The Thirteenth Apostle

It is with a bit awe and disquiet that I finished Michel Benoit's "The Thirteenth Apostle", a mixture of religious thriller and suspense fiction. The plotline is rather remarkable, beginning with the mysterious murder of Father Andrei, who had discovered the top secret that would have the potential to threaten the very foundation of the Church and denounce the belief upon which the whole Christianity was built. Darkness hovers over the whole book, leaving little space for me to heave a sigh of relief. But in the end, I am quite reassured that righteous characters had found peace and contentment in their search of truth, which led them to the way of eternity.

As a prominent religious scholar and novelist, Michel Benoit possesses every trait of a good writer. His "The Thirteenth Apostle" is qualified in every way to be compared with "Da Vinci Code", which is also a religious thriller, but far less plausible. From those delicately composed chapters which contain the "flashback" scenes of the life of Jesus and his apostles, I could see Michel really had remarkable scholastic repertoir.

Language-wise, the novel is less promising because the poor translation irked many a reader and became intolerable in their critical eyes. There is quite a lot of repetition in the use of words that perniciously abates the literary value of the novel, though its original French version might be better. Some commentators on Amazon.co. disliked the book for its lack of suspense, which is quite contrary to my point of view. Not only does the writer make a great effort on pushing the plot forward in a logical and progressive way, he also pays special attention to set up suspenses, which made it hard for me to repress my "oohs" and "aahs".

It is also not a novel that ends badly. Till the end of the last chapter, it reveals the author's clairboyant perspective on the independent and interdependent relations between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. And the close sentence "anyone can be a successor to the thirteenth apostle" reveals the real thesis of the novel----not to set up conflicts or to arise upheavals between followers of different religions as it appears to be, but to advocate people of various faiths to procure peace and harmony which are of capital importance.

The writer is a genius, and so does his book----a work of genius.