The first half of the book proceeds at breakneck speed and leaves the reader dizzy but the end is worth it.
Stack up all the books written on the hidden truths of Catholicism together and you’ll feel they aren’t quite different from each other as they claim to be. There is and always will be only one Jesus Christ and all an author can do is look at His life and death from various angles.
The only places where authors can establish their supremacy is through their storytelling and the strength of their characters.
In Sign of the Cross, Chris Kuzneski adds one more aspect to this murky combination — action. Believe you me, the effect is not stunning. The story, characters and the action do not go hand-in-hand, neither do they develop.
This is perhaps Kuzneski’s biggest downfall. He has put in so much effort to enhance and magnify each of these aspects that they remain grotesquely out of proportion— they just don’t fit together.
Mistake number one— beginning the book with action. When you pick up a book and immediately read about a Vatican priest nailed to a cross on the shores of Denmark, you want to read more. There are so many questions left unanswered. But it stops right there, and that is mistake number two— moving straight on to characters you know nothing about.
Readers of Kuzneski’s earlier book The Plantation will be familiar with smooth-talking American Special Ops, Payne and Jones. Otherwise, you’ll be left floundering. It is not until a good 10-15 pages that you learn that the two men used to work in an elite counterinsurgency team called MANIACs.
They are recruited by the CIA for a mission that takes them all over Italy, but get sidetracked by a covert operation of their own. You’re left wondering what this has to do with the murder.
More mistakes— Kuzneski then travels at breakneck speed between two other sets of characters. They are Interpol chief Nick Dial who is investigating the murder and a student-professor duo in the catacombs of Orvieto in Italy. It is only with the portly, but extremely agile Professor Boyd and his nubile student Maria Pelati that a few plot details concerning secrets of the Pope and the Vatican are revealed. Again, this is rudely interrupted by crazy action.
Sign of the Cross;
Chris Kuzneski,
Penguin Books, 2007, pp 610,
Rs 250.
Detail overload
This is just a sampler. Such interruptions happen again and again till you are dizzy with details. Kuzneski intends to tie all the three sets of characters, their pasts and their adventures together, but takes so long to do it that things just get very confusing.
The fact that he ends each chapter with a teaser for the ones that come much later brings no relief. For instance, Chapter 8 ends with Maria taking a video of the Catacombs but Kuzneski’s teaser— “Little did she know that it contained the most important discovery of all time”— makes the ending very tacky, to say the least.
On the action front, Kuzneski promises big guns and explosions, and delivers more. The gore is explained a bit too much in detail— the crucifixions, especially, are too graphic for the queasy stomach.
It is only towards the final few chapters of Sign of the Cross that the story takes precedence over everything else. The significance of the revelations in the book are felt only towards the end; surely, the story of Christ deserves better than that.
Yes, when you turn over the last page, you will be left breathless and dumbfounded. And you probably will call Sign of Cross a ‘very good’ book. But you can’t help but wish Kuzneski hadn’t made you go through a half-baked first-half for a great ending.
