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The Spirit Well (Bright Empires, #3)

Stephen R. Lawhead

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Dec 05, 2012 Werner rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

In style, texture, quality and content, this third installment of Lawhead's Bright Empires series is pretty consistent with its predecessors. I felt that the writing was arguably smoother, however (and the author's ability to describe physical settings has always been top-notch, here and elsewhere in the series and his corpus as a whole). The plot is definitely advanced, though, in ways both small and large. We have the introduction of a new major character, paleontologist Cassandra Clarke, who' In style, texture, quality and content, this third installment of Lawhead's Bright Empires series is pretty consistent with its predecessors. I felt that the writing was arguably smoother, however (and the author's ability to describe physical settings has always been top-notch, here and elsewhere in the series and his corpus as a whole). The plot is definitely advanced, though, in ways both small and large. We have the introduction of a new major character, paleontologist Cassandra Clarke, who's both likeable and apparently destined to play a big part in the next two books. And with the entry of the Zetetic Society into the mix, Lawhead begins to weave into the storyline a teleological and theistic theme much more open and explicit than in the first two books, with the ley travelers seen as being caught up in, and serving one side or the other in, a cosmic struggle of good and evil, fulfillment vs. destruction, the benevolent purposes of God for a multiverse of eternal loving community against the malevolent designs of spiritual forces opposed to God (the word "Satan" isn't used, but comes to mind) for the universal annihilation of warmth and light and love. As in the Bible and a great deal of other Christian literature, God and His adversaries are viewed as working through human agency --though just how humans are to be directly involved in this conflict is a murky question left for the remaining volumes of the series to delineate.

As in the first two books, and even more so here, Lawhead eschews linear plotting. We not only have a number of characters moving independently back and forth on historical timelines from the Stone Age to the present, and extensive use of what elsewhere would be called "flashbacks" to reveal crucial information about past events (except that Lawhead would argue that the distinction between "past" and "present" is an illusion); we also have them interacting with each other in time frames that are out of sync with each other. That's a difficult concept to put across; but it means that, for instance, a character can do something for another one --but when he meets her later, though he remembers her doing it and the situation is affected by the fact that she did, from her perspective she hasn't done it yet! I'm reading this series as a buddy read with my Goodreads friend Jackie (whose insights add a great deal to the reading experience!) who's an avid Dr. Who fan; she pointed out that the approach to time in the two series is quite similar. My experience of the TV series is confined to one episode, and I'm not a fan; but I think Whovians would be particularly attuned to appreciating the Bright Empires books. (As a case in point, Jackie gave this installment one more star than I did.) Since we're reading these books in absolute rather than relative time, though, we now have a problem: we have to wait until September for the next one. :-( ...more

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