B07 #23 Thr3e by Ted Dekker
Sunday, July 29th, 2007I had never read a Ted Dekker book before, but I have heard a lot of good things about him. I once picked one up, and thought he seemed a bit boring. However, this time, I zipped right through the book. (And I believe it’s a movie now, too!)
The back of the book summarises it like this:
Kevin Parson is driving his car late one summer day when, suddenly, his cell phone rings. A man who identifies himself as Slater speaks in a breathy voice: You have exactly three minutes to confess your sin to the world. Refuse, and the car you’re driving will blow sky high.
Kevin panics. Who would make such a call? What sin? Kevin ditches the car. Precisely three minutes later, a massive explosion sets his world on a collision course with madness.
Ted Dekker is a Christian thriller authour. He actually “crosses” over into the secular book world. Most of his books have a very underlying Christian theme, but he is deeper than most Christian books get. In fact, people often miss the themes because they are very subtle.
This particular book is psychological in nature. One of the themes is good versus evil, and how the “old man” and the “new man” fight to come up with some sort of “acceptable man”. Essentially, for those who are not Christians, he battles with the good and evil nature within all of us.
Underlying themes aside, there are some really enjoyable twists, and some psychological issues I did not expect. There were some misrepresentations of a certain psychological illness, but all in all, I loved this book.
I like to read the Amazon.com reviews after I read a book I enjoy, just so I can see the all the bad reviews. This time, they all said the same thing: Ted Dekker is a Christian; his character’s insults are terrible. He doesn’t use swearing in his books, so his characters do not use swearing in their speech. In this book, Slater would tend to be the one who should be doing the swearing. However, his lines are very juvenile in nature. The only thing is, I never interpretted these juvenile lines as a bad thing, or rather, as poor writing. I actually assumed they were intentionally this way because Slater has an interesting connection to Kevin’s childhood that would make for an interesting allusion. Essentially, he used the same insults he did as a child, and it makes a lot of sense.
It is really interesting to see how others view a certain book. Most of the time I read reviews and think, “did we even read the same book?”