Falling Night

Phil Clarke is a new author and he has been working on this story, Falling Night, since 1994. It has to do with a fictional aid volunteer in a fictional African country during very disturbing internal conflict among tribes, as well as the efforts of the United Nations and various aid agencies to get in control of the conflict. Clarke certainly has the background to write such a book. He provided such efforts over a period of years in Somalia, Rwanda, Congo, Liberia, and Sudan. In my opinion, those aspects of the book were believable. In the novel, a British aid worker, Alan Swales, was dissatisfied with his life in England and with his live-in relationship. In a hasty decision he decided he could make a positive difference in the world by helping the relief effort to feed the starving population of Kugombwala. He called a relief agency and was quickly hired.

 

Clarke is a capable writer and tells an important and shocking story, although there is one important caveat. I should have been suspicious when I read the Publisher’s Note which suggested that the work of Jesus Christ was behind this story. In the first half of the book, minimal mention was made of a religious theme other than Swales had always been an avowed atheist. It was about halfway through that the character of Swales began a religious conversion, using a belief in Christianity to manage his own thoughts and feelings as the result of witnessing horrendous human trauma, as well as being the victim of such trauma himself.

 

I think this story of this war-torn country and its desperate population would stand on its own without any reference to religious principles. In fact, the reference to the protagonist’s religion beca theme the dominant part of the book’s second half. Probably this is a book that should be sold in Christian bookstores, and without editing out those parts of the story, I don’t see Falling Night being a candidate for a wider audience.