Word: collier
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...interminable tête-à-têtes about the creation of the world, etc., between God and Jesus, and between God and Adam. Gone too are most of the lofty jawboning sessions with angels who tend to sound like an unfortunate blend of Dean Rusk and Charlton Heston. Collier skips the Creation entirely, as well as the war in heaven (in fact, most of Books III, VI, VII, VIII, X, XI), except for the fall of Satan's defeated forces toward hell. Where it suits his purposes, though, he uses Milton's verse verbatim-and with reverence...
Describing the action for future cameramen, Collier creates prose that often matches and sometimes surpasses even Milton's great-ranging visual imagination. He sees the fall of the rebel angels at cosmic distance, as a golden snowfall that fills the firmament. After Pandemonium (the house of all demons) is created by magic, its central room becomes as black as night, or the inside of Satan's skull, and myriad rows of attendant devils wink like stars. Satan and his dark disciples fly toward the high gate of hell bound for the corruption of mankind. They look, Collier writes...
What Milton had that Collier hasn't is a sense of sin, and the overwhelming power and beauty of divine order. What Collier has that Milton hadn't is a sense of humor and a delight in the variety of chaos. For Milton the Fall was not merely revealed truth but a towering, tragic parable through which man could imagine how mortality and evil came into the world. Verse after Miltonic verse wrestles with the problem of free will and predestination, and throbs with the poet's knowledge that to survive humanely, men must paradoxically believe they...
That ingenious paradox Collier is not about to accept. If the Fall is a tragedy, Collier feels, as petulantly as the veriest college sophomore, then God is to blame. He was running the show, wasn't he? Even more fashionably, Collier looks on the Fall of Man as a liberation -from timeless, static perfection into the rich, brothy, changeful world of guilt and death, of love and squalor...
...crystal," Collier has fairly explained; "Satan is a virus. Crystal imprisons us in perfection. Virus is a source of death, and of all growth...