Reading The Lying Carpet is a mesmerizing, dizzying experience. Somehow, through the story of a little statue and a lying (and talking) carpet, Lucas effortlessly pushes us up against some of the most essential questions – the nature of truth, the role of stories, and making sense of one’s existence.

(image from author David Lucas’s site)

The story centers around the statue of a little girl, Faith, who one day awakens and starts to wonder what she is. She’s puzzled with the realization that she is a statue and questions how she became a statue. With the assistance of the lying carpet, she wonders if she was once a little girl turned into a statue through a magic spell. Or is she just an ordinary statue and before that stone on the side of a mountain before being chiseled into creation by a sculptor? If she was once a girl and there is a spell, can it be unbroken? Or is she doomed to be a statue forever? And what would happen if she was knocked off her pedestal to smash against the floor? What would she be then?

Although disguised as a children’s story, I found this to be a philosophical fable – an allegory perhaps for the creation stories we humans have created over time. As the lying carpet tells her possibility after possibility of what she really is, Faith finds herself believing each story and not knowing what is true and what isn’t. Each creation story is compelling. She yearns for the truth, but the carpet frustratingly seems to be talking in circles.

Faith wishes and hopes that she’s really a little girl. She yearns for meaning and to know that she is more than just a simple statue. But the carpet and no one will tell her what she is. She yearns for proof and to know.

However, proof isn’t always possible. And sometimes we will never really know. Sometimes, in whatever we believe, whether in terms of science or love or the universe, there must be, albeit how scary it may seem, an element of ‘Faith.’