Book Analysis: BLACK

Author: Ted Dekker
Publisher: WestBow (February 2004; 408 pages; Hardcover)
ISBN: 0849917905
Genre: Suspense

Black is an absorbing hybrid of genres that defies easy categorization. It's part fantasy, part time travel, and part apocalyptic epic. Blending genres like this carries a certain amount of inherent risk. Each genre possesses certain conventions, specific hallmarks that make it work. Mixing two together, much less three, is a lot like loading a computer with unfamiliar software. Unless the programmer is skilled at what he's doing, potentially debilitating extension conflicts between the programs are almost guaranteed.

Dekker juggles these genres with amazing dexterity. One thing he does to make it work is that he splits Black into two separate yet interdependent plot lines. One plot line is pure fantasy. The other is pure apocalyptic epic. They are connected by a time travel subplot. By dividing the genre elements into their own story worlds, it makes them a lot stronger. None of the story elements must compromise to facilitate the others. Ordinarily, what a story compromises to keep, it loses, but there are no compromises or losses here.

The parallel stories in Black are deceptively simple. The apocalyptic epic is a (seemingly) straightforward end-of-the-world action-adventure story where the world faces extinction because of a super-virus. With the clock ticking, the hero, Tom, goes on a globe-trotting quest for the anti-virus. Madmen in positions of extreme power intent on stopping him provide the conflict. A possible romantic interest, the female French scientist who initially created the virus as an all-purpose vaccine, embellishes on the main goal and adds further complications.

The fantasy plot also seems relatively simple. The agnostic hero, Tom, wakes up an amnesiac in a world literally split down the middle between the forces of good and evil. The good side is populated by white furry bats and happy innocents who try to coax him into a life of contentment and romance with a beautiful worshipper of Elyon. Instead, he goes on a quest to find out what happened to his memory. Unfortunately, only the furry black bats on the evil side seem willing to provide him with any answers, untrustworthy though they may be.

What ups the complexity of Black by quantum percentages is that these two stories are linked together by a time travel subplot. The fantasy plot occurs sometime in the future, after the eventual resolution of the apocalyptic adventure plot. The story eschews the danger of episodic sequences or disconnected story lines by making the events in each story line co-dependent. In other words, events in the apocalyptic story have significance in the fantasy world, and events in the fantasy world have consequences in the apocalyptic adventure. They are fused together by the Second Law of Fiction (the First Law is Show, Don't Tell): Cause and Effect.

Dekker braids the parallel story lines together by permitting the separate goals to intrude on and motivate Tom's actions in the other world. But he never allows one plot's goal to take over the other so completely that the second plot loses its drive and focus.

Despite the almost allegorical complexity of this book and its relatively substantial length, it was an amazingly fast read. A lot of books catch up readers on the first page, but I give extra points to one that maintains that level of breathless interest for over four-hundred pages. I credit this in large part to Dekker's masterful handing of "deep" point of view. Despite involving such potentially complicated subjects as global terrorism, germ warfare, and the end of the world, he avoids boring readers with long dry chunks of exposition. Instead, he filters in everything readers need to know through the perceptions and heartbeat of the viewpoint character, with appropriate reactions. It's a seamless working together of the First and Second Laws of Fiction: Show, Don't Tell combined with Cause and Effect.

Tom's persistent reluctance to accept the time travel element as reality did keep me confused for longer than I liked. I was ready to accept it a lot sooner than he was. Indeed, authors familiar with the time travel genre know to not spend a great deal of story time dealing with the question, "Is this real, or am I imagining it?" After about a hundred pages, Tom finally decided to treat it as real, and my confusion evaporated instantly. Still, when a story is complex, it doesn't serve any good purpose to risk confusing readers. It was a dangerous (albeit ultimately forgivable) jitter in an otherwise brilliantly crafted story.

Black is not a book unto itself. It's merely Act One in Dekker's dynamic Circle trilogy. The ending represents far more than a gimmicky cliffhanger. It launches the second part of the story, Red, into a whole new and breath-stealing direction. Dekker's without-boundaries imagination and exquisite skill as a writer takes the limits off fiction as we know it with this story and the two following it.