Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26608 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
After millions of people around the world vanish in one moment, in what many claim to be the Rapture, Rayford Steele begins a search for the truth amidst global chaos.

Customer Reviews

Poorly written and bad theology
This book was a terrible read. I have enjoyed Tim LaHaye's non fiction works, so I feel I gave these books a fair go, but the characters seemed quite one dimensional to me, the plot pondering and long and the whole thing based on some very bad theology.

I do not entirely understand the fixation many American Christians have with the secret rapture. It seems that the doctrine was invented in the 19th century among a group known as the Irvingites, who disintegrated following the failure of their prophecies to come to pass, but one of whose leaders had influence in another group that then proceeded to produce the Darby study bible that became very widely used in the US. Because of the ubiquity of this Bible, the notes in it became widely assimilated as a dsitinctive American orthodoxy, and one of these doctrines was that of the secret rapture, that this book uses as its theme.

That being the case, no one should read the book with any idea that its events would actually unfold as described. Read it as a work of fiction.

But with this in mind, I read the book as a work of fiction and still I hated it. Perhaps I am too close to the errant orthodoxy that informs the storyline, because it then held no surprises for me - and the quality of writing did not save it.

My best recommendation is to non American readers - read this to get into the mind set of one popular strand of American Christianity.

Just awful
I must admit first that I have read almost but not all of this book. I just couldn't bear to finish it. I read small parts of some others in the series.

If you would like a badly-written book/series in which Christianity is mixed with loony US beliefs about raptures and american exceptionalism, with a good dose of neocon "Killing is good. Killing works" added, fine. Personally I think it would have been more use published in roll form.

Preaching to Converted Americans?
The cover makes some spectacular claims for the sales of this book. Such claims may be true, but it is not easily found in mainstream British bookshops and, like a number of 'cultish' American hits, is barely heard of, over here. Some aspects of the book cause me to suspect that this might not be of much concern to its authors. Back in the 80s, when their form of Evangelical Protestantism was widely successful outside America, this book and its numerous sequels would have been all over British schools and universities. - among the students, of course; their lecturers would have been horrified. Twenty years later, what is known as the American 'Religious Right' seems far more insular and 'Left Behind' shows little concern to be credible to anyone outside the US. A minor example: a brief phone-call to any Baptist Chapel in Cardiff or Swansea, who would probably have been delighted to hear from them, would have been enough for Tim and Jerry to discover that the name 'Dirk Burton' doesn't sound authentically Welsh.

So, it's a book that is preaching only to Americans. Were I to be more critical, I would suggest that it is preaching only to the converted.

Whatever its intended audience, the book exists to spread among them a message of 'Revelations'-based prophetic Protestantism. Up to a point, it does an acceptable job at this. It is an almost weirdly easy read, and, unlike some other best-sellers, the lamentable 'Da Vinci Code,' for example, it stops at a little over three hundred pages, before its thin prose style becomes boring or irritating. But, if its purpose is to create a convincing account of what would happen if its authors' particular interpretation of the Bible was true, it fails. The demands of the action thriller do not lend themselves to the thoughtful characterisation necessary. Our hero is labelled as such by his triply-symbolic name, 'Rayford Steele:' he is a creature of light, he will cross from Evil to Good during the story, and he has the mettle to do so. Such allegorical figures work better as characters in stained-glass windows than novels. As for the Anti-Christ, Nicholae Carpathia? 'Old Nick' was, of course, a familiar name for the Devil and, here, his surname marks him as coming from the same part of the world as Dracula. Effective and, perhaps, witty, but not the stuff of a narrative that is meant to convince us on a literal level.

The book avoids some of the evils that infect much of White American Evangelical Protestantism. There is little evidence of racism (In the movie adaptation, the wisest of those saved at the outset is played by a black actor!) There is no hysterical anti-Catholicism; the Pope, too, is taken up to Heaven in Chapter One. But the old Catholic notion that the unbaptised were doomed to an eternity in Limbo is also healthily dispensed with. Tim and Jerry seem, compared to some preachers, a benevolent enough pair, bless `em. I wish they'd not made Rayford Steele's initial temptation a tediously sexual one, though. The threat that initially-sympathetic air stewardess Hattie will lead our Ray astray is too clunkily derivative of the early chapters of Genesis not to provoke a snigger. And I do not want to snigger at this book: I want to believe that its writers have their hearts in the right places. But there is so little here about the social and economic implications of Christianity that it's sometimes hard to do so. No one here takes what he has and gives to the poor, no one gives up his life for his belief, though I hope that's coming up in later volumes. Accepting all the tenets of Christianity that the authors do, one would have to acknowledge that, without a true preparedness to give up ALL physical and worldly comforts, mere chastity is of no value. Perhaps, then, the shirts and haircuts in the author photograph on the back are not as self-indulgently expensive as they look. That, one must acknowledge, is a matter for Tim and Jerry's own consciences. And I'm not saying I wouldn't be interested in hearing either or both of them preach, if the opportunity arose. But, if I were seeking a genuine insight into the demands Jesus was making, or is making, either as a moral philosopher or as the embodiment of the Creator, I'd sooner listen to Robert Beckford.