Nose in a Book

The Alexandria Letter by George R. Honig

A young scholar, Nathan, stumbles across an extremely old manuscript while doing research on Hebrew poetry.  He translates the manuscript and finds that it is a letter written by a man who was a disciple of John the Baptist and Jesus.  The contents of the letter “threaten to turn long-held principles of Christianity on their heads.”  According to the book summary Nathan “finds himself thrown into an agonizing struggle against powerful forces committed to discrediting him…As he races to verify the authenticity of the letter, he faces rejection by his fellow scholars and sinister opposition from within the Church that aims to stop him at any cost.”

I really didn’t like this book and here’s why:

The story lacked flow.  The story was told in three alternating parts: the letter, Nathan’s narrative and the story of a shady priest who’d spent at least 30 years murdering, stealing and plotting.  There was way too much unnecessary detail in the letter and it was so boring.  The part of the book that told Nathan’s story was too impersonal and the writing was stilted.  This part of the story didn’t have enough detail.  As a result the characters were not adequately developed and I never got to know the characters.  Because I didn’t know them, I didn’t care about them or the outcome of the book.  The shady priest parts of the book were so random.  I think the author was trying to show us what a bad guy he was but so much of what he did was so completely unrelated to the rest of the novel that it was confusing.

The book summary was one of the things that bothered me the most about the book.  I thought the story was going to be exciting, and suspenseful, and controversial.  But it wasn’t!  The book moved so slowly, I didn’t find it to be suspenseful at all.  And controversial?  I don’t think so.  You’d think with the subject matter of the letter that it wouldn’t be that hard to find some controversy but I suspect that if the letter had been real most Christians wouldn’t be all that bothered by it.  I wouldn’t anyway.

After trashing a book like that, I usually like to find something good to say about it but in this case I just can’t think of anything.  I always feel badly, saying I didn’t like a book because I know a lot of blood, sweat and tears go into writing a book.   I’m sure there is someone out there that would enjoy this novel, it just wasn’t for me.

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