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57 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring, pedestrian, reactionary, prejudiced, 16 April 2004
Well, it's not unreadable. The writing is plodding and pedestrian, and the characterisation wooden and stereotypical, but many popular writers are successful in the same way. These guys are in about the same category as Jeffrey Archer, David Gemmell, etc. They write to tell a story, and rely on their readers' wish to find out what will happen next to carry them along.The story in this case, of course, is of the Rapture, and of the End Times. Our hero is tough, manly, loves his daughter, lusts after flight attendants but doesn't act on it, gets angry in a suitable kind of way, and is your basic authorial projection fantasy. His daughter is pretty, independent, clever, but not too clever and clearly not considered an equal to any male character. Other sympathetic characters are all men standing by themselves, bucking the system, and generally similar to our protagonist. Lots of reactionary positions on everything, and of course lots of paranoia, are both implicit in the basic plot of 'United Nations takes over the world'. Some Jews are good, repent and become Christians, and other Jews are not and are part of the New World Order. Etc. Non-believers are proud, arrogant, thoughtless, deliberately blinding themselves to the truth, and so on. Some are actively malevolent, or just petty. Believers are persecuted and misunderstood (one example of persecution is that non-believers are not happy to be preached at all the time). They are constantly the underdog, but consistently successful despite that. There are several tearful conversion scenes, and gifts of the spirit are real and protect a hero from hypnotic control by the Antichrist. I'm not surprised the books sell well in the US - they allow Fundies to feel smug, humble, persecuted and successful all at the same time. But I shouldn't sneer. I was reading the 80s/90s equivalent of this stuff (This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti) when I was a teenager, and I believed every word. Luckily I've moved on since then...
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by Tim F. LaHaye
by Tim F. LaHaye
by Tim F. LaHaye
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