Title: Tribulation Force
Author: Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
Jerry Jenkins' web site: http://www.jerryjenkins.com/
Date: 1996
Publisher: Tyndale House
ISBN: 0-8423-2921-8
Length: 450 pages
Quote: “Buck Williams has witnessed the murderous evil power of Nicolae
Carpathia, and Bruce Barnes knows from his study of Scripture that dark days
lie ahead…But only Bruce has more than a hint of the terror to come.”
The Left Behind series was an
epic in more ways than one. As a series of novels it was an epic-sized work of
what can only be called “Christian mythology,” the genre of fiction Christians
invent by asking themselves “What if this or that variation on, or addition to,
or even misunderstanding of, Christian doctrine were true?”
In the case of Left Behind, it
was “What if both the ‘pre-tribulationist’ understanding of Scripture and the
‘Y2K panic’ about civilized life ending at the turn of the millennium were
true?” Obviously the Y2K panic was not true; to a considerable extent it was
whipped up by computer technicians to motivate people to update their
computers. My understanding of the prophetic apostasis is not the familiar version of “The Rapture,” either.
As a publishing phenomenon, the way Left
Behind appealed to so many people on so many levels as to become a whole
publishing industry in itself was a different sort of epic; something writers
will dream of being able to reproduce as long as this world may last.There were
almost two dozen big fat novels, counting the prequels, plus forty short
paperback spin-offs, and millions of people wanted to read all of them.
Not everybody liked them. They were written fast. They were adventure
stories, more about plot than about character development; you knew from the
beginning that Rayford Steele was going to embody the steely strength children
attribute to their fathers, Buck Williams was going to be the more vulnerable
but still heroic character boys identify with themselves, and Chloe Steele was
going to be the sweet but strong heroine girls identify with themselves. You
knew Buck and Chloe were going to fall in love and, if you were Protestant enough
to know where the plot was heading, you regretted that they’d never get to live
happily ever after, with children. Jerry Jenkins wrote the storylines for some
of the most popular adventure comics of the twentieth century, so you already
had a vivid, if two-dimensional, picture of the resolute set of Rayford’s jaw,
the swing of Buck’s arms, the perkiness of Chloe’s bosom, and so on. Comics are
easy to laugh at, even when the cartoons and stories aren’t particularly
funny…and some readers did laugh at the stereotypical quality of the
characters. LaHaye and Jenkins had written other stories in which characters
developed in more of a realistic way; in Left
Behind, although they hadn’t been especially heroic before, the main
characters were supernaturally transformed into almost “super” heroes, and at
least one really “super” villain, by the force of the apocalyptic adventures
they were acting out.
There is in fact an historical precedent for this kind of storytelling,
in Christian hagiography. The prospect of being executed, it has been observed,
“concentrates the mind.” Many an early Christian who might never have done
anything interesting, if not faced with martyrdom, was dragged to a Roman arena for some form of torture that allowed
him or her to exhibit epic-quality fortitude. Knowing they had little time to
live in any case, they packed wonderful demonstrations into that time.
Tribulation Force was volume two, numbered and published and
originally conceived before the three prequel volumes of Babylon Rising, which made it, in a way, volume five of the story.
The characters have reconciled themselves to the loss of most of the nice
people in their world. They’ve met Nicolae Carpathia, who is still only
starting out as a villainous would-be world ruler but will later embody the
Evil Principle itself as the super-villain; he’s still trying to act like a
nice guy but the Steeles, Bruce, and Buck know he’s not one.
The Left Behind series was
meant to be solidly Christian, but never anti-Jewish. Differences between
whole-Bible Christians and Messianic Jews are cultural; you are one or the other, but mixed groups
meet and worship together. In Tribulation Force our newly baptized
Christian protagonists form alliances with a few newly religious, newly
Messianic Jews. One of the “signs and wonders” that make false Jews and
Christians think Nicolae is an angel of light, but warn true ones that he’s
“the” Antichrist, is his ability to sweep Muslims aside—literally—reclaiming
the Dome of the Rock on behalf of his “Global Community.”
There’s no real resolution in these novels. Each one points forward to
the next one. The world in which they’re set is ugly, and will get uglier;
that’s why all the covers are dark up to the final white-and-gold one.Some of
the plot threads in Tribulation Force seem
to resolve by the end of the book. Others don’t. One of the main nice
characters dies; to preserve some suspense, this review won’t say which one.
Should you buy this book from me? Realistically, I imagine that most of
the people who were interested in Left
Behind have already read it. If you need Tribulation Force to complete your collection, I have it. If you’ve
not already read the whole series and would like to, however, you can and
should buy all the Left Behind books
as Fair Trade Books. Tim LaHaye no longer has any use for a dollar per book.
(Sniffle. I miss him. I knew he was older than the pictures he chose to publish
looked, but not how much older; when he e-mailed that he was starting a new
speculative fiction series, earlier this year, I thought he was likely to live
long enough to finish it.) Jerry Jenkins doesn’t seem to need a dollar either, but he’s active online and probably has a
longish list of charities to support by any residual sales of his books.
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