Book Review – The Edge of Eternity

I hadn’t planned to do two posts in a row on book reviews, unless one of those was the next in the series I covered the first book of in my last review.

However, I feel compelled to process my perspective with a book I read this past weekend.  As with another book I read recently that had been on my bookshelves for a time, this book has a copyright date of 1998.   Author:  Randy Alcorn.

I don’t quite know what to do with this book.

I found it more compelling than most books I read to keep going forward and progressing through the storyline:  to the extent that I found it difficult even to break and start dinner, and so on.

Yet, in a sense that makes no sense because of the nature of the storyline.  Per what I have read about well crafted novels, this one had far too much mental action versus physical action and far too much description versus physical action.

Apart from compelling, I also found the storyline strangely disturbing.  Though I think the theology here more sound, I found it a similar experience to my response [and that of others] to The Shack, which many have noted constitutes a heretical tract opposed to Christianity:  a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Yet, this in a sense in a different configuration is the same thing:  in Edge of Eternity there is no Trinity.  Here, everything is the second person of the Trinity without reference to the Father or Holy Spirit:  except for a strangely symbolic likely interpretation of the Holy Spirit as a bird dwelling within the protagonist.

Yet, from a readership point of view, I think the most serious flaw involves that my suspension of disbelief in the end failed in the last chapter.  There simply wasn’t enough justification for the protagonist character – a lifelong skeptic and atheist – to accept as evidence of Christianity a near-death experience.  Such a character, I should think, would have written it off as suspect, a hallucination, or a dream.

Further, I work with Viet Nam vets, and know other ex-military people:  and the mindset of the protagonist does not work within that structure for me.  Military personnel are trained to see the team as more than the individual, and some of the things this character had trouble with as embarrassing or self-subjugating no ex-military personnel I know would have.  The Vets I know, including some from earlier wars than Korea and Viet Nam, would have lost their false pride long since.  And also would not find embarrassing the kinds of things the protagonist did:  they would have seen far worse in wartime circumstances.  This was a second fail in the suspension of disbelief.

I would consider that seriously poor research underlying the book:  and the experiences of Viet Nam veteran’s is very accessible.  Apart from working with about a half dozen of them, I know someone who counsels them.  And the kind of things that “embarrassed” the protagonist in this book would do so to no Viet Nam vet I know of from any of those contexts.

In the end, a very odd book.  Compelling, but strange and strangely disturbing.

Epiphany . . .

Today is the actual day of the Feast of the Epiphany.

Nowadays, in the Catholic Church, the liturgical observance falls on the nearest Sunday.  Because of the timing of a Sunday Christmas and New Year’s, that means the observation this year is this coming Sunday. 

“Spirituality and religion” is one of my sub-category niches.  I’ve written in that area quite a bit, and while I don’t regard that as a direct product or service niche, in my spec samples for catalog copywriting I have tied that into three of my niche areas:  books, games and toys, and educational services.

So, because of the timing this year, I thought the general idea of Epiphany would be a good one to get a weekend’s worth of blog posts and that sort of thing out of. 

Further, from the writing perspective, the term “epiphany” has a name in terms of a fiction technique.  The word translates to something like “revelation” or “discovery” in writing.

Indeed, a well-made “epiphany” can form the most satisfactory element of a book.

I’ve read a good number of books over the past year, and I find that writers tend to go about this in one of two different ways.  A novel either has a succession of small epiphanies for one or more of the essential characters; or there is one real, major “ah hah!” moment for one or more of the most central characters.

Either of these approaches, if well realized, can have a satisfying impact on the reader.

I have had some very fulfilling reading experiences over the past year or so with each type, although for a wide range of reasons I would have to say that the book that I would recommend if I had to choose only one out of last year’s reading was the single epiphany type.

Which kind do  you prefer?