Review: That this represents a major world religion is a terrifying reality!
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 05 28, 2012
I confess it's difficult to convey in a few short words just how utterly bad this novel really is!The premise is certainly sound enough and, frankly, that's what prompted me to pick up this. The second coming of the Christian Messiah is at hand as a result of the deeply undercover cloning of Christ's DNA from blood recovered from the Shroud of Turin by a group of religious separatists known as the Vinces.THE SON OF MAN is clearly Christian fiction and one doesn't have to hunt very hard to see the clear parallels to the biblical story of the birth of God's son - the nativity star is represented by a rogue asteroid on a collision path with earth; the immaculate conception is presented via the impregnation of illegally cloned cells into a young virgin; the trek to Bethlehem is re-created as the struggle to reach Omaha, Nebraska, the anticipated ground zero of the collision with the asteroid; and the gift-bearing magi make an appearance as a kindly doctor and a Nobel Laureate physicist. There's even a John the Baptist character who ensures that nothing stands in the way of the birth of "the Father's only begotten son".I'll hand one kudo (and one kudo only) to CW Johnson. He definitely has the writing chops to create first rate suspense when it comes to describing the impending apocalypse that would be caused by collision of a mountainous asteroid with the heartland of America. Frankly, that's the only reason I actually finished this dog-eared mutt. But that's it! From a purely writing point of view, the plot is seriously disjointed and outrageously difficult to follow, sub-plots are willy-nilly injected and summarily dropped and the characters are cartoonish and thinly developed. Maria, for example, the stand-in for the mother of Christ on this second stab at converting the world, is a virgin only because she's a neurotic, egocentric,waspish whiner that no self-respecting man would stay with long enough to roll into bed.If one examines this novel from a thematic point of view, the theology is a joke and is an excellent example of the many reasons why I am a rabidly anti-Christian deist hanging tentatively by my fingernails on the edge of atheism. (And I know I'm not alone) That a self-centered, narcissistic God would make a second appearance to the world because we screwed up the receipt of his first message and failed to give him his due obeisance; that he would choose to make his appearance through the worldly efforts of a renegade group of arrogant theologians convinced that the end justifies their illegal means; that he would enlist a pederast, murderers, thugs, drug runners and extortionists as his advance earthly agents; that this so-called God would create havoc, mayhem, destruction, heartbreak, chaos and the foundation for a world-wide nuclear war as the climate for his second coming ... well, it's all more than laughable. It's the reason why there is so much antipathy today toward organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.If that's the God that Christian dogma has on offer, then give me the apocalypse but leave me alone after I'm dead and gone. That's one God that I don't care to ever meet.Paul Weiss