I've hesitated to offer my thoughts on this book because I simply didn't care for it, and I generally don't believe in giving bad reviews. Reading tastes are so subjective that reviews at either extreme can usually be discounted as either the serendipity of the ideal reader or the collision of incompatible aesthics. In either case, the review becomes an emotional response, not an intellectual one, so the value of the review becomes suspect.

Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile to know why individual readers do or don't like a particular book, so I offer my thoughts here with the disclaimer that I have very strong feelings about the book -- most of them bad. This book frustrates me deeply for reasons that I will try to articulate here.

Jerry Johnston had the following to say in his capsule comment on Ephraim's Seed in the Deseret News (the entire text of the comment appears here).

     From novelist Richard Paul Evans to the Osmond family, LDS artists have always felt comfortable with popular culture. In literature, that means a lot of Mormons write "genre" fiction: Westerns, romances, mysteries, science fiction.
     In "Ephraim's Seed," Pam Blackwell has apparently gone for a hat-trick; three genres in one. The cover calls the book "a psycho-spiritual millennial thriller." There's also some literary heavy lifting going on as well -- epigrams for each chapter from the likes of W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Milton, and Shakespeare.
     Who says you can't have it all?

At the risk of sounding catty, Pam Blackwell can't have it all. In Ephraim's Seed she has produced a book that failed to meet its own promises. From the cover quote attributed to the Deseret News (but that appears to have been quoted by the Deseret News from the author's own press release), to the unattributed blurbs on the back cover (". . . so intense it makes the end of Joyce's Ulysses read like a repair manual for an air conditioning unit!"), to the epigrams mentioned by Jerry Johnston in his capsule, Ephraim's Seed makes promises to the reader that the text didn't keep.

The story centers around Ben and Peg Taylor and their odyssey in a near future America where an oppressive international government (the UWEN) has conquered most of the world (including the United States and Europe), has outlawed Mormonism, and has instituted a series of strict economic policies and interstate borders patrolled by attack helicopters with orders to shoot to kill. Ben and Peg have been married for only four years -- each married for the second time -- and Ben is a recent convert after a childhood as an inactive Jew and an adulthood looking for god.

We follow Ben and Peg as they are forced to flee Salt Lake City (to escape a UWEN crackdown on the Mormon black market) to find refuge at the southern Utah ranch (Pah Tempe) of a non-Mormon friend and his Mormon wife. As they wait out an attempt by Interpol to secure the Utah border, other Mormons begin to gather at the ranch as well. Eventually, Ben comes in contact with two apostles hiding from the authorities and is called to translate plates held by the Dalai Lamas for over three thousand years.

Through a series of adventures, including the kidnapping of Ben's children (from his first wife, now dead) from abusive grandparents in California, to Ben's introduction to transcendental meditation by a Tibetan monk, to armed conflicts with Interpol-armed criminals sent to eliminate them, we follow the residents of Pah Tempe as they come to grips with the startling reality that the last days have arrived and they are seeing the signs of the apocalypse. Each of them finds their faith tested in personally unique ways, and all find that they have a role in building the New Jerusalem in preparation for the Second Coming.

The book attempts to do a great many things, and succeeds to varying degrees in each of those attempts.

A Mormon Apocalyptic Folklore Primer

First, the book does raise a lot of questions of specific interest to Mormons. It takes a look at the events that have been prophesied for the last days and attempts to make them real. Characters struggle with the events, questioning whether they are fulfillment of prophecy or just hard times. Some see the events as proof of their faith, others see their friends changing from ordinary people to borderline religious fanatics for apparently irrational reasons. There's a woman facing the choice of her husband versus her religion and the real need to leave one behind. The book raises a lot of intriguing questions and offerd some interesting possibilities. There are many gifts of the spirit in evidence, including visions, premonitions, and translation of ancient texts.

In this sense the book was successful. Two weeks after finishing the book, I find myself thinking about many of the issues raised, and I find that my own ideas of the last days and what will happen have been stimulated and challenged. But the frustrations I experienced in dealing with the text and the story were so great that I can't help but wonder if I could not have been as equally challenged by a bullet list of Mormon assumptions and possible alternatives.

In fact, that thought underscores one of my major issues with the book. It read like a thickened outline, a paint-by-numbers plot that was so focused on the grand idea of the events leading to the coming Millenium that it forgot to tell a story about real people. In this sense, I admit that my criticisms may be unfair -- I find stories about ideas to be less satisfying than stories about characters, and this story was very much about an idea. And even then, the book was filled with pages of irrelevant detail that distracted from the primary narrative goal.

It's characters were simplistic and flat, with people filling roles more than functioning as real people. The author is a psychology professor and clinician, and that background came through in how the characters were portrayed. Every character seemed hyphenated, which is to say that they had not just a name, but a type, as well. There's Ben-Converted-Jew and Grace-Prophetess-Earth-Mother. There's Sangay-Guru-Prophet and Bishop Olsen-Father-Figure. It seemed as though every character was working through a deep-seated issue from their childhood, usually related to a cold or uncaring father or a fear of death. In the end, fulfilling their type seemed more important than being real people, and the problems they faced could have been shifted to nearly any other character without a loss of poignancy.

Politics Meets Religion

Second, the book makes some assumptions and offers some political comments that I so violently disagree with that it became nearly impossible for me to treat the book seriously. The world situation is straight out of an alarmist, right-wing political tract, with the New World Order and the international conspiracy coming to power and imposing despotic rule on the world. It was almost funny with its cartoonish bad guys sitting in rooms trying to think of ways to hurt Mormons -- not individuals, but the culture in general.

This is one of the areas I have a hard time commenting on. Politics is one of the quickest ways to start an argument among friends (after religion), and one's opinions on the matter are so personal as to be useless in a review of fiction. And the politics of this book are almost perfectly opposed to my own.

Where the issue really gets difficult is when it's mixed in with apocalyptic prophecy and issues of religion. To me the book is tying the alarmist right-wing political theory directly to apocalyptic doctrine, and that assumption angered me throughout.

There is a fairly common cultural assumption among Mormons that the last days will look a lot like the last days of Nauvoo, with raging mobs out to murder innocent Mormons, the Church leadership in hiding from corrupt officials, and a government that is either indifferent or openly antagonistic to our plight. That's simply the way the last days will be, so the best you can do is prepare for it. This belief has led some to stock weapons and ammunition with their food storage and to mistrust any government outside the Church. Not my flavor of apocalyptic politics, but not as uncommon as one might think.

Ephraim's Seed offers this prototypical Mormon nightmare as reality. The Church has been outlawed, government-armed thugs are sent after political dissidents, and wiretaps and armed state borders are simply a fact of life. Personal liberty is a thing of the past.

Which raises a problem. If this vision of the future really is common to the Mormon culture, then it theoretically needs no further explanation because the intended audience already accepts it as real. But I don't believe that Mormon culture is quite that homogeneous in political approach, and I don't think you can simply offer that future with no explanation. One of the genres that Ephraim's Seed claims (albeit passively) is that of science fiction, and one of the basic rules of science fiction is that things happen for reasons -- with the reasons offered as part of the plot development. Ephraim's Seed failed to offer reasons for this extraordinary future, and as such fails as even basic science fiction.

It's one thing to offer unexplained miracles; it's another thing altogether to offer implausible futures where people and governments do things that make no sense. What purpose is served in patrolling the borders of the state of Utah? What purpose is served in shipping all of America's wheat to Europe so that Americans are left without basic staples? What purpose is there in outlawing a single, relatively small religion?

This book's assumptions seem to work by this logic:

1. In the future, the hearts of men will wax cold and evil will rule the world.
2. If good people do good for its own sake, then evil people must do evil for its own sake, revelling in personally harmful actions simply because they're evil.
3. Therefore, no explanations are needed for this extraordinary future because everyone knows that that's just what evil people do.

I don't have a problem with the first assertion, but the second and third really bother me. Apparently outlawing Mormonism needs no explanation, because it's clearly an evil act and evil has no explanation.

Why expend military effort to patrol state borders in a conquered country -- especially when you're at war with China and need all military strength to win the war? Because it's despotic, and that's what despots do.

It's almost Lovecraftian in the sense that the motives of evil are incomprehensible.

(My personal belief is that evil people do what they do for personal gain -- be it in the form of power, money, or pleasure. What makes them evil is that they place their acquisition of gain above the welfare of human beings; the life of a person is worth less than the Air Jordans on their feet. Their reasons may be alien, but the reasons do exist and they come down to personal gain. I don't recall ever seeing an evil savior who sacrifices himself so that evil may live; the nature of the thing simply doesn't support true self-sacrifice. Evil people don't do things that are personally harmful just because the act is evil; they do it to get something they want. There is always a selfish motivation.)

These assumptions bother me for several reasons. If the justification for failing to offer reasons is that "everyone in my audience already believes in that future" then the author has narrowed the intended audience of the book to those who espouse a specific political theory. I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but it limits the effectiveness of the book and begs whether it would have been better served if labelled as a political tract.

If the assumption is that all Mormons believe that way, then I think the author just plain missed the boat. There is little actual doctrine on what will happen in the last days -- especially in terms of politics -- though there is a tremendous amount of speculation. The casual assumption that this particular speculation requires no explanation is a critical error in craft. If given a reason, I can choose to agree or disagree; when given no reasons, it becomes an assumption of general knowledge or acceptance that simply isn't justified.

I don't claim that the vision offered in Ephraim's Seed isn't valid; I just argue that it isn't internally justified, thus coming up short as fiction.

Writing and Craft

Third, I found the book to suffer in basic issues of craft, both by the author and by the publisher. This was not a well-written book, sentence by sentence or scene by scene. Odd turns of phrase and bizarre non-sequiters left me scratching my head fairly regularly. Character motivations were erratic and sometimes just plain incomprehensible.

An example . . .

Early in the book, Ben and Peg flee to Pah Tempe, a ranch in southern Utah owned by their friends Alex and Moira. Ben and Peg are escaping the international government and have made it clear that their lives are in danger and no one is to be trusted. On their first night at Pah Tempe, Ben is so mentally exhausted that he hallucinates while sitting in a hot spring behind the house. At this point Alex is called to the front gate to deal with two carloads of strange men who have come to the gate asking after Ben, claiming to be friends of his from Salt Lake. Alex and Moira are trying to decide what to do.

     "I can't imagine anyone making up such a story, and I can't ask Ben. He's out of it at the moment. Talking to Beethoven."
     "Excuse me?" Moira asked.
     Alex waved his hand to dismiss the remark. "I'll tell you later. Let them in. What the hay!" [sic] Noah's ark, he thought as he walked up to the gate, opened it and gestured to the cars to move forward. Moira told me this would happen when we bought the place. He shook his head. A friend once said Moira was his talisman. More like a tiger that I've got by the tail, Alex laughed to himself. Who was it used to sing that song? Buck Owens? He couldn't remember. What the song did bring up was a memory of the San Fernando pool hall his father used to take him to -- the acrid smell of beer and smoke, his father's eyes, mean, demanding that he not blow this shot in doubles -- he had twenty bucks riding on it. Alex could see the other men's faces too. Cold. They were unsympathetic to the slight, sensitive ten-year-old boy who just wanted time with his father. (35)

No reasons are offered as to why Alex would let perfect strangers into the ranch when Ben has made it clear that evil men are after him. With a shrug and a "What the hay!" Alex puts his own family and his friends' lives at stake. It turns out that they really are friends of Ben's, but Alex's reaction just didn't make any sense in context, and the writing was at best neutral. The transformations in that last paragraph were just plain bizarre. And the book is replete with these sorts of phrases.

This is also a poorly typeset book, with numerous typos, bad line endings, poor-quality duplication, repeated text, missing punctuation, straight quotes, and inconsistent type justification. Physical issues like this have nothing to do with the quality of the text, but they made an already difficult reading experience even harder for me.

Ephraim's Seed offered some interesting ideas and represents an ambitious attempt to collect Mormon apocalyptic folklore into a single narrative. But the story it tells is internally unjustified, with flat characters doing odd things for unspecified reasons. There is a nice sense of tension as multiple plot threads converge to the climax, but it took far too long for those threads to be established, and my confusion about basic character and plot motivations had already turned me off before the tension could become meaningful.

This is a prime example of a good idea hurt by poor craft, plotting, and consideration of audience. And that's part of what made it a particularly frustrating reading experience. The basic subject matter is interesting to me, but the implementation repeatedly disappointed. For all of that, I could still have come away feeling good if there had been any sense of justification for the incomprehensible actions of peoples and governments.

There is nothing that says that the storyteller has to give the bad guys equal space. But if you give them no motivations at all, you make it impossible for me to accept their actions as anything but authorial caprice. In the end, this story failed to offer a realistic conflict, only a cartoonish fight against faceless evil told in the terms of psychology and Mormon religion. But Mormons believe in evil with a specific face and motivation, and that mismatch was just one more problem in a long list.

A lack of basic research and poor writing finished off this book for me. It succeeds neither as science fiction nor as Mormon morality tale. I have no experience with political thrillers, but the incomprehensible acts of the various governments makes me suspect that it falls short in that category as well.

This is the first in a four-book series. Perhaps the next installments of "The Millenial Series" will improve in quality, but this first volume falls short of the lofty aspirations it has set for itself and fails to live up to the repeated promises made in its own introduction and cover blurbs.

Scott Parkin
sparkin@itsnet.com