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ELISHA'S BONES
By: Don Hoesel
Bethany House Publishers: Bloomington, MN
2009 (PB)
Don Hoesel’s first published novel is a workman-like
effort that presents the reader with an interesting plotline, tw sympathetic
protagonists, and plenty of fast-paced action. What is perhaps most
intriguing is that he takes an obscure (and brief) Old Testament story and
spins a contemporary adventure yarn that takes its hero, Jack Hawthorne,
from archaeological sites in Egypt and Venezuela to an ancient religious
site in Ethiopia to the novel’s denouement in the Australian outback. Jack
manages to leave in his wake a trail of death and destruction as he follows
clues that might cast light on this Biblical puzzle.
The story opens five years in the past when Jack is
working as field director to Australian professor James Winfield’s
excavation of the KV65 burial in the Valley of the Kings. Jack and his crew
are in the process of revealing the secrets shut away in the sarcophagus
bearing Coptic inscriptions that allude to “bones of the holy man,” when the
dig is abruptly shut down by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Literally within minutes of the project closure, an excavated trench
collapses, burying several crew and killing Jack’s brother Will-- a tragedy
that Jack believes was no accident.
Five years later, a dejected and still-despondant Jack
Hawthorne has left archaeological field work for the more mundane and
desultory life of a college lecturer at Evanston University in Ellen, North
Carolina. He has resigned himself to a solitary semester break as Christmas
approaches, when Texas billionaire Gordon Reese offers him a most
interesting “business proposition.” Reese, a terminally ill dying man,
tells Jack of the story, recorded in Second Kings of the Old Testament, of
the death of the prophet Elisha and how the approach of Moabite bandits
caused a group of Israelites burying another man to toss the corpse into
Elisha’s grave as they fled. When the body touched the bones of Elisha, the
corpse came to life and stood up. Reese believes, to the core of his
being, that the story is true and that if Jack can find the remains of
Elisha, they will cure him of his disease. Reese has conducted research on
his own that hints broadly of a closely guarded conspiracy of families and
groups that have passed the bones on down through the millennia. The trail
has led to the New World and a shadowy guild called the Fraternidad de la
Tierra—the Brotherhood of Dirt. Jack accepts the challenge and follows
Reese’s research to Venezuela, where he collaborates with an old friend and
dealer in antiquities, Romero Habilla, and his brilliant sister—and Jack’s
former fiancée, Esperanza.
The relationship between Jack and Esperanza—Espy, for
short—is turbulent, to say the least, but the quest for this ancient and
mystical artifact convinces both of them that they must cooperate and at
least treat each other civilly. Together they discover more clues to the
whereabouts of the peripatetic remains as they explore proto-Mayan ruins in
the jungles of Venezuela—a great distance south of the traditional Maya
land. The pyramidal structure amazingly displays glyphs that include
references to the Brotherhood and Lalibela, the second most holy city in
Ethiopia—all in Coptic! In essence, Jack and Espy have discovered a
Mayan-style pyramid built by Egyptians, pointing towards Ethiopia, in the
middle of a South American jungle!
What follows is a harrowing race across continents as
the search for the bones continues unabated, with betrayal and death seeming
to lie in wait for the two former lovers around every corner. There are
also tantalizing hints at religious and spiritual awakening in both Jack and
Espy that could have been more fully developed and would have made the story
more satisfying.
Given the innovative premise of the adventure—the quest
for the prophet’s life-sustaining bones, the quirky and often endearing
natures of Jack and Espy, and the cliff-hanger episodes of derring do, I
would ordinarily be ready to give this delightful escapist adventure three
trowels; but there are weaknesses in the author’s prose style that hopefully
will be addressed in his future efforts. I found that some of the linkages
in clues that led Jack and Espy onward towards the eventual discovery of
Elisha’s bones were often vague, cryptic and obscure. But I could live with
that and have often been willing to overlook such lapses in other books in
this adventure genre. What I found less forgivable were long and often not
very revealing internal dialogues by Jack. Similarly, while I will always
enjoy a well-conceived metaphor or simile, I would prefer an author to avoid
those that don’t do the job. I will give two brief examples from p. 253:
“…apprehension fills my stomach like a solid ball of undigested cheese.” And
There’s that moment between sleep and
wakefulness—when one’s unconscious mind is feeding stimuli
rapid-fire to the part of you fighting off cobwebs, when
everything takes on added poignancy.
Two trowels for this nonetheless entertaining adventure
yarn.
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