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Empire Of Lies (2007)

by Andrew Klavan(Favorite Author)

3.37 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1423312880 (ISBN13: 9781423312888)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Brilliance Audio

review 1: I had an early negative reaction to the narrator because of his foul language. I'm not entirely against in-character foul language in dialogue, or even necessarily in narration, but this person put himself forward as a Christian and then used a couple of very harsh words he could have avoided as part of the narration, where it wasn't even really necessary for impact.It came from that box of books I was sent, so I knew no more about it going in than what was on the cover. It presents a man who gets pulled into battling a terrorist conspiracy because of a daughter he never knew he had; it also presents Islam in a very bad light, and suggests that the media is almost entirely left wing and atheistic, and does so with a heavy hand. On the other hand, it tells a compelling stor... morey, particularly since the main character is never entirely certain whether he is putting together the pieces of a major attack on American soil or losing his mind.One character drawn boldly on the page was so obviously a caricature of William Shatner, and a rather unflattering one (even if he is ultimately the hero), that it is impossible to escape seeing Shatner's image when envisioning scenes in which the character appears. On the other hand, I had the very strange experience of so totally associating a police detective, described as tall, thin, black, with a cold, hard look, as a Morgan Freeman role that after a couple pages of his presence I could not read his lines without hearing them in that voice (and I did not have that experience with the recent Internet bit of the poster of his image and captions saying that you couldn't read those words without hearing them in his voice). I'm not sure why that was, whether the author had done something subtle that suggested it.C. S. Lewis said that the world needed not more Christian books but more books by Christians, and I suspect this might be one of those. It was well worth reading despite a lot of dark passages (a murder, descriptions of sexual encounters including sadomasochism, threat of torture). There were quite a few things I did not see coming. On the other hand, the big attack seemed to me to be so obviously prefigured that it was surprising the lead character did not recognize it until getting the terrorist to tell him. Ultimately, things worked reasonably well for the people who seemed to matter (or we didn't hear otherwise), and there's reason to think that they may have lived reasonably happily ever after.
review 2: Until now, it's been rare to find an unabashedly conservative author writing point-blank about a protagonist who is also unabashedly conservative and who encounters the world from that perspective. It was so rare I found myself questioning the hero's reactions to the plot, but since we share much of the same worldview, I found him refreshingly realistic. It's like in so many movies where the hero is beset by difficulties and he NEVER turns his face to God. In real life, God is the first one to hear our laments, but not in Hollywood.Klavan presents a hero who, notwithstanding his turn toward the light, still has plenty of darkness in him, and that darkness not only makes him interesting, but impacts on the story itself. Caught up in a terrorist plot of huge proportions, his own failings and issues keep apace the political thriller, yielding a rare depth of storytelling.In so many such stories, heros have no families, no friends, no physical needs, no real emotional issues (beyond the obvious and trite: alcoholism or drug addition). Klavan's hero is a real person trying to be a better one; he succeeds in a way that I wish more heros succeeded: not only does he save the day, he also saves himself. less

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