Voice in the Wind

I received Voice in the Wind and the other two books of this Francine Rivers triliogy as a gift. That's the main reason I read the whole book--not because I liked the story or writing style. It's an okay book I suppose, but not my kind of book. I never connected with any of the characters.

Set in ancient Jerusalem, Rome and Ephesus in about 70ad Voice in the Wind tells the story of an early Christian slave, the family that owns her, and a Germanic gladiator. It was like reading a C.B. DeMille film, not his best one either. The emotions seemed stilted and dialogs contrived.

At times I felt the book was researched well in that it described various household items of the day, but that it got the zeitgeist wrong. In fact sometimes I got so doubtful of the accuracy that I sometimes stopped reading and went online to check out a fact. Not something one wants readers to do when reading historical fiction.

Rivers is a well known, successful Christian writer so she wants to tell a story and to illuminate some aspect of this faith. She wanted to show that Christianity is the Way. Yet I've studied Roman culture, philosophy and literature in college and do think this aim came into conflict with an accurate portrayal of life at the time. For example, one character gets an abortion and the Christian slave woman disapproves. I don't think that was a formal belief that Christians held in the early church. According to Wikipedia the earliest Christian writing against abortion appeared in 100 AD. From my studies, imperfect as they are, of Church history, the early church was not as highly formal and organized as it became after 1000 AD. As I understand it, the church was figuring out how to develop. There wasn't a clear blueprint.

Also, when I learned about the history of birth control in Western culture in a college course, I know we learned that Jews accepted infanticide up to age three. The slave woman is a Jewish Christian. Now I don't have my notes and I don't know when that belief was held, but this sort of thing and the way Rivers describes Epicureans (she seems to see them only as pleasure seekers, but that wasn't the case; they believed in taking a middle way between extremes) kept me from getting into this book. Yes, Rivers did a lot of research, but she didn't talk to a Classics expert and she did not read Lucretius' On the Nature of Things which is a wise book that Christians can certainly learn from.

A lot of the book seems to want to preach to modern readers about modern problems and attitudes. One character has an argument with her mother and she doesn't want to be "judged" and throughout she seemed completely of our era not 70 AD. Yes, there were similarities, but it wasn't a distant mirror.

What really irked me was that the book doesn't resolve any of the ongoing conflict. Rather it ends with a cliff hanger so you buy the next volume. Novels in a trilogy should stand alone somewhat, while carrying some themes forward.

I couldn't lose myself in this book. I did want to give it a try and made myself read 20 pages of this each day before I let myself read something else. That pretty much indicates my lack of pleasure.

I'm more of an Evelyn Waugh, François Mauriac or Graham Greene writer. I like their complexity and how the characters never come to easy solutions.