Sunday, February 15, 2009

Left Behind

Hahaha. You know the expression "so bad it's good"? Well, that's not true of this book. Oh no.

For those unaware, it's the first book in a series written by dispensationalist US Christian conservatives: didactic works intended to promote their theology as well as being novels.

Left Behind was unintentionally funny. Many of the plot devices were madly implausible - a super-duper fertiliser formula making Israel richer than oil nations and thereby bringing relative peace (until the Russkies try to kill them)? Agrarian based economies don't work like that, and even if they did, money is so unlikely to solve all Israel's problems! Carpathia's fantastically moving speech consisting of reciting the names of every country?!

Overall, it was poorly written, the characterisation rather basic, and the inner lives rudimentary. On the plus side, it was readable, if clunky. On the minus, its didacticism was overt and it had a hammer for those points and knew how to use it. It took crude potshots at all sorts of targets, from the Jews to family planning.

I found it impossible to take the novel seriously and snickered long and loud. For me, the best part was the naming of "Tribulation Force"* which was doubly a gift since it was very close to the end, thankfully. Oh me, oh my. Hahaha.

Needless to say, I shan't be rushing out to read any more of the several gazillion sequels, prequels and spin-offs from this stable.


*Not like G-Force, sadly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I read that one. Yeah, it's rubbish. And *this* is what's known as the Christian fiction market that Christian writers are supposed to get all excited about. (Very lucrative in the States). *hangs head in shame*. I think I'll have to market myself as anything but a Christian writer. Abster x