Summary
Title: One Nation Under God
Author: Vincent M. Wales
Publisher: DGC Press
ISBN: 0974133701
Book Review
Vincent Wales’ One Nation Under God is a novel about a president who gradually restricts civil liberties in the name of promoting morality and Christianity. Criticism of the president is banned. Blasphemy is outlawed. Gays are sent to reeducation camps. Offensive web sites are eliminated. Religious liberty is defined as only applying to “true” religions (Christianity) and not to “false” religions (everything else).
In a good novel, though, such historical events are a backdrop for the lives and relationships of characters which readers can identify with. The primary character is Mary Christopher, daughter of the president and a perfect Christian girl — until, that is, she tries to save an atheist she meets in a chat room and ends up questioning everything: her beliefs, her religion, and as a consequence even her sexuality.
Whether you enjoy Vincent Wales’ book will depend upon what you are looking for. He does an excellent job at imagining a realistic future and plausible steps by which liberty is undermined. The unusual style makes the story go by in a fast-paced manner which feels real because we are reading the sorts of news stories and web pages which could exist at the time. The interactions between Mary and the various other characters in the story also seem realistic based upon my own experiences with such interactions.
One Nation Under God is constructed in an unconventional style. Rather than a straightforward text, the book is set up as a series of glimpses into the lives of the characters: snippets from diaries, passages from emails, screenshots of web sites, and sections of news reports, all from the perspectives of different people. Some readers will probably find it disconcerting and too difficult to follow; the pieces do hang together rather well, though, and readers who are accustomed to viewing material online will probably find this style easy to slip into.
Where there may be something lacking, though, is in the development of some characters. Character development typically proceeds through their interactions with each other, but most of the interactions here occur online which sharply limits the scope of possible development; what associations do occur in real life are only reported on after the fact by one of the characters themselves. I don’t think we ever read about a single event from multiple perspectives, something that would have been easy given the book’s style and which could have provided interesting insights on the characters.
The style imposes further limitations on how character development can proceed because we only have information from their perspective and what other characters are saying to them. There is no omniscient narrator who can draw things together, create context, or tell us things that the characters themselves may not know or even be willing to acknowledge.
On the other hand, the use of diaries does allow us to see Mary’s development in a manner that wouldn’t ordinarily be easy.
Because some of the characters don’t feel as well developed as they might otherwise be, I didn’t find myself caring as much about their fates as I wish I could have. I certainly cared about how the overall plot would be resolved (How far would the president go? How far would the violence against nonbelievers go?), but my interest in the characters was largely limited to how they connected to the political and social lines in the plot, not for their own sakes. If anything, I might have cared more about the “negative” characters (like the president) — their changes are more dramatic, and because we see their perspective, we can understand how and why they act as they do.
Wales’ book gets you to think about some important issues and about the possible consequences of what some religious conservatives advocate, which is good. If you’re interested in dystopian stories or more general issues involving the power of the Christian Right, you’ll probably enjoy this book. If you place a high value on characters, though, you may not like it as much.
