Action-adventure for a Christian evangelical audience.
With the fourth in The End series, LaHaye and Parshall (Brink of Chaos, 2012, etc.) continue to translate apocalyptic theology into action-adventure fiction.
The rapture has occurred. Christian believers have been taken to heaven. Now, Satan seeks to subdue the world, and his evil agent is the Global Alliance. The good folk left behind, now Christians, are resisting. That’s the theology piece, but the book reads like a spy novel set in the immediate future and using Revelations as a plot outline. Chapters are short, and settings jump around the globe as the narrative follows multiple characters. The protagonist is the head of the Remnant, Ethan March, subject to visions and recipient of miracles. The antagonist is Alexander Colliquin, head of the Alliance. Characters, however, are one-dimensional, although there’s a chaste love story between March and Rivka Reuban, former Mossad agent. There are odd dialogue juxtapositions—a believer is confronted by a murderous pimp in a Hong Kong back alley and threatened with death, only to respond "I’ve settled up my life with Christ. I know where I’m going. Do you?" The issues at hand are, first, the refusal of believers to submit to "BID-Tag" implants, laser-readable identity chips, and second, the Alliance’s effort to subvert the Internet to its own purposes—mind control—by taking over the United States’ vast security mainframe infrastructure, particularly a facility in Utah. Evil machinations in Washington thread through the story, including an assassination, but action zigzags around the world. With the action moving quickly, the narrative is constructed to suggest the apocalypse is near, and so there are references to current events. The writing is prosaic, and the theology is fundamentalist rather than mystical. As a character notes at book's end, the prophesied Tribulation is yet unfinished, and so LaHaye and Parshall have more to write.
Action-adventure for a Christian evangelical audience.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-310-33464-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Zondervan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
A clever but unnecessary project.
Though witty and erudite, these tales could have been left “untold.”
In a new collection that springs from his participation in the esteemed Gotham Writers Workshop, Rothstein takes stories from the Hebrew Bible and tells them from new perspectives in modern language. The author hopes to provide a fresh context for oft-told biblical tales, infusing them with life by allowing readers to see the material with new eyes. He succeeds to a certain extent. His retellings are detailed and scholarly, as they should be given the author’s doctorate in Jewish History from Harvard. The problem, however, is the same one that bogs down most attempts to elaborate upon the Biblical text, including those of Joseph Heller, Zora Neale Hurston and, more recently, Anita Diamant. Literary critic Erich Auerbach identified the greatness of the Bible in its sparseness, famously describing the text as “fraught with background.” It is as notable for what it does not say as for what it does. Efforts to fill in the Bible’s narrative gaps–no matter how well intentioned–disseminate the sublime sense of mystery. Thus Cassandra was doomed from the start, but the book is also flawed. Rothstein’s efforts to modernize the Bible often come off as flip–too superficial for such a foundational text. One first senses the encroaching campiness when a young Israelite, fresh out of Egypt and wandering the wilderness after the Passover, asks his mother, “Oh, and could you pass more manna, please?” By the time readers come upon the story of the minor prophet Hosea from the mouth of a literary agent, they may have had enough.
A clever but unnecessary project.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4392-0825-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A novel of psychological devastation, where the unthinkable and unspeakable exist offstage.
A welcome reissue of a classic about Nazi evil originally published in German in 1959.
This psychologically subtle and acute account of denial in the face of Hitler’s rise to power received strong acclaim before disappearing from print. With the celebration last year of the 100th birthday of Keilson, a psychoanalyst who was part of the Dutch resistance during World War II, the novel has lost none of its insidious power. Cast as notes left behind by an anonymous German outcast in the years before the war, the narrative recalls the existential depth of Camus and the fabulist absurdity of Kafka or Beckett, as it illuminates the protagonist’s symbiotic relationship with the enemy whom he wishes he had killed when he might have had the chance. Though the narrator doesn’t identify himself specifically as Jewish or his adversary as Hitler, the parable has even more resonance than a fictional memoir would. “The whole thing was a comedy, a comedy in a minor key,” writes the narrator. “Tomorrow it would become real; then it would be tragedy.” The most striking episodes in a novel filled with them include a rally during the enemy’s ascent (“He still had to stay within certain limits, but his threats were unmistakable. He was not, as yet, master over life and death. As yet?”) and a chilling rampage through a cemetery, defiling the dead. The framing of the novel suggests that these pages are being read years after they were written, and written years after the events recounted, but such distance doesn’t render the narrative any less vivid: “In the middle of a sentence, in the middle of the debate with his adversary, he began to scream and rave. A lunatic!” Yet the enemy could not be so easily dismissed, as subsequent horrors would prove.
A novel of psychological devastation, where the unthinkable and unspeakable exist offstage.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-13962-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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