Krishna
Carlos Missirian and Valborg Svensson are eating. Each has multiple names.
Carlos is coordinating a biological weapon that can wipe out Israel and restore Islam to the land but Svensson is interested in having the only antidote when the virulent virus sweeps the world – so he can control them all. James Bond style premise of dominating the world right off the start of the book. Thomas Hunter was a man who reported that the mutations that were uncontrolled were now controlled and he had no business knowing that. So Svensson wants to interrogate the owner of the lab producing the vaccine, one Monique and asked to ‘acquire the vaccine by any means necessary’.
A day earlier, Thomas Hunter, who grew up in the Philippines is shot at by an assassin with a gun and barely manages to escape by knocking him out with a karate chop, only to be hit unconscious when he tried to flee by an unknown assailant.
When he wakes up the book goes gooey and surreal and you groan – ‘not one of those crazy books’. He wakes up with another man in a deserted place and starts a meaningless ‘Who am I? Who are you? How did I get here? Where am I?’ kind of drivel that diminishes your interest substantially in the book within an astonishing two pages.
Then the story swivels back to him waking up in a dumpster. You think ‘Unless they tie this up somehow, this is all going to be a random walk in the universe and one of the most boring ones at that’.
The book takes some getting used to, and then it gets better. He goes back to the bat cave of his fantasy and realizes that that was the real thing and everything else, even getting wounded and falling in a trash can was all in his dreams.
No we are told that every time he falls asleep in one world, he wakes up in the other. Slightly more interesting. We are also told, when he crawls back to his house that he shares with his sister Kara, that he is being shot at because he gypped some really tough people in Philippines of $100,000 and they have tracked him down to New York, where he lives now.
When he sleeps again, he is transported to the fancy land and when the story gets weirder, it kind of gets better. He has found himself in a kind of enchanted forest. He struggles with black evil bats called Shataiki who end up peeling his skin and breaking his arm and swarms of flies which bite into him. He sees a white bat (Get the reference, black and white as in old epics) and follows it out, barely making it before collapsing.
The bat is not a bat at all but Rouch, a birdlike talking thing called Gabil. He boasts of how he rescued the human to his friend Michal. Rachelle, a twenty year old female, finds them (she knows them) and decides to revive him and ‘choose’ him as her mate, as is their custom.
The story gets delightful, in the mould of The Sword of Shannara, as it goes along. The comical stupefaction on the faces of both Rouch in not understanding why Thomas would ever want to choose his mate is funny. And the New York of his other reality is ancient history in this world. They are still living on earth but it is a vastly different earth.
He goes back and is confused about the ‘other’ world. His sister is surprised that he knew about a secret vaccine development before it was even in the papers – the one predicted to destroy humanity. She puts him to test to see if he can predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby to be held later that day and deliberately makes him sleep.
He wakes up under the tree and Michal takes him to the village and he goes and stays with Rachel, uncomfortable at her assurance that he was the chosen mate and will in turn automatically love her. He also learns the name of the winning horse from Michal, after promising that he will not ask for these ‘histories’ again.
The story gets interesting and then gets bogged down by juvenile details. Thomas and his sister Kara behave as if they can unravel the entire mysteries of a giant corporation unknowingly unleashing the greatest destructive virus just by their sheer personality, all by themselves. So then you lose interest for a bit. I definitely call the narrative power weak on this story. The plot saves it from being abandoned midway as a waste of time and effort.
And then it turns into a story written by an imaginative nine year old. They go with less plan than the habitually reckless James Bond would to take on a mighty corporation and its security features and even the company authorities behave like nine year olds so I guess the siblings are lucky that they are dealing with both good and evil people of their own mental age. You quickly lose interest in the whole story. From then on it is superbly boring.
There is no depth, no planning, no plot – just a series of happenings at the whim of the author who seems to have strung together a story on the spot. No depth to the dialogs either.
He then dithers between the coloured people and the Shitaki, whose leader Teeleh tries to convince him that his side is the wronged one. According to Teeleh, he and another person Sam came by spaceship to another planet and what he is dreaming is the future not the past. He is almost convinced.
But he is persuaded by the faithful Raush who followed him and he becomes a disciple of Elyon and has a psychedelic drug user kind of experience where he embraces Elyon (and meets a small child representation of something on a hill that he alone is invited to).
In the real world though, he has been killed by Carlos, who has put a bomb in Monica’s mouth and has taken her away. Knowing that his earlier head injury disappeared, you know what to expect and you are not surprised that he is still alive in this alternate reality
It is not all bad, there are moments which are genuinely nice and tense as in how Tanis gets duped by Teeleh into biting into a fruit and how the entire coloured forest is devastated by Shitaki. Only Tom, Rachelle and Johan survive and they have to endure a long trek to safety.
Monique, in the other world, is threatened by the evil billionaire who had hired Carlos and when she refuses to budge (to reveal him clues about the antidote) he threatens to unleash the bug into the world nevertheless.
It is also easy to see the allegory between black devastation and coloured splendour in the alternate world, black evil bats vs white good ones, a long and arduous trek which requires you to keep faith to survive or else you perish – rather like other books with a religious inference, if you will.
What lifts the book from a caricature level and brings it into a book of interest is the story line, which goes into fascinating scenes and this stops you from the feeling of ennui caused by the inane conversations sometimes.
The book ends in the worst way possible. Without an ending but in what the author thinks is a hook to make you read the second book.
This alone would disqualify this book as a good read in my eyes.
It has some good stuff there but far too much is wrong and so 3/10
- – Krishna