Christine Feehan - Dark Prince

This is first book I’ve finished in 2019 and hopefully the first of many. It took me a while to get through this one mainly because it’s a hard book for me to get into. The text was small and frankly, I found most of the book boring.

As a side note, I was reading through some of my older reviews and it seems that I’ve decided to be more PC of late. I’m not sure why, maybe I’m afraid of offending people by having an extreme opinion that may differ from theirs and on that subject, Dark Prince could be a very dangerous book for me to review, especially with what’s about to follow. So here goes.

Dark Prince is the first in a long series of books about a race of creatures known as Carpathians. These creatures are somewhere between human and vampire and need to from a connection with a life mate in order to not be fully consumed by the beast inside. This story follows the Carpathian male, Mikhail who finds his life mate, Raven and the whole experience is essentially a study on how not to date women.

I won’t go too much into the detail of the story but essentially Raven has psychic abilities and can use these to communicate with Mikhail with just her mind. Upon the first contact with Mikhail, he gets annoyed when she tries to read his mind and in response… he mentally breaks into her bedroom and plays with her vagina. There is a lot of back and forth from then on mostly involving Raven continually claiming that she is going to leave him, is a totally independent woman who doesn’t need Mikhail and can look after herself… but then does the exact opposite of what she says.

The other thing I don’t like about Raven is the fact that she is portrayed as a barbie doll. Blonde hair, massive tits, tiny waist. In a book released in 2006 when I thought we were past objectifying women, even in a book as smutty as this. I also don’t think I’m the intended audience for this book so I find it even more surprising that Raven is portrayed in this way.

Raven appears to be totally submissive towards Mikhail and despite continually saying that she wants to be a strong, confident, independent woman, continually lets him dominate her. There is nothing in narrative that suggests this is a slowly changing character trait and the whole ‘love’ between the two is more of an author’s ‘because I said so’ approach to character development.

In terms of the writing itself, it’s horribly put together. Perspectives change at a whim which makes it hard to tell who’s narrating and from what perspective. This happens all the time and is made worse on page 32 where one of the character names is actually wrong.

The worst thing about the book however is that… nothing really happens. It does that, what I’m finding to be, typical thing of being 308 pages long and only having anything happen in the last ten pages. Okay, I’m overexaggerating here but even if you count the smut as things happening there’s still 150 pages of nothing – just more gesturing by Raven and Mikhail being angry that she was breathing without permission.

The last section of the book sees the arrival of Andre the vampire, a character who has had no visibility in the story whatsoever and shows up as if from nowhere to piss on everyone’s parade. The way he’s dealt with is just terrible too. I cannot believe that there were two run-ins with Andre before the final show down, during both of which he could have been killed… but I’m guessing for plot reasons he wasn’t?

Dark Prince is the first in a very long Carpathian series of which I’ve been informed, they get better. But it’s going to be a while before I test that theory.

Dark Prince by Christine Feehan was published by Piatkus books in 2006. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)

David Gibbins - The Last Gospel

The next adventure for Jack and his crew of historical heroes has a lot of different paths but ultimately it boils down to a hunt for a Gospel written by none other than Jesus Christ. The trip takes them all around the world from ancient Rome, to California in search of where it’s been kept. As always with these things though, there are arbitrary dickheads who want to stand in the way of history but this time it’s not for money, but more just to keep the Gospel hidden – because there can be no change to religion.

The book itself is well written but goes a little further with the ongoing dialogue sections that explain the history behind everything that happens. There are a lot more flashbacks in this one which makes me think there isn’t enough modern-day information to keep the story going and we keep needing to dip back into the past to have more explained to us. Again, there is nothing majorly wrong with this, but I did feel like it broke the flow of the story as it always seemed to happen just when the modern-day parts were building up momentum.

Another criticism is that, just like in the last books, Jack’s power to recall knowledge at a moment’s notice to serve the story has gotten even stronger and this takes away a lot from the characters. I see that it serves the purpose of driving the story forward, but it feels too easy as it’s always at the exact moment the information is needed.

I found it a lot harder to keep on reading this one, probably because the continual dialogue explanations slowed down the story a lot more than in previous books. That said, there is a very good, and also historically plausible, story in the background here and it’s very enjoyable to see it unfold over the 542-page extravaganza.

There’s not really a lot else to say to be honest. The stories are written in a consistent and coherent way and stick to an established pattern. While I’ve enjoyed these first three books, it’s time for a break and to read something new, however, I’m sure that the next few books will follow the same blueprint when I do go back to them.

The Last Gospel by David Gibbins was published by Headline Publishing Group in 2008. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

I played squash recently with someone when I mentioned that I was reading David Gibbins’ Atlantis and they mentioned that I might enjoy Ready Player One. The movie had just come out and I was also told that it was wildly different from the book and that if I was going to watch the movie, I should read the book first. So I did.

The general premise is, this crazy genius, James Halliday, creates this thing called the Oasis which is a virtual universe that people log in to play games, do jobs, go to school and essentially do anything except for eat and sleep. It’s almost where computer games are heading now we have VR headsets, only expanded to cover more of our general livelihood.

In the book, the real world is going to shit with wars, poverty and famine. This is summed by the cover of the book which shows mobile homes stacked on top of each other to increase the population density and cater for the ever widening rich/poor divide.

Anyway, in terms of the driving force behind the story, Halliday dies and leaves no heirs so he starts a contest to find keys in his game world. Whoever finds all the keys gets full control of the Oasis – so essentially becomes the richest person in the world.

There were a couple things that irritated me about the movie, which I’ll throw in here as it’s relative but first, the book. Now in terms of story, Ready Player One is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It does that thing where it drags you in, gets you invested in the characters and makes it difficult to put down. The arrogance of the antagonist makes you want him to lose and the characters are both engaging and charming in their own ways.

That’s not to say it’s a well written masterpiece though. There are several issues I had which unfortunately broke the flow somewhat. In hindsight, I should have ignored them and carried on, but I can’t do that anymore.

The most glaring of these was the time-continuity throughout the book. At some point, weeks would go by in a sentence without any real clues toward the passage of time. Then time will move back three days, then forward a day to the point where it became impossible to know what day of the week it is. Maybe it’s got something to do with the destructive capability of computer games on our perception of reality, who knows. On the bare face of it though, it looks like bad writing.

Halliday is obsessed with 80s culture and a lot of the references in the book reflect this with games like PacMan, Tempest and Joust making prominent appearances. However, there are certain elements that cross over into the 90s. References to directors on page 62 that only really rose to prominence in the 90s and some didn’t make an impression until the 2000s. It seems like a strange choice when there were a lot of movies released during the 10 years that comprised the 80s. This is a minor point though and it annoyed me more in the movie when it states that James Halliday’s favourite game was Goldeneye, a game released in the mid nineties for a console that didn’t exist in the 80s!

I also found it odd that all Wade can do in the Oasis is go to school because he doesn’t have any money. It’s like EA came in, bought out the Oasis and then monetised the whole thing. I would have thought that especially for a character like Halliday, this would have been the exact opposite of how he wanted the Oasis to work, and it feels like part of the premise of the movie – stopping the evil protagonist from gaining control of the Oasis – is made almost redundant by this fact.

When I thought about it a bit more, it seems that Wade’s inability to go anywhere other than school in a universe of infinite possibilities, it merely a device to drive the story and it’s really weak when you think about it. The movie didn’t create this problem and doesn’t have Wade confined to school so while parts of the movie annoyed me, parts of it are better too.

Another example of things done to drive the story, when you get to page 208, Artefacts are brought up for the first time stating that they’ve been around since the start of the Oasis. This again feels very much like, ‘I need to do something to move the story on… so… Artefacts?’ It could have gone by unnoticed if done differently but it’s at the start of chapter, 208 pages into a 374-page book so feels like an afterthought. Not as bas as some of Stephen King’s Dark Tower decisions though, and there isn’t an author note to justify them either.

One more contrasting point from the movie is the character of Art3mis. A main part of the book is that Wade believes that the Art3mis avatar looks like her real-life counterpart – this is true in the book but in the movie, the avatar is an alien. I can see absolutely no reason for this. The movie also rushes through the premise of the Oasis making it so anyone who hasn’t read the book will struggle to know what’s going on. Lastly, there is no relationship building between Art3mis and Wade in the movie. He just sees her one day and the next thing you know they are best friends. It condenses the story from the book for no real gain or reason.

There – movie whine over.

As I said at the start, Ready Player One is an imaginative story with some great characters. It’s just a little rough around the edges.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was published by Arrow Books in 2012. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

David Gibbins - Crusader Gold

The second book in the Jack Howard series sees Mr Howard and friends on a quest to retrieve the Menorah, a golden Jewish relic lost to the ages. In a short sentence, it’s pretty much a copy of Atlantis in terms of the writing style and structure; there is lot of historic explanation, some crazy action sequences and a lot more plot explanation.

It suffers from the same ‘issues’ as the first book in that Jack is a walking Deus Ex Machina who knows the exact piece of information to continually drive the plot forward. That said, it’s still a good book that’s easy to read and has that ‘this could have happened in real life’ feel to it with its use of historical references.

In this case, it’s the ancient Viking Harald Hardrada who sacked Constantinople, stole the Menorah and sailed to Greenland and then on to America or, in this case, Newfoundland. Jack and company follow this trail while being pursued by some evil doers who are seeking the giant golden candlestick, not for historical purposes, but because it’s made of gold and worth a lot of money.

While telling its own story, Crusader Gold, appears to set the groundwork for some other group of people who will continually cross paths with Jack and try to kill him – adding excitement and exhilaration to their worldly travels.

There are two gripes I had with the story and one of the comes from the first book. Jack has unlimited resources at his disposal and while this is almost necessary for the course, it does feel rather convenient. It does make me wonder if there is going to be a future story where all his resources are stripped away – it might make some of his adventures slightly harder.

My other gripe was with the character Maria. She wasn’t mentioned in the first book at all, but is made out to be so close to Jack she’s practically his sister – which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering she was totally absent from the first book. If they were that close, you would have thought that Jack would have told her about a little thing like discovering Atlantis.

Crusader Gold clocks in at 449 pages but I reckon only 250 of those drive the story – the rest are spent explaining what’s going on and providing backstory to move the plot on to the next bit. There’s nothing wrong with that but at the same time, the balance just doesn’t feel right here.

Crusader Gold by David Gibbins was published by Headline Publishing Group in 2006. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

David Gibbins - Atlantis

My new year’s resolution is to definitely read more and get more book reviews published. The first four reviews of this year date back to my holiday in June last year so it’s high time to crank up the output on book reading. Anyway, that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about David Gibbins’ first book, Atlantis.

There’s a semi-interesting story behind this one. I got a book called Gods of Atlantis from a charity book thing at work and after reading the opening and doing some research, I found out that it was the fourth or fifth book in a Jack Howard series. I didn’t like the idea of starting part way through a series, so I got Atlantis and the two follow up books to bridge the gap.

Atlantis follows the story of Jack Howard and his buddy Costas as they go in search of the legendary missing city. What follows is a tale of mystery and intrigue with a beautiful girl thrown into the mix. Naturally Mr Howard beds the girl, as it seems that all these sorts of books have to follow the same pattern of male, physically able protagonist has to bed the girl otherwise it’s not believable? I dunno.

One thing that came through the narrative a lot was Gibbins’ overwhelming need to explain everything. There are pages upon pages of exposition with literally zero urgency as characters will just spontaneously divulge every piece of information they know about the subject in question. Jack is easily the worst at this as he seems to know everything. I get that it’s a device to make the story work but it’s crazy how much he knows about everything and how there is seemingly time for everyone to stand around talking when there is a race against time to stop the bad guys destroying Atlantis.

The writing itself it actually very clean and well done and Gibbins structures his characters well. While I make fun of the fact that Jack Howard gets the girl in typical fashion, it’s at least structured in a way that makes it logical and there is a relationship development piece. This in comparison to Lee Child where the sex happens because the girl is hot.

In terms of things that stood out, there was one on page 352 that got my attention. The sentence talks about how there were low chances against surviving which on a read back, made me think it was saying there was a low chance of death… which I didn’t think was the intention of the sentence.

There was also a reference to ‘one giant step’ which made me cringe as it was a glaring similarity, and probably deliberate one, to the moonwalk. It just felt a bit out of place it a book that wasn’t at all cliché at this point.

There was one minor point when the quest for Atlantis starts by having a camel falling down a hole to uncover an Egyptian tomb. It’s described as a coincidence… I’m not sure how a camel falling in a hole and discovering a tomb is coincidence – more like blind luck. Which is not the same thing.

Atlantis is a solid adventure story and despite what I’ve said about the explaining, it’s necessary and helped me invest more in the story as you join the characters in their excitement of discovery. There is also a lot of action too, but it suffers from the same problem as other books where it’s 480 pages long and the last 40 pages are pretty much where everything happens.

Atlantis by David Gibbins was published by Headline in 2008. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

This one took me a while to get in to after reading loads of fiction and if I’m honest, it hasn’t endeared me to non-fiction writing, even if the subject is borderline interesting. The edition I read was the 10^th anniversary edition featuring a new introduction. The introduction takes the interesting step of answering criticism the book has received, not only from religious people but from the non-religious community as well. The tact taken appears to be any criticism of the book, even when not biased or based on counter beliefs, is wrong. Because science. That’s basically the whole book. But what’s wrong with that you say? Well…

Firstly, the God Delusion is a published book. As it is a book, it is designed to be read by other people. If it were me writing a book with the sole purpose of ‘opening people’s eyes’ I wouldn’t do it using obnoxious language and inaccessible words. I don’t claim to be the smartest guy in the world, but I would like to think that I have some semblance of intelligence and I had no idea what Dawkins is banging on about half the time. But I suppose ‘religion bad, science good’ wouldn’t sell a lot of copies.

The second thing is the way in which the book is written. It clocks in at 426 pages including the afterword by Daniel Dennett – which is yet further posturing over the ideas contained within the book and how they are right and anyone that disagrees with them is wrong. The book could have been closer to 200 pages as Dawkins has an overzealous need to repeat the same point over and over again. On several occasions, I had to check that I hadn’t misplaced where I was in the book and that I wasn’t reading the same thing.

Now on to the subject itself. I did think that the book would be more about why God doesn’t exist and here’s proof looking at history, but I didn’t factor in that Dawkins is a biologlist, not a historian so his argument comes from the biological standpoint. There’s just one massive flaw in his main hypothesis. Using evolution as an argument against the existence of God is weak. God is supposed to have created the universe out of nothing. If he has the power and ability to do such a thing, you would also think he has the ability to create life with the ability to evolve and adapt. Almost in the same way as humans can program AI to react to things.

There were also a few terms I didn’t like and an overall hypothesis that feels very contrary to the point. The first point is one I don’t quite understand and revolves around the ‘ultimate bowing 747.’ Why is has to the be ‘the ultimate’ I have no idea. Anyway, the argument goes that if all the parts of a bowing 747 were in a scrap yard and a hurricane blew through it, what is the chance that the hurricane will put the Bowing 747 together? Essentially this boils down to if the universe was created by something, due to the complexity of said universe, its creator must be at least equally as complex. This isn’t an argument for God’s lack of existence – it’s an, ‘I don’t know but God doesn’t exist.’ It’s not so much the argument I don’t like but the term Ultimate Bowing 747.

The second part is where Dawkins goes on to talk about the ‘Mother of all Burkas,’ The idea being that people are blinded from the realities of science by the belief in God. Telling people that their beliefs are wrong is one thing, if backed with evidence, but telling them they are blind to science because they believe in something is total shit. I know that’s not the science way of saying it but who cares.

The last point I didn’t like was the way Dawkins takes credit for converting people to atheism. Converting is an interesting word, isn’t it? And also there are a few instances where he describes people, mostly Americans, of being afraid of coming out of the closet with their atheist beliefs… that’s an oxymoron in itself but it’s the best way of getting my point across. Writing a book called The God Delusion and trying to convince people to think the same way as you, is acting in the same vein as the thing you are trying to dissuade people from doing. It almost makes atheism seem like its own religion, one that we should all believe in.

Now from the start I haven’t been a believer in God. I believe that we don’t know enough about the universe to understand our own creation and we likely never will – in fact we shouldn’t even be contemplating our own existence – but all this book does is say that God isn’t real because you can’t know that he is. It’s not an argument and any evidence we can fathom from our own planet is not a proof of a lack of God.

Also, telling people that are blind and stupid probably isn’t the best way to get them to buy into what you are selling.

That said, I do agree with the concept even if I think the book goes about it in the wrong way. If there is no religion, there would be no religious wars, there would be less barriers towards social interaction and the world would generally be a better place. At least in theory. Personally, I think the human race is so destructive that even if we didn’t believe in a multitude of different things, we would still find other reasons to kill each other. Isn’t that a sad fact of life? And one that Dawkins doesn’t consider. If you succeed in abolishing religion, wouldn’t you be afraid of what might take its place? Food for thought.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was published by Bantam Books in 2006. RRP £9.99 (Paperback)

Steve Alten - The Mayan Prophecy

Firstly I must say that I really enjoyed reading this book. At 629 pages long it’s one of the longest books I’ve read for a while but that’s only because the text is large and well spaced. A testimony to how much I enjoyed it is that it only took me a few days to crank through it and I struggled to put it down most of the time.

The Mayan Prophecy follows the story of Dominique Vasquez and, I can only imagine the symbolically named, Michael Gabriel (yes, not one angel reference but two) as they quest to save humanity from the end of the world. The plot goes into the reasons why the Mayan calendar ends in May 2012 and it’s actually quite well constructed in terms of reasoning. The main plot point focuses around the fact that it wasn’t actually an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It was actually an alien spaceship that has been lying dormant at the bottom of the ocean. It’s sending out a distress beacon which can only be picked up when the planets line up in a certain way which happens once every several thousand years but is stopped because some other aliens, who helped us build the pyramids and other shit, have prevented them from doing so. Until now.

There are a few popular culture references but because the book was written in 2001 depicting events in 2012, there is some creative license here. For example he writes about a Rolling Stones album called Past Our Prime and Dominique has a car that can test your alcohol level before you drive.

Despite my overall opinion that it’s a good book there were a lot of things that irked me. On page four we kick off with horrendous spelling errors where the non-word ‘qreat’ is used instead of ‘great’. Now, this section of the book is from a journal of one of the characters so it could be argued that this is the portrayal of typed up handwriting. However, even if this is the premise, I don’t agree with it. If you are going to write something for someone else to read, so not a journal, then spell the words right.

On page 56, there is a face scanner which is used to access a health facility as a security precaution. But it’s not referenced again or cleverly bypassed by taking off someone’s face or head to use it so it’s completely redundant in terms of the story. I’m not if this is meant to be another futuristic prediction over security protocols, but I’m sure this could have been less grandiose if so.

Some of the mathematics while fascinating, is not easy on the eyes and at one point, I found myself wondering if what I was reading was actually correct in terms of sentence structure. Unfortunately, Steve Alten doesn’t have a Clive Cussler character around to explain it to the dumbasses like me. One thing I do know though is that light years is a measure of distance, not time. Yet one of the doctor/scientist characters is either making a joke or doesn’t know this when they refer to light years as a measure of time.

There was one more major error I picked up on towards the middle of the book. Michael has magic sneakers that get written off of his feet but then magically get put back on again. And he ends up going barefoot through the alien spaceship. I’m not sure this is the best choice when journeying in to the unknown but to each their own, I guess.

The only other thing I noted was the dialogue kind of falls apart in the second half of the book. It’s almost like the characters stop caring about making sense with their dialogue. That said, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story and I will definitely get the second one to see where it goes.

The Mayan Prophecy by Steve Alten was first published as Domain by Tor in 2001. RRP £6.99  (Paperback)