Review: Interesting; could have been better
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 2, 2014
Part I 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.I'm moving on to Part 2 now.