"The Father's Tale" admired as an "unusual combination of Ludlum and Dostoevsky"

Over at "The Corner", Michael Potemra shares some thoughts about reading Michael D. O'Brien's "new epic", The Father's Tale: A Novel:

The first half of this massive, 1,076-page volume is a gripping suspense story, with pronounced spiritual aspects, about an introverted Canadian bookseller who believes that his son has fallen under the control of a New Age cult, and travels literally half a world away — to Siberia — in order to rescue him. In the second half, the spiritual aspects become much more pronounced and even come to dominate the story, before the plot constructed so well in the first half is finally resolved. In short, what we have in the book is an unusual combination of Ludlum and Dostoevsky. (I thought the combination of international suspense and theological speculation was achieved much more seamlessly in the author’s 1998 novel Father Elijah; but of course it’s easier to do that in a work that’s explicitly in the apocalyptic genre.)

Read his entire post. And, on Ignatius Insight, read the opening pages of the novel:

Comments

[Just Sayin']

Michael O'Brien is a very talented author but I feel that his novels are crying out for an editor willing to cut the manuscripts down to, say, 400 pages from their original 1,000 pages!