Patriarch Run by Benjamin Dancer – A Book Review

I get up in the morning. Groggy, I pull the curtains. The sky looks messy; dark angry pregnant clouds drift, promising the delivery of a torrent. Doesn't matter, rather can’t matter; I brush my teeth unwillingly and get ready for another day to the office. In the other room, my nephew, half dozing half awake looks blankly at the effort of an omelet in his plate while turning a deaf ear to his mother’s hurried lips; it’s time for school. My young neighbor might finally go to sleep now having practiced Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the water’ the whole night on his guitar. On the road, hurried umbrellas and rain jackets wade the streets to get to their destinations. And life goes on…

But there are bigger and heavier things going on; somewhere. Wars are being planned, genocides are being sketched out. Maybe the soldier standing there on the border, under inhuman conditions, with his attentive and piercing eyes and armed gun may get a role in this movie of killings, maybe the role of a dead soldier. How much do we know and how much do we care? Spare a thought for the soldiers who follow orders, kill, against their conscience.

Would you believe that a mass extermination of the race is sometimes not as inevitable as much as it is necessary? In ‘Patriarch Run’, Jack, an undercover agent of the US Government is a thinker and an observer and what he discerns scares him as it would scare me and you. He explicates why killings are a requisite for this spiral viral reproductions of the humans, else the people dying of hunger today due to lack of resources would be much greater in number than the people existing and it won’t be very long while we ride the dinosaurs in a different world. As Jack quotes,

“The number of people without enough to eat in the world today is equal to the entire human population of 1810. Where is the pressure, the competition, the predator to check human civilization?”

Aren't the deadly tsunamis, cyclones, forest fires, earthquakes then a worthy attempt, a natural course of Mother Nature to restore the balance? It reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, ‘She will take it back, someday…’

Jack, a mercenary, has stolen a device from the Chinese, that has the power of destroying the world and he is on the run. As he is hunted down, his abandoned wife Rachel and son Billy inadvertently get into the crossfire. And Jack beyond the bombings, remembers nothing. So how does he chance upon his wife, child and ‘Yan Shi', the device? Will the world be saved or do we find ourselves at the crossroad of Armageddon? Read this fast paced novel to find out.

Written with a purpose, the author builds up a lost relationship and longing between father and son; he intricately enumerates the consequences of lying on the altar of sacrifices, of making choices with no getaway to repentance when you have a larger role to play. This one is a page turner. Though at some places I thought the story could be a little tighter, overall it was a very interesting read, especially for the message that it conveys.

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 6/10

Benjamin Dancer