By Michael O'Brien
Catholic-ometer: 3 of 5
Enjoyability: 0.5 of 5
Now, I began by saying that this book was a vapid, boring, meandering trainwreck, and I intend to prove that to the best of my ability; one word at a time.
Word 1; Vapid
Something which is vapid is something which offers nothing original or challenging; a normal and uninteresting fare, and this book falls neatly into that category. Alex Graham spends most of the book meeting irrelivent people and hearing their life stories. This book goes into -tremendous- detail about every last life story it chronicles, and the worst part is that some of these could have been really cool life stories, but they never focus on the stuff that would actually be impressive and challenging to read about, like for example, there was the dead father character; Yevgeny, who's basically a radiation doctor who gets shanghaied by the Russian government because they suspect him of something, and leaves his family behind. Sounds like a cool story, right? Well, yeah, in theory. The problem is, you only find out the story decades after the kidnapping/execution/whatever is already over and done with, and it's too late to do anything about it, so... what the heck?
Aglaya is another good example of what I'm talking about; spends a -huge- amount of time telling the story of her life. and what did she do with that life, exactly? Watched her mother do a few cool things when she was a little girl, then spent the rest of her life taking care of a cow.
The problem here is that while there is sort of a spectre of things having gone wrong in the lives of many of these people, there's either no really direct contact with the source of that evil, or else, no serious hope of routing it, and either way, the outcome is the same. If you never ran into a really serious evildoer, then how exactly is that challenging? Because you suffered? Everyone suffers.
On the other hand, if you did run into a serious evildoer, and just never had any real hope of stopping him/her, well... join the club. Every single person who makes the mistake of watching the news or picking up a newspaper knows what that's like. There's nothing seriously challenging here.
The only messages that are challenging are the extreme messages; hope and despair. You either have hope for the ultimate destruction of evil, and the total exhaltation of man to divine purity and glory, or you absolutely despair that this will ever happen. If you're midway between those two, you can hardly claim that your message is even interesting, much less challenging, and not one person in this book talks about Jesus finally squashing all evil and taking good people home again. Oh, they talk about Catholicism, in a way, but not the one way that would have made one of their messages challenging or compelling. This is why I say that this book is vapid.
Word 2; Boring
This is mainly outlined in the section on the plot, but for the moment, all I really need to say is that this book contains no serious conflicts. Alex Graham supposes, at first, that his son has fallen in with the wrong people, and that he might even have been kidnapped, but he's never sure what's happened, and the other characters do everything they can to comfort him and convince him that nothing bad has happened to him or to his boy. In short, to disarm any sense of tension that might otherwise have saved this story from the mess of boredom it sunk into.
Furthermore, at every stage of the story, the irrelevant subplots distract the mood further from where it ought to be, which leads me to my next complaint.
Word 3; Meandering
Midway through the story, the father takes flight after flight around Europe and Russia, trying to track down his son, but he always seems to arrive just a moment too late, and have to pick up the trail again after a lot of research and more than one botch. In each place he visits, he also runs into an irrelevant side character, who he usually helps out in some manner. Because he accomplishes absolutely nothing at most of his stops on his trip, the whole section feels like one long lump of filler, meandering aimlessly towards its objective -eventually.-
However, this only lasts until he gets stranded in Siberia, and the whole plot becomes one long meander; grinding to a screeching halt. It gets jump-started again later, but goes a little too fast, rushing off in a completely irrelevant direction again, so its track record of meandering goes quite strong until Alex's son pretty much falls into his lap upon his return home. I don't think calling this book "meandering" is anything close to a stretch.
Word 4; Train-Wreck
Lastly, this book is a train-wreck, because it fails to deliver an enjoyable reading experience. As I said, there's no substantial conflict, no focus on the main plot, no tension to speak of, and lastly, the book offends the sensibilities of any decent person by allowing the bad guys (such as they were) to get away scott free, while the good guys (such as they were) continue reflecting on all the meaningless suffering, persecution and torture they've undergone over their lives. Lovely. There's no scenes of great heroism, no magnificent accomplishments depicted; by God or men, and ultimately, the story fizzles in a very unsatisfying way. I can't imagine anything about this story that could possible inspire enjoyment or satisfaction, and that's reason enough for me to call it a train-wreck.
Of course, this only scratches the surface of the pain this book brought. There's still one last section to get to; the premise and the reaction to this tome. See you then.
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