Poor man Lazarus from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Poor man Lazarus . . . . . jan 5 2005 — bookish115.dat

Preparing for trans-USA travels at Christmas, what better than a religious action thriller? Suppose an ancient order of monks was charged with keeping a certain Christian safe from enemies -- and finding him for rescue if he had been captured and buried in an unlikely prison? And suppose further that a beautiful woman, a Harvard PhD candidate, was attacked by a bunch of terrorists for no obvious reason, yet rescued at the last minute by a mysterious Frenchman who was seriously injured in the rescue, but who hours later simply got up and walked out of the Mass General Hospital emergency room after an apparent clinical death?

This is just part of the intriguing, unlikely, and gradually unfolding premise of The Assignment [buy at amazon] .by Mark Andrew Olsen, a book that is everything that the Da Vinci Code hoped it could be, and was not.

Vitiated somewhat by the literal appearance of devil-homuncili (you can see them riding on the backs of their possessed hosts) and the implied appearance of angels (not to mention the holy longevity of the central character), this multi-millenial tour-de-force was pretty doggone readable. I, at any rate, read the whole thing in one single escapist rush. What can I say, I love it when the monks at Mont St Michel pick up automatic weapons, even if they do perish. A mighty fortress, and all that.

All in all, the protagonist had a long and unhappy life, having to live with his own repeated and soul-deadening failures in his battle with evil. "Oh, but to have been an angst-ridden existentialist", he might have been excused for thinking. Fortunately at long last he eschews the weakness of self-reliance, casts his lot completely and totally with the Lord, traps the arms of the evilly-possessed-one (formerly a Nazi, now a Catholic priest) at the crucial instant and recites 'maximus expelliarmus' or whatever the spell is called in The Church and rejoins his loved one and her centuries-old family, not to mention his Lord and Saviour, for their long-promised but never really-truly expected final reward. Thank God and Amen.

Index of Previous Journal Entries

If you like what you read, click here to sign up for our mailing list and we'll notify you when we post new book reviews