Scan barcode
A review by sandevon
Absolute Proof by Peter James
1.0
I picked this up because the cover blurb by Lee Child promised me the best what if since The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown's book was dumb but entertaining. Absolute proof however, is not.
This isn't immediately apparent, because Peter James can write. Pacing is perfect, and the short chapters really help with digesting what is a very thick book.
However, things start unraveling fast. First of all, Ross Hunter is a complete asshole. We learn in his very first chapter that he pushed his twin brother away only because...he felt his parents liked his brother better. Furthermore, it's made clear that the brother suffered because of this.
He also is a terrible husband. Sure, his wife cheats on him at the beginning of the book, but he forgives her and agrees to give the relationship another chance. Except he absolutely doesn't. He's cold and distant to his pregnant wife, constantly suspects she's cheating on him without any real reason or follow-up, and spends the entire book using her mistake as an excuse to date another woman, whose main quality seems to be to agree with everything he says. In the end, she conveniently loses the child and "betrays" him so he can leave her and be with the airhead. The betrayal by the way, is trying to find a way out of the situation he put them in, one where he constantly puts both her life and the life of their unborn child in danger.
He does this, we need to understand, because he can't give up the search for God in exchange of money. It's too important, more important than money, more important than his family.
Of course, in the very last scene he throws a tantrum because his story didn't reach the front page, but as luck would have it, he gets a call where's he's offered millions for it! Does he like that? "Is the Pope catholic?" That's an actual quote. It's the final sentence of the book.
Ross Hunter is an horrible human being and I'm very happy he doesn't actually exist.
Then, James takes the unusual step of not leaving the answer to the big question (Is God real?) unanswered. It's all true. God is real. Jesus was a miracle worker, and it was in his DNA so his descendant is a miracle worker too who turns whiskey into beer when he's not drunkenly depressed because mankind sucks. And mankind does suck and we need to repent and we're given absolute proof because it turns dark and we see rainbows upside down and I can't even...
The problem I have here is that it makes the entire plot unnecessary. The final chapter would have happened with or without the horrible Hunter. Apparently the only reason for his search for Christ's descendant was to write about the upcoming rainbow freak show so people would...believe again and thus, would be nicer to each other, I guess? This could have happened in one paragraph where God speaks directly into Hunters mind, ordering him to write his article. Instead, God told a medium, who told an old man, who told Hunter to visit three coordinates, which eventually lead him to Las Vegas to meet the descendant of Jesus, who tells him to write the article. And because Hunter does such a fine job of this, the old man ends up dead, he destroys the tooth of Christ, he loses the Holy Grail, he gets the descendant killed, while abandoning his wife when she's pregnant and about to have a nervous breakdown (no wonder she lost the child) and for all intents and purposes, cheating on her.
There was no point to Ross Hunter and his adventures. The most interesting and important character to the plot was the descendant of Christ (his stories I would have liked to read), and he shows up in all of two short chapters.
Finally, what really irked me is James puts science and religion on opposite sides of the spectrum. Apparently either science is correct, or God exists. This is simply not true. If scientific research would find evidence that a higher being created the universe, then that would be published and scientists would test that theory by trying to prove and/or disprove it. That's how science works. James mentions correctly that science doesn't care about why, only with how, but then inserts an incredibly hamfisted "paradox" into a conversation: "science cannot recreate the Big Bang, and anything that cannot be recreated in a lab isn't science." Of course, a simple Google search shows us that big bang conditions HAVE been created in a lab, but this isn't enough for Hunter. He wants the entire universe recreated, exactly as it happened, at any given point in history. As long as science cannot do this, God may exist.
This is plainly ridiculous, and the only reason to invent a "paradox" like this is to discredit science in general.
I wanted to give this two stars since I did appreciate how well it was written and paced, but according to the GoodReads rating system this means "It was OK", and to me it was not. It started off well, but then descended into a poorly reasoned pamphlet in favor of intelligent design, with an unsympathetic main character and a plot that eventually ended up to not matter at all.
A disappointment.
This isn't immediately apparent, because Peter James can write. Pacing is perfect, and the short chapters really help with digesting what is a very thick book.
However, things start unraveling fast. First of all, Ross Hunter is a complete asshole. We learn in his very first chapter that he pushed his twin brother away only because...he felt his parents liked his brother better. Furthermore, it's made clear that the brother suffered because of this.
He also is a terrible husband. Sure, his wife cheats on him at the beginning of the book, but he forgives her and agrees to give the relationship another chance. Except he absolutely doesn't. He's cold and distant to his pregnant wife, constantly suspects she's cheating on him without any real reason or follow-up, and spends the entire book using her mistake as an excuse to date another woman, whose main quality seems to be to agree with everything he says. In the end, she conveniently loses the child and "betrays" him so he can leave her and be with the airhead. The betrayal by the way, is trying to find a way out of the situation he put them in, one where he constantly puts both her life and the life of their unborn child in danger.
He does this, we need to understand, because he can't give up the search for God in exchange of money. It's too important, more important than money, more important than his family.
Of course, in the very last scene he throws a tantrum because his story didn't reach the front page, but as luck would have it, he gets a call where's he's offered millions for it! Does he like that? "Is the Pope catholic?" That's an actual quote. It's the final sentence of the book.
Ross Hunter is an horrible human being and I'm very happy he doesn't actually exist.
Then, James takes the unusual step of not leaving the answer to the big question (Is God real?) unanswered. It's all true. God is real. Jesus was a miracle worker, and it was in his DNA so his descendant is a miracle worker too who turns whiskey into beer when he's not drunkenly depressed because mankind sucks. And mankind does suck and we need to repent and we're given absolute proof because it turns dark and we see rainbows upside down and I can't even...
The problem I have here is that it makes the entire plot unnecessary. The final chapter would have happened with or without the horrible Hunter. Apparently the only reason for his search for Christ's descendant was to write about the upcoming rainbow freak show so people would...believe again and thus, would be nicer to each other, I guess? This could have happened in one paragraph where God speaks directly into Hunters mind, ordering him to write his article. Instead, God told a medium, who told an old man, who told Hunter to visit three coordinates, which eventually lead him to Las Vegas to meet the descendant of Jesus, who tells him to write the article. And because Hunter does such a fine job of this, the old man ends up dead, he destroys the tooth of Christ, he loses the Holy Grail, he gets the descendant killed, while abandoning his wife when she's pregnant and about to have a nervous breakdown (no wonder she lost the child) and for all intents and purposes, cheating on her.
There was no point to Ross Hunter and his adventures. The most interesting and important character to the plot was the descendant of Christ (his stories I would have liked to read), and he shows up in all of two short chapters.
Finally, what really irked me is James puts science and religion on opposite sides of the spectrum. Apparently either science is correct, or God exists. This is simply not true. If scientific research would find evidence that a higher being created the universe, then that would be published and scientists would test that theory by trying to prove and/or disprove it. That's how science works. James mentions correctly that science doesn't care about why, only with how, but then inserts an incredibly hamfisted "paradox" into a conversation: "science cannot recreate the Big Bang, and anything that cannot be recreated in a lab isn't science." Of course, a simple Google search shows us that big bang conditions HAVE been created in a lab, but this isn't enough for Hunter. He wants the entire universe recreated, exactly as it happened, at any given point in history. As long as science cannot do this, God may exist.
This is plainly ridiculous, and the only reason to invent a "paradox" like this is to discredit science in general.
I wanted to give this two stars since I did appreciate how well it was written and paced, but according to the GoodReads rating system this means "It was OK", and to me it was not. It started off well, but then descended into a poorly reasoned pamphlet in favor of intelligent design, with an unsympathetic main character and a plot that eventually ended up to not matter at all.
A disappointment.