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Review by Evie Delacourtfor Yahoo Christian Science Fiction email group, Yahoo Christian Fiction email group, and Amazon.com May 3, 2002 There are stories that are realistic in tone, but not at all true. And there are stories that are clearly fantasies, yet are filled with truth. Arena, like other literary classics such as Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books, falls in the latter category. The book's cover has several quotes from other authors referring to Arena as "allegory", but I don't think it really fits that description. Certainly it's not the sort of story in which a character named Faith wanders through the Desert of Despair in search of the Oasis of Hope. Hancock respects her readers' intelligence enough to write a story chock filled with deeper meaning without having to hit them over the head with a clue stick. Back in my day, they didn't call this sort of writing allegory. They called it good literature. If you must call it something else, call it an extended metaphor. Or perhaps a novel-length parable. But whatever you choose to call it, this isn't just another tired rip-off of Pilgrim's Progress. You will find as many overt references to "God" or "Christ" in this CBA-published book as there are in the LOTR Trilogy or the Biblical book of Esther, and yet there are few (if any) scenes in this book in which a Christian worldview fails to shine through. Oh, God is in the Arena, all right. Just don't look for him to appear by that name, along with a host of characters all saying "Praise the Lord!" and "Hallelujah!" and doing all the right things at the right times until someone says the "sinner's prayer", because Arena isn't a thinly disguised sermon like most CBA offerings. This is a story in which characters display realistic feelings and make hard choices--often even wrong choices--and where even the "good guys" don't always know God's will, or have all the right answers. In fact, the word "choice" pretty much sums up what Arena is all about--the free will which God has given us to make our own decisions, to seek His will or to only satisfy our own desires, the freedom to learn from our mistakes and grow from them, or to repeat our bad choices over and over again until they destroy us. It is a story that reveals unconditional love and grace, but also reveals that willfulness and wrong choices will lead to painful, yet just, consequences. Our choices, and whose guidance we choose to follow or disregard, determines our outcome. Simple as that. And just as difficult. In order to help people make the right choices, the Arena provides a written manual, and also a Benefactor. Sound familiar? And just as in real life, people in the Arena are not any better at trusting in authority or following directions than we are. This is a bad thing, yes? Well, no, because this means that Arena has believable characters whom we can all relate to. I saw myself in so many different guises while reading this book--both myself at my best and myself at my very worst. And often I'd see both of these sides of myself in the same character. You see the full spectrum of human nature in this book. You also see lives being transformed--some for the better, and some for the worse. You see characters dealing with inner struggles and battling with temptation. Sexuality is dealt with very realistically here. Although you won't find any sex scenes graphically described (if that's what you're looking for, leave this book alone and go find something under a "Harlequin Succumb" imprint or something similar instead), Hancock doesn't shy away from creating characters whose feelings of attraction for each other can cause problematic choices. But as we all know, and tend to forget, temptations are not always sexual. In fact, they're more frequently not. We struggle daily with the temptation to give in to our fears and insecurities, to control our own destinies, to give in to our pride, to bask in our self-righteousness, to reject God daily and go our own way. We long for relationship and intimacy with God and with others, yet frequently pull away from these things the moment we sense that things aren't going our way, according to our own self-limited notions of how things ought to be. Arena is a book that will stick with you even after you've read the last page. I finished the book on a Saturday night, yet the next day I was constantly reminded of it. I had read the book fairly quickly, reading more for story content than for the deeper meaning (although I suspect it's pretty nearly impossible to *not* see some of the deeper meaning in Arena right from the start, at least if the reader shares the author's worldview), but the sermon and Sunday School lesson on Sunday morning brought out even more of Arena's hidden treasures. There was hardly a Scripture reference or pastoral anecdote that didn't contain something that didn't make me smile and think "Yes! That's so right, so true...and didn't I just read an example of that last night, when so-and-so did such-and-such? Why do we *do* that to ourselves?" This was a book that I finished one night, and immediately began re-reading as soon as I could the next day, wanting more. This is a book for anyone who enjoys fiction that holds up a clear mirror to life. This is not a book for the squeamish, though. If you think that books should contain no unpleasantness, avoid _Arena_. If you think violence is completely out of place in a Christian book, this is not the book for you. Sorry, but real life is frequently violent, and _Arena_ doesn't shy away from depicting reality in any of its horror, as well as in its beauty and splendor. Sometimes our choices, or the choices of others, lead to horrific consequences. _Arena_ shows this unflinchingly. It displays, in the limited world of the fictional Arena, the hellish depths to which we all have the potential to sink, and the heavenly heights to which we all aspire, even when we ourselves hamper--occasionally even knowingly--our own ability to get there. |
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