Sunday, February 28, 2010

Book Nine - I, Lucifer


I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan started off as a very humorous and well written novel but lost its way somewhat towards the end in my opinion. The premise is that the devil is offered a deal wherein he is to spend 30 days in the body of a human, at the end of the month he is given a choice; to live out the human life and if he doesn't sin too badly, then he can be admitted to heaven, the alternative is to return to hell.

I very much enjoyed the description of what a fallen angel would think of the human experience. The sights, the textures, the temptation to just let one's trousers hang to expose the flesh to the cool breeze and so forth. It is also amusing to hear how he spends his time, all the pleasures that one could dream up, drugs, sex, food, booze. Lucifer, in his human form is even writing a movie about his side of the story of how it all went down with the big guy upstairs. Also he is writing the book that is being read.

It is very clever and tongue in cheek, and there are parts of this that I greatly enjoyed. However, towards the end it got to be a bit nonsensical. Perhaps this was intentional, and meant to represent Lucifer's declining hold on reality, but I found it tedious. There were minor errors in grammar and loose parentheses as well, but it was not glaring enough to be intentional necessarily and to me just felt awkward and distracting.

Overall it was entertaining but towards the end I just wanted it over and done with, had I not been doing this challenge, I may not have finished reading it at all.

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