Just Finished Reading: The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove

Lt David Westwynter, squad leader of a special forces unit in His Pharaonic Majesty’s Second Parachute Regiment, is on a mission for his Lord God Osiris. Unfortunately for him and his men the mission has plausible deniability. When they’re ambushed in the desert and captured by forces loyal to the God Horus, bombers are sent to erase all evidence of the covert insertion including the men under David’s command. As the only survivor, David makes his way across the border to neutral territory – Freegypt where, by agreement, no Gods rule. Captured again he falls into the hands of the Lightbringer, a charismatic leader of a revolutionary group dedicated to overthrowing the Gods themselves. With his military experience David is more than aware of the difficulties ahead for this rag-tag force of badly armed zealots. For how exactly do you fight the Gods and hope to survive?

I picked this book up on ‘spec thinking that it sounded like a reasonable knock-off of a rejected Stargate SG-1 script. Although there were a few similarities (including the use of ‘staff’ weapons) this was a mostly original idea. The background was an interesting one. It appeared that all of the Ancient Gods actually existed and, for millennia, had been fighting it out in the spiritual realm for domination. In this book/world the Egyptian Gods have successfully eliminated the competition and now rule the planet. Earth is divided into power blocks, not unlike our world, and a God (or husband/wife team) rule in their name and fight with the other Gods on a fairly permanent basis. I didn’t have a great deal of issue with the idea – which was rather interesting - but did find it difficult to grasp any great distinction between our world and the God filled one. I mean, these people knew beyond doubt that the Gods existed. Yet this fact seemed to have precious little impact on their lives. Whatever changes the author did show were minor ones – name changes, family cartouches, pyramidic architecture, that sort of trivial thing. I would have thought that there would have been a radical shift in the way people thought and lived their lives. One thing that did surprise me, and I thought immediately eliminated any great tension, was the apparent rapid decline in the numbers of both Christians and Muslims. I doubt very much if the faith of billions of people would collapse very soon even in the circumstances portrayed in this novel.

Overall the storyline was reasonable and actually had me completely misdirected for a while. It did however have rather clunky sections amongst the Gods that interrupted the flow of the narrative more than necessary to tell the story. The dialogue often sucked and was, from time to time, as bad as Star Wars – yes, that bad! The battles were reasonably handled and the Gods had introduced some fascinating armaments including an interesting variation on binary weapons which made me smile. Overall, despite its many problems this turned out to be an interesting idea reasonably well done. I doubt if I shall be seeking out the next two books in the series (The Age of Zeus and The Age of Odin) despite finding the first book rather entertaining at times. An interesting oddity that could have been much better.