but noteworthy. First, it needs a professional copyeditor. Typos are like potholes. Readers tolerate one or two, but scores become jarring.
Second, Walker’s major revelation about his shameful past (chapter 11) and the assertation that he’ll always be a haunted man is unconvincing. There’s no echo in his life prior to this dreadful sin and it’s only mentioned sporadically afterwards. It’s a lost opportunity to create empathy for the hero by showing his flaws, doubts and moral wrestling, plus a driving motive for change. Teenage male readers need connection. They’re experiencing their own real-world struggles with lust, rage, abandonment, body image and culturally lambasted masculinity, mostly without anyone willing to listen to them. Escapism provides short-term relief, but realism provides long-term understanding.
Third, a mystery involving the other major character and fellow Traveller, Caleb Dox, sees him framed for murder in Addle. It’s built up beautifully. But rather than leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the reader to follow, the crime is mostly resolved off-camera. It feels rushed, like the story had to quickly run back to the main character, Walker. The let-down is rescued by the ending, however, which is crisp, action-packed and opens the novel to a sequel.
Ultimately, The Blood Miles is an engaging, inventive and swift novel. It avoids clunky preaching disguised as a story. Christians will draw the most from it, though it contains allegories accessible even to unchurched teenagers, both guys and girls.
