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Blogs by Gabriel Boutros
Conspiracy theorists get average treatment in thriller, God's Memory 5/5/2014 8:48:38 AM
God's Memory is a two-part thriller about a shadowy group that plans worldwide domination. It has some interesting themes, but the over-all execution is lacking. Part 1 of God's Memory centers around Zoe, a woman in her early twenties whose mother and step-father died in the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City. Actually, Zoe would disagree with me, because she is certain that the destruction of the Twin Towers was an inside job by the US government, acting under the control of something called The Family, which is the kind of shadowy, behind the scenes power that one can often find in books about conspiracies. One of the main problems I had with the book is that I had no idea why Zoe didn't believe that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible for the attack, nor how she knew that an ultra-secretive power behind the throne like The Family existed. She is shown as very passionate in her convictions, and succeeding in convincing many people to follow her, but since we're never told the basis for her beliefs I have no idea why she becomes any more popular than the average rabble-rouser with access to the Internet. (Minor spoiler alert: About two-thirds of the way into the book she receives an anonymous call telling her about a man who wishes to speak to her because he was involved in the secret planting of bombs in the towers in the weeks leading up to the attack. She is very excited at the prospect of getting this evidence, but this merely demonstrated that she had no reason to believe the attacks were an inside job in the first place, since she had never seen any kind of evidence before.)
Beyond this gap in logic, what makes the book not as entertaining as it could have been is that there is hardly any real dialogue, there are only diatribes. Zoe (as well as the duplicitous President Taylor, or the shadowy Rothfeld) never speaks to other characters, she only makes long-winded speeches at them. The result is that Zoe and all the characters are very two-dimensional, existing only to represent specific points of view that the author uses to get his message across, while never feeling like real people. This message is that we are all dupes to governments, the media and unseen powers that mislead and misinform us. While that is not a bad message to have in a thriller, the reader is hit over the head with it over and over, with little nuance or self-questioning by any of the characters, so that it feels like reading a political tract rather than a novel. All this is too bad because the prose is strong and clear, and if more time was spent on fleshing out the characters or making the story a little less obvious, it would have been a much better book.
Part 2 picks up right where Part 1 left off, and really wouldn't work as a stand-alone novel. Zakhar, the Ukrainian ex-soldier, is after revenge for the murder of his daughter. He holds former US President Taylor responsible, but he doesn't plan to kill him. He wants to kidnap Taylor and get him to confess to being part of a worldwide conspiracy which, among other things, was behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. The reader has no idea why Zakhar believes that such a secret organization exists, other than that his daughter Zoe told him so in Part 1, and no reasons were ever given for her beliefs either.
Be that as it may, when Part 2 begins Zakhar kidnaps Taylor along with Rothfeld, who, unknown to Zakhar, just happens to be the head of that very same secret organization. This book starts off really well, with a well-constructed action scene, and some very gripping moments between the kidnapper and his hostages (including some squirm-inducing torture). About a third of the way through Part 2 I told myself that this is much better than Part 1, but that optimism soon died. The tense dialogue and clever verbal sparring between the characters soon devolves into long-winded speeches, which was the same problem that cursed Part 1.
We get page after page of first Taylor, then Rothfeld, explaining, in a very detailed manner, why this organization, known as The Family, is controlling world events, causing wars and crises in order to make the world, somehow, a better place. The men discuss their politics, philosophy and religion. These discussions go on and on and on. They’re not boring in and of themselves, they just go on and on and on. If I don’t refer to anything else which happens in the book, it’s because there’s almost nothing else in it. Every now and then there’s a page or two about the military looking for the hostages, and a couple of flashbacks to the origins of The Family, but otherwise, almost to the last page, the book is one continuous debate between kidnapper and hostages.
Strangely enough, considering how long-winded these discussions are, much of the story felt rushed and superficial. For example, almost no time is spent explaining how the incredibly intricate plan to kidnap a former US President is put together. Then, The Family’s origin story could have filled a whole book by itself, but it’s told in a handful of pages. Even Rothfeld’s explanations for The Family’s secret machinations don’t really make clear why they decided to behave as they do: I still haven’t figured out how the anti-Semitism his ancestor faced in 18th century Germany led to the US government faking the terrorist attacks on New York City, nor how uniting the world under one government will somehow stop all the tribal, ethnic and religious hatred that are so pervasive.
So, while this book spends a little time as a thriller before trying to be a book of ideas, it doesn't really succeed in either one. There is certainly a skeleton of a potentially fascinating story here, but too little meat on its bones.
