Leaving Behind Left Behind
I tried to read them. I really did. I would say that reading the first four books of a twelve-book series seriously counts as giving the authors a chance to get somewhere. I’ve decided that Soul Harvest will be the last book in the Left Behind series that I choose to read. Why?
- The authors’ collective obsession with telecommunications. Nearly every time something happens, the reader is subjected to pages and pages describing all of the main characters’ attempts to call relatives and friends—usually to make travel arrangements.
- Cardboard cutout characters. I really tried to give LaHaye and Jenkins some slack on this one because I know that they’re in essence writing a novel in the tradition of a medieval morality play. Characters are really vehicles for a larger religious exposition. Nonetheless, I can only take so many global tragedies wherein the main characters make a pretense of grieving in the aftermath for a few pages before returning to pragmatic travel arrangements. Why isn’t anyone in the novels ever hysterical or inconsolable? Why doesn’t anyone ever go a little crazy with grief? The characters are inhuman in a particularly creepy way.
- Christian characters behaving in a most unchristian manner. The main characters routinely lie and deceive out of an attempt to protect themselves and their loved ones. Absolutely no one in the first four books took the same path as the Jesus they purport to emulate. No one is helping the sick and the dying (unless they’re related). Precious few of the characters in the novel are even openly Christian. Believers, in LaHaye and Jenkins distopia, only help other believers when crisis hits.
- Lack of technology research. Regarding web-based bulletin boards: “[N]o one knew when technology would be advanced enough to trace such messages.” Wait, wait, wait…I can. If Nicolae “Antichrist” Carpathia has such a stranglehold on the entire world, he almost certainly has tracking software installed at all the ISPs. From there, it would just be a matter of seeing who was connecting to the verboten IP addresses. Now, please don’t misunderstand. I don’t expect the authors to be experts in this field. My expectation can be summed up simply in this statement: Don’t write about things you don’t know about. If you don’t know how the Internet works, don’t go to great pains to write about its inner workings in detail. Your prose will be much more believable when the details are left to imagination.
- Telling rather than showing. Occasionally something very exciting will happen within the plot of the books. Unfortunately, more often than not, the reader isn’t there at the time that it happens. The reader doesn’t get a firsthand description of watching someone vanish right in front of the main characters as they’re talking. Difficult landings get glossed over. Treacherous hikes are summed up ex post facto in a matter of a few sentences. Don’t tell me how difficult something was; show me the difficulties through the actions and words of your characters.
Basically, I don’t think that the books are written very well, and life is simply too short and precious to waste my time with substandard writing.
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