Book Review: Mark's Story by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: The Passion story was moving

Cons: The rest of the "novel."

The Bottom Line:

So little novel

The "authors" should be ashamed

Glad I did not buy

Not a Novel but a Scripture Dump

I had a love/hate relationship with the Left Behind books written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.  By the time the series ended, I decided I was through with their fiction even though I was intrigued by their Jesus Chronicles, a series of four novels about the authors of the gospels.  That's why I snagged Mark's Story: The Gospel According to Peter while I was looking for books on tape at my local library to listen to during the drive to my parents' for Easter.  And, considering it was Easter, I decided this was an appropriate book to hear.

Oh, that I had actually liked the book.

This book follows the life of John Mark, most commonly called Mark, from the time he is 16 until his death.  The book actually starts during Passover of the year that Jesus dies and is resurrected.  We get to see the birth of the early church, Mark's various journeys, and his conversations with Peter that formed the basis of the Gospel that bears his name.

But before I get to what I didn't like, let's start with the one thing I did.  The part of the book that centered on the crucifixion and resurrection were extremely moving.  I found myself tearing up on more than one occasion, not the best thing if you are listening while driving like I was.  If the rest of the novel had kept that level, I would have enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, that part ends before we are a quarter of the way into it, and things go downhill from there.

In reality, this is a fictionalized biography.  I expected that, but I still found long passages  of the book had no real plot.  Plot is the basis of a novel, right?  They should have focused on one time period of his life.  After all, we really know very little about Mark from the Bible, so they have plenty of room to maneuver.

And they did weave the few references to Mark from the Bible into the book.  The rest of the novel is filled with tradition passed down from the days of the early church.  Frankly, I had no problem with that being the basis of the novel since it was given as fiction.  There's no way of knowing if the traditions are true or not, and I'm not going to take a side.  But there's no reason to worry about it since this is a novel.

But again, the authors went out of their way to avoid conflict.  Very few parts of the novel actually contained any.  One thing Mark is well known for is deserting Paul during his first missionary journey.  I honestly thought early on it would form the basis for much of the novel.  Instead, it causes some problems, but they are more in the background than anything else.  That alone could have formed the basis of a much better novel.  But instead it is glossed over and Mark is treated as if it were the right thing to do and Paul was in the wrong.  Now who knows, maybe that is the way it happened.  But that doesn't seem to be the way things are presented reading the sub-text of the Bible.

Now it would help if the characters were developed.  Developed characters?  Don't make me laugh.  Mark is cardboard thin and only something to be moved around by the whims of the author.  Only two of the characters are any better.  Peter is somewhat developed.  Paul actually becomes the most developed character, eliciting a couple laughs from me.

Then there's the writing.  Even listening to this, I recognized the simple writing style from the Left Behind books.  Any elementary school student could read the book just fine.

The book incorporates large passages of the New Testament.  Early portions of the story use passages from John.  As the church gets started, we get one character telling another a story of something that happened to him, and it sounds exactly like Acts with the pronouns changed.  Later, as Peter reminisces about his time with Jesus, it bears a striking resemblance to Mark.

Now don't misunderstand my complaint here.  I have no problem with reading the Bible.  But when I sit down to read a novel, I don't expect to be reading the Bible instead.

The book includes the Gospel of Mark and the Epistles of First and Second Peter in the appendix.  So why do we need them also quoted so heavily in the book?

Frankly, the practice becomes laughable as the novel progresses.  See, the version of the Bible quoted is most like the New King James (the audio version didn't tell me).  So the characters go from speaking in modern American to this stylized English and back again.  Plus, we get Paul going from his conversion in Acts to Philippians 3 is the next paragraph.  While the Epistles work as writing, they sound strange as dialogue.  My favorite example, however, is Peter speaking when he says to a character, "You will now be known as Barnabas, which being translated, means Son of Encouragement."  Really?  That's the best you could come up with?

The final part of the book gets away from the quoting scripture and it does become slightly more interesting.  But by then, I was just listening to finish.  And the way the book ends, it made me wonder if this was really Mark's story or more Peter's story.

Now I am not holding any of this against Robertson Dean.  His narration was great.  He just had a laughable book to narrate.

I'm giving Mark's Story: The Gospel According to Peter two stars only because of how moved I was by the beginning.  I like good historical fiction, but this wasn't it.  The book is now going back to the library.  I won't be wasting any more time on "novels" from these two authors.