Book Review - Intervention by Robin Cook

Intervention

I've only read one Robin Cook book besides this one, but I was impressed by his ability to write a gripping thriller that combined the medical world as well, two ideas that sound great but, when mashed together, can end up bogged down with medical mumbo-jumbo and off-kilter pacing. Intervention is very loosely tied to the medical world, however, and I couldn't help feeling a Dan Brown influence throughout the entirety of the novel.

Intervention can be considered a quest story of sorts; this time, the quest item is not the Holy Grail but the ossuary that contains what the characters of the story believe are the bones of the Virgin Mary. Cook is definitely caught up on the religious spin in the novel, but he does tackle some other themes about the medical world as well. But this tendency to pin too many themes to one story is what generates the big problem for Intervention.

Cook's protagonist is Jack Stapleton, a recurring character from some of his older novels. Some of Jack's friends, Shawn and his wife Sana, have unearthed the ossuary of what appears to be the Virgin Mary, and, both being in two fields of study that will be directly affected by this find, proceed to uncover both the evidence to support the Virgin Mary claim and DNA that would uncover a matrilineal link to Mary in the contemporary world. But Jack's other friend, James, is an archbishop, a guy who would really suffer if word got out the Mary's bones had been found and that she had not divinely ascended into Heaven. So James and Shawn butt heads about the whole matter, and James sends a Virgin Mary fanatic into Shawn's house to influence him not to release his evidence. And somehow, Jack manages to find himself caught up in all of this, plus deal with his sick 4-month-old.

The plot sounds a bit confusing, and the references to Gnosticism and the Bible can be frustrating if one isn't up on their religious knowledge. But the plot is explained clearly enough, and often enough, to allow for the reader to get the gist of what's going on and why it's bad. Once one has been given the run-down of the Virgin Mary dilemma, the plot becomes quite intricate and interesting. It's the intervals in-between that make for a muddled read.

The first half of the book is fairly misleading. Jack begins to focus on his fieldwork about the dangers of alternative medicine, like chiropractic, which ultimately leads... no where. One can argue that towards the end of the novel, there's a frail tether between the religious aspect and faith healing, but to be honest, the two are barely connected. It feels like a waste to be given so much information on chiropractic, following Jack's informational trail and getting sucked into the topic, for it to just be dropped in the middle of the book for something more permanent. It feels as though Cook is trying to tap into some very pertinent themes, but there are just too many. They just can't be tackled all at once.

Unfortunately, the religious aspect of the plot becomes significantly less arousing after the ossuary has been dug up; the plot is reduced to a "thriller" where Shawn and Sana are wiped out by a religious fanatic with little to no emotional buildup and an even smaller emotional release from Jack. The characters are incredibly unbelievable; Jack is constantly leaving his sick baby and his taxed wife to go play a game of hoops, or skedaddling out of the house early in the morning to get in a couple more hours of work so that he doesn't have to be with the baby. Shawn and Sana bicker more than siblings, and that gets annoying all too quickly. James does not feel like an archbishop in the slightest. Their reactions are even more improbable. James and Jack are quick to get over their old friend's death; they are barely phased, moving on to more "pressing" matters! Jack blows up at people over the silliest of instances; twice he gets angry at people because they have had some sort of alternative medicine once in a while. This man needs some anger management counseling! The dialogue is off as well; everyone seems too nice, too sophisticated in speech. It seems these people don't use slang, or even contractions, when they talk.

A huge detractor is that the plot is wrapped up too quickly. Come on, I've read 350 pages of this book about the Virgin Mary; I do NOT want the conflict resolved by a quick house fire in two pages. The pacing, especially towards the end, is so inconsistent that the conclusion is probably one of the most disappointing features of the book. In the end, not much happens - everything is restored to order, a couple people died in the process, but so what? A baby is cured of cancer - maybe.

This is Robin Cook's 29th book. But it doesn't feel like he's learned a whole lot about the craft of writing in those other 28 novels. Why are the characters so unbelievable? What's with the dialogue? What happened to sticking to one point of view (Jack's)? There are just too many mistakes here to deny; the themes might be edgy, but the book can't sustain any intensity to give them any weight.