This book has blown my mind and I’m not quite finished reading.

I’m revising a novel set in the first years following World War II. One of my main characters is in Paris. Her lover was a member of the French Resistance. So . . .

I’ve been reading a lot about the war and the post war period and I recently stumbled on a book entitled Eleos by D. R. Bell. That novel encompasses not just the consequences of the Holocaust, but also of the Armenian genocide that preceded.

“In the Bible,” Bell writer, “God was willing to spare Sodom if ten righteous people could be found.” Ten people in a whole city seems easy. Bell seems to concur. “How low are our expectations of righteousness,” he writes.

The crux of the book follows immediately, at least in my thinking. Though there is much more to reveal about the survivors of both horrors, one of the main characters continues with his attempt to understand how either or both could have happened. “Like guilt,” he says, “the righteousness is individual, not collective.” He argues that a righteous person can’t absolve the murderer or murderers of their guilt. “the only redemption there is must be our own.”

Individual responsibility. I’ve written several times about our responsibility as writers to write actively, not because it’s more exciting, but because active writing assigns responsibility. The sentence, “Abel was murdered,” means something entirely different from, “Cain killed Abel.” It has to do with telling the whole truth as much as we are able. Even in fiction, our characters do stuff, some of it pretty nasty. We can provide backstory to explain how that character did that bad thing, but if you believe in free agency, the bad actor needs to be assigned responsibility.

Throughout the novel, Bell sets his characters, all victims of the two genocides, in a world that has moved on. These characters argue, over and over, that letting the perpetrators go free or suffer minor penalties assure that there will be another genocide, and another, and another.

In addition to that thought, I’m still processing Bell’s grey zone, “the moral compromise that prisoners make in order to survive another day.” How do we assign responsibility to those prisoners? I don’t have an answer to that.

I found the book unsettling in an important way. I’m still processing and struggling to imagine how we stop the next genocide when genocidal wars rage all around us.