Friday, November 29, 2002

I've bounced off books before -- actually, it's not that uncommon. By "bouncing off" a book I mean that I read a ways into the book, maybe a quarter of the way in, and realize that I am so uninvolved in the book that I can't tell who the characters are, what they are trying to accomplish, what the key conflicts are, or anything. Sometimes this indicates a lousy book, but I've often had it be the case that the particular book in question simply wasn't what I wanted to read at that time. It's not unlike when you think you want to have a certain dish for dinner, but when it's on the plate and you're at the table, it suddenly appears less than appealing and you pick at it until you ultimately decide to spoon it into some Tupperware for tomorrow and order a pizza for tonight. (Or Chinese....or BK....or Don Pablo's....or whatever.) So, in the case of books like these, I just put them aside and come back to them later. This is the case for the vast majority of instances where I do not finish a book, and I can honestly report that in most cases when I've gone back, I've turned out to enjoy the work very much (and, in a few cases, loved it deeply). So it's actually quite rare that I stop reading a book on the basis that I don't like it -- that rather than believing that I'm not "in the mood" or it's not "my cup of tea" at that moment, I actually believe that it's a bad book. This happened this week, and I'm still surprised by it.

The book is The Blood of the Lamb, by Thomas F. Monteleone. The book is subtitled "A Novel of the Second Coming", and the cover image is a dagger whose hilt is the shape of a Catholic cross. I've always enjoyed thrillers and horror stories set amidst the backdrop of Christian Millennialism, and this sure sounded like one of those. End-of-the-world, Second Coming stuff, with some inner-circle-of-the-Vatican shenanigans thrown in -- it's all good. Or I thought it was. This book has a grabber of a premise: that a secret Vatican cabal somehow manages to extract enough of a blood sample from the Shroud of Turin to clone the man whose image is on the shroud, a man who therefore may (or may not) be the bodily resurrection of Christ. This man, Peter Carenza, is a Jesuit Priest in New York City when his Christ-like powers start to manifest (he blasts a would-be mugger with lightning from his hands, reducing the unfortunate hood to a crisp), thus attracting the attention of the Vatican individuals who cloned him in the first place.

Now, what's not to like about a scenario like that?

Sadly, Monteleone's execution goes awry, pretty much almost immediately. One of the major problems is that Monteleone partly tells the story from Carenza's own point-of-view. This sets up roadblocks to believability almost immediately, because I as the reader am thrust into the position of wondering, "Would Jesus really think that? Would Jesus really do that? Is that what a man would really say upon learning that he may be the Son of God? And, would he go through the first part of his life so blissfully unaware of it?" And it goes on and on. Peter Carenza's inner turmoil -- inasmuch as he should even feel any inner turmoil at all -- comes off like all those superhero comics, where the young man or woman first starts to learn about their special gifts. So, I guess my problem is that I don't think that a man learning that he may be the Son of God should be similar, tonewise, to another man learning the effects of being bitten by the radioactive spider.

Other problems arise, of the "Show, don't tell" variety. Once Peter Carenza starts to embrace his, well, "Inner Christ", he starts wandering about the country performing various acts of ministry. As one might expect, this "New Christ" ends up attracting quite a raft of followers. The problem is, none of this is believable as it's handled in the book, because Monteleone can't show us how remarkable this guy is. The reader doesn't feel it, because we are only ever told about it. Disparate incidents happen, some people shout "It's a miracle!" and "Hosannah!" and "Halleluia!", but I didn't get any sense that it was because of what Peter Carenza did or said, because in a lot of these episodes Monteleone doesn't even tell me what Carenza said. Imagine if the Book of Matthew cut from 5:1 and 5:2 directly to 7:28:

5:1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

5:2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them,

[And he gave a wondrous sermon, full of beauty and Grace,]

7:28 And it came to pass....


Basically, what Monteleone does is the equivalent of, "Jesus went up on the mount, and there he delivered a magnificent sermon, and after that he had a lot more followers", with no hint of what the sermon actually said. So I never got a feeling of Peter Carenza as a religious figure, or really a figure at all; instead, he's a plot device, a character-as-Macguffin. Monteleone's failure, then, is twofold: he cannot show us, convincingly, the inner workings of the soul of one who may be Christ; and he can't show us this man's ability to stir the souls of his new followers.

There is another large problem with the novel, one of language. When writing fiction, one must take care to select the words one uses so as to effectively convey the mood. One magnificent example for this can be found in the last paragraph of the chapter "The Siege of Gondor" from Tolkien's The Return of the King, where the hopes of Minas Tirith look bleakest, and a dead silence settles over the city and the battlefield. The only sound, Tolkien tells us, is the call of some bird -- followed by the war-horns of Rohan as the battle is at last joined. The way Tolkien writes that paragraph makes it one of the most amazingly heroic passages in literature I have ever read. Or, for another example, we might consider something from the Bard himself: Shakespeare's play Henry V, and the great "St. Crispin's Day" speech in Act IV. Shakespeare doesn't give any direction as to how the actor playing the King should deliver this speech, but he doesn't need to. The speech is so brilliantly constructed that one cannot read it aloud and not feel one's voice slipping into the cadences of a King exhorting his outnumbered troops to victory. The point of all this is that language is important. It's the coin-of-the-realm, where storytelling is concerned.

So, let me consider one episode in The Blood of the Lamb. One of the book's characters is a shadowy enforcer-type, who is occasionally dispatched by the shadowy Vatican cabal for various deeds of information-gathering. It's basic, "Go break some kneecaps"-type stuff, only more horrific. This guy is sent to find Peter Carenza, who has managed to escape from the Vatican (a passage that in itself is none-too-believeable, but I digress) and he decides to viscerally torture one of Carenza's close friends. The torture is very graphic -- he cuts large amounts of flesh from the man's arms, he staples his lips shut, he burns the guy's hands terribly with a hot-plate. It's a scene of actual, visceral horror, and it is followed by Peter Carenza's first miracle in the book, when he finds his horribly maimed friend and, in a manner befitting the Christ, heals him. This should be a scene of immense emotional power -- it's a spiritual moment. The reader should, upon reading this scene, be of one thought: "This man may be the Son of God." But Monteleone uses language that completely destroys the atmosphere of sanctity that should exist here, all in a single sentence:

Within seconds, Dan Ellington's [the maimed man] arm had become whole again, the flesh pink and new like a baby's ass. (Emphasis added.)

Now, come on. I don't know if a baby's rump is really the best metaphor to use for what Monteleone is trying to convey here, but even if it is, surely the wording "like a baby's ass" is not the way to convey that metaphor. There is a reason why Jonah 2:10 does not read, "And the Lord spake unto the fish, and He told it that Jonah would irritate its bowels and give it a gas attack come morning, and the fish vomited Jonah onto the dry land."

So, what it all adds up to is that The Blood of the Lamb fails utterly to cast a spell on me, as the reader. I've read many a book whose lackluster prose was overcome by the momentum of the plot, but that's simply not the case here. This book was as gigantic a disappointment as I've ever had in a reading experience.

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