The Evolution of Adam
Dan Ford
Highly evolved spiritual entities make simple animals into humans with sentience and free-will. What follows in recent times is their journey towards enlightenment and the quest for ‘God’.
I put off reading this novel because it sounded like yet another ‘Spiritual Quest’ novel that wanted to tell me how to live my life. Instead I found a fiction that was just how the blurb announced it. The only problem was that the blurb read more as an advertising brief than a quick summary of the text.
The characters had very nice variety in them. Although I felt like Adam was the main character (of course, since the book is sort of named after him after all!), the other characters got airtime and some development. I didn’t feel like I needed to prefer one over the other, and I think the majority of people could find someone that they related to.
Oh dear. This novel was a bit of a tome, since despite having large text it came in at 500 pages. My feeling was that for every three sentences, it could be replaced with one sentence to give a more pithy and powerful novel. I got caught down in the colour of clothing and the insecurities of the characters when I should have been entranced by the story.
I confess that I didn’t finish this novel (I read up to chapter 4), which would usually be an automatic 1 star from me. But I’m giving this novel 2 stars. The storyline would have been fine, but the wording was just too much for me. I can see the potential there, I’d be willing to try reading it again if some serious editing took place.
