"Rollicking Good Read" - The Big Issue
The Big Issue magazine, editorial review
It’s fair to say one-time Capitol Hill chief of staff Gerald Weaver will not be accused of dumbing down on his fiction debut, the densely allegorical 'Gospel Prism'. The book’s preface, which begins ‘I did not write this book’, is a thinkpiece of the evolution not just of books in general but on the one you have in your hands, evolving as you read it. Each of its 12 chapters – stages in protagonist Christian’s holy quest, as bestowed upon him by the beautiful Messiah who visits him in jail – is inspired by a great name from the literary/philosophical canon (Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne, Borges). You don’t have to get the allusions but it helps.
That said, I found this a rollicking good read. Weaver revels in his literary heroes but his palpable love of them is more puppyish than pretentious. His prose is sharp, cute, sometimes lyrical and surprisingly funny, usually when Christian’s evangelical mission clashes with the prosaic details that surround it. The Messiah is all the more persuasive because she is disguised as Halle Berry and lets the narrator smell his hair. Christian’s Proustian epiphany regarding the smell of gravel involves a childhood incident when he had his face ground into it, and bits stuck to his face. As intellectuals go, Weaver is definitely one of the fun, and possibly blasphemous, ones.
Jane Graham, The Big Issue, 22-28 June 2015
It’s fair to say one-time Capitol Hill chief of staff Gerald Weaver will not be accused of dumbing down on his fiction debut, the densely allegorical 'Gospel Prism'. The book’s preface, which begins ‘I did not write this book’, is a thinkpiece of the evolution not just of books in general but on the one you have in your hands, evolving as you read it. Each of its 12 chapters – stages in protagonist Christian’s holy quest, as bestowed upon him by the beautiful Messiah who visits him in jail – is inspired by a great name from the literary/philosophical canon (Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne, Borges). You don’t have to get the allusions but it helps.
That said, I found this a rollicking good read. Weaver revels in his literary heroes but his palpable love of them is more puppyish than pretentious. His prose is sharp, cute, sometimes lyrical and surprisingly funny, usually when Christian’s evangelical mission clashes with the prosaic details that surround it. The Messiah is all the more persuasive because she is disguised as Halle Berry and lets the narrator smell his hair. Christian’s Proustian epiphany regarding the smell of gravel involves a childhood incident when he had his face ground into it, and bits stuck to his face. As intellectuals go, Weaver is definitely one of the fun, and possibly blasphemous, ones.
Jane Graham, The Big Issue, 22-28 June 2015
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