Book Review Time: A Vision of Fire

It's book review time! I received a copy of A Vision of Fire, by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin, through the GoodReads First Reads program.  A Vision of Fire is a sci-fi thriller about a child psychologist named Caitlin O'Hara who has been called in to (discreetly) help a UN ambassador's daughter. The daughter, Maanik, witnessed an assassination attempt on her father and broke down shortly afterwards. The strange nature of Maanik's illness and the emergence of similar cases around the world, however, lead Caitlin to believe that this is more than just PTSD. There are some spoilers ahead, although I try to stay away from anything too big.  Just to be on the safe side: Read at your own risk.  Also, I felt a free book deserved a detailed review (i.e. - it’s pretty lengthy), so...read at your own risk?

This book was probably more of a 2.5 stars quality, but I rounded up for potential.  However, maybe a little counterintuitively, I was most disappointed in this book because of that potential.   A Vision of Fire read like an early draft of what could have been a compelling start to a new series.  I’d say the book was average, but that word isn’t nuanced enough to really convey my meaning.  It was more that the book has some really good parts and some really mediocre parts, which sort of balanced out to average on the whole.

First of all, the narration was often heavy-handed.  For example, there is this passage:

“Caitlin’s phone buzzed, buzzed again.  It was a call from Benjamin Moss [...] Caitlin’s phone stopped buzzing, then started again.  Ben was calling a second time instead of leaving a voicemail.”

Yes, that Gillian Anderson

Showing, not telling is not only one of the first things that creative writers learn, but it is something that will be beaten into their heads with every workshop.  Now, I’m not going to get into an argument about the wisdom of this rule/guideline/whatever, but I wanted to point out this passage as a strange instance of someone showing AND telling, which is the literary equivalent of flogging a dead horse.  The first part of this passage is, I think, pretty expertly done.  There is something urgent and a little unnerving about someone continuing to call without leaving a voicemail.  If I looked at my phone and saw that my mom had called three times in a row without leaving a voicemail, I would immediately assume that someone died (I’m anxiety-ridden, but you get my point).  So, with those emotions implied so well by these first couple sentences, the last sentence doesn’t accomplish anything other than to regurgitate the same thought in a less artful way.  

There are other examples of this “telling problem” throughout the book, especially in scenes between Caitlin and Ben.  There’s a lot of “he laughed” or “she said, laughingly” which, ideally, should be unnecessary dialogue tags when someone makes a joke.  Also, their relationship often seemed forced, and it quickly became obvious (Spoiler?  But is it, really?) that they are going to get together.  While the authors pretty much beat you over the head with how compatible Caitlin and Ben are, I don’t think that the chemistry between them was sufficiently illustrated.  Or maybe it was too illustrated (in a “the lady doth protest too much” sort of way)?  Either way, I just didn’t feel it.

Along the same vein, the book was far too short - maybe not in page length (although, at around 300 pages, it is much shorter than many sci-fi/thriller type novels), but definitely in plot.  There were events, characters, and settings that were introduced but not adequately explored.  For instance, the Group (a mysterious organization) has a handful of chapters but has absolutely no bearing on the main plotline.  Yet.  It’s fairly obvious that they will be involved to a much greater extent in future novels, but their inclusion here, as well as the ancient artifacts that they collect, was so unconnected as to be superfluous to the book as a whole.

There was also not nearly enough about the ancient civilization, Galderkhaan.  Although the supposedly rational-minded main characters seem to accept the the supernatural and anti-modern science/history happenings and explanations with worrying ease, the idea of some sort of ancient race with a collective consciousness definitely sparked my interest.  There’s a nice Lovecraftian vibe to these people, and I actually would have liked to read a book just about the Galderkhaani.  But besides slaking my own interest, there were a lot of holes left in their part of the story.  Again, future books will likely delve more thoroughly into this ancient history, but there were questions brought up that should have been answered in this book.  I don’t want to spoil the climax to the entire novel but two very important questions were not answered here: How did Caitlin know to do what she did?  and, Why did it work?  The sickness in Maanik and others like her was the plot of this novel, and it should have been more thoroughly explained.  Instead, we are left with the “how?” of the sickness and the cure, but we are missing the “why?”  Even if a novel is the first of a series, it’s a wasted opportunity if it functions in main part as an introduction for subsequent books.  There should be a more self-contained plot structure.  

This all seems a little doom and gloom, however, and there were parts of the book that I really did enjoy.  I mentioned the ancient civilization as something I would be interested in learning more about, and the idea of the novel is a very interesting combination of sci-fi and religion, aliens and alternative planes.  The errant souls, wandering through time, but still somehow trapped at the moment of their death was was a unique twist on the body-snatching trope, and I would have liked to see that explored in more depth too.  The action sequences were also particularly well done, especially those involving the escalating conflicts in the Kashmir region.  I think the writers were caught up in the action as much as the reader because these parts lacked the somewhat stilted quality of the more introspective scenes.  While the narration in the dialogue and interior monologue chapters often seemed forced, the action chapters flowed much more naturally.

I also thought that Caitlin’s 10 year old son, Jacob, was one of the more fleshed-out characters.  Jacob is deaf and speaks/understands through a combination of sign language, lip reading, and a hearing aid.  He also likes cooking and sometimes pretends to be a squid.  I generally don’t like children, real or fictional, but I have a soft spot for weirdos, and he hit it.  There was also a character, Arni, whose synesthesia was put to very good use.  He associates sounds with colors, and there is one scene in which he is listening to a dull humming noise but sees the color brown, which he normally links to hearing people talk.  I have only a very basic understanding of synesthesia, but I thought that it was a fascinating idea to use it as a kind of warning system - something that could pick up on things before our conscious mind even registers what they are.  There’s also an unknown language in the book that uses arm gestures as superlatives.  It’s such a little thing, but something so far removed from the workings of most modern languages really struck me as a very imaginative detail.  There were little bits of genius like these throughout A Vision of Fire, which, again, makes me think like this could have been something more.

tl;dr - Will I read the next book?  Maybe.