CALL ME JOE

A mysterious figure may be the savior a world on the brink of chaos needs.

“Is this the end of the world?” asks a young schoolboy at the beginning of this novel by Crofts and debut author Van Es. The reason for the question is alarmingly obvious: The midday sun has been completely eclipsed and the world has suddenly gone dark. In the resulting global panic, the boy’s question is echoed by everybody from the president of Russia to the United States director of national intelligence, who angrily floats many possibilities, from invading aliens to attacking Chinese. That initial blackout only lasts for 12 minutes, after which things temporarily seem to go back to normal for everyone except a young schoolteacher named Sophie, who notices a peculiar man emerging from the shrubbery on her school’s grounds. “He almost seemed to glow,” she notes. “His long, black hair and beard positively shone with good health, as did his darkly tanned skin.” Despite the odd circumstances, Sophie feels instinctively that she can trust this stranger, and when she learns he’s homeless, she impulsively invites him to stay in her apartment, despite having no proof that he’s not a “delusional nutter.” Under prodding from Sophie’s students, the stranger reveals that his name is Jesus but consents to being called simply “Joe” instead. And as the rest of the world deals with the steadily spreading uncertainty of the blackout’s meaning, a more intensely personal drama unfolds in Joe’s personal orbit.

Van Es and Crofts do a very canny job of balancing these two focuses, sensitively playing off the tensions between the forces on a Tom Clancy–style worldwide stage and the much tighter community found in typical contemporary Christian fiction. Readers are brought into the debates raging in the halls of power in many countries, and they’re introduced to a large cast of characters, ranging from artificial intelligence specialist Yung Zhang to Hakizimana, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and Tanzeel, “a neuroscientist, spiritual leader and author.” As word of Joe spreads, it ignites a global frenzy. “It is tapping into the religious and spiritual ecstasy that we all crave,” readers are told, “whether we choose to admit it or not.” And at the center of everything is Joe himself, easily the book’s most realized character, a kind and unassuming version of Jesus who varies from the canonical version (at one point, he casually reveals that the whole born-in-a-manger drama never happened) as often as he explicitly echoes it. The version of Jesus’ philosophy conveyed by this appealing character is gentle and empathetic. “I wanted a world in which the goodness of people would rise to the surface rather than the selfishness and hardness that was so common,” he tells Sophie at one point. The book’s depiction of this new ministry’s fate is not only closely connected to the tale’s more dramatic events, but also more intriguingly—and ultimately no less globally—to theology, as Joe eventually deals with the world’s religious leaders. The authors occasionally allow their characters to lapse into one-dimensionality, but the story’s general momentum carries the day.

A readable and effective combination of international thriller and religious novel.