The Fallen
Author: Eric Van Lustbader
Publisher: Head of Zeus
ISBN: 9781784973049
Year Published: 2017
A new, pulse-pounding thriller from Eric Van Lustbader, author of the Jason Bourne series and The Testament. The doomsday has been predicted for the last two thousand years. Now, without warning, it is upon us. In a hidden cave in the mountains of Lebanon, a man makes a fateful discovery. He will bring what has been forbidden for thousands of years out of the darkness and into the light - the Testament of Lucifer. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Bravo Shaw, head of the Gnostic Observatine sect, is warned by his mentor Fra Leoni of the war between Good and Evil, waged to a standstill since time immemorial. Now an unfathomable danger has arisen - Lucifer’s advance guard, the Fallen.
And humankind is in danger of being enslaved by the forces of evil.
Bravo, Fra Leoni, and Bravo’s blind but brilliant sister, Emma, are the first and last line of defence against the chaos unleashed by the Testament of Lucifer. All roads lead to the Book of Deathly Things: the Testament of Lucifer. But if Bravo and Emma become privy to its dreadful secrets, they might endanger more than just their lives.
In the sequel to his bestselling The Testament, Lustbader delivers a new trilogy that explores religion, politics, and civilisation that deals with the decay of morality. And, that, finally also asks us to consider what it really means to be human.
More underground guerrilla warfare than DaVinci Code conspiracy, Lustbader's The Fallen has two premises - King Solomon’s alchemists employed Satan’s Book of Deathly Things to create golden treasures, which they thereafter infused with a fifth element called aether or the Quintessence, which is the pure energy of the universe. More critically, Lucifer, believing that God had stepped aside and ashamed of the transgressive failures of his greatest creation, intends to rule the world.
For this, Lucifer has set loose the Fallen as advance troops. Also involved are the Knights of Saint Clement of the Holy Land, whose motives and goals are nefarious, and the Gnostic Observatines, a long-ago Franciscan splinter group more interested in serving truth than the pontiff.
Braverman Shaw and his sister, Emma, lead the Observatines. They’re presently working from Istanbul, where Braverman will meet with Dilara, a local Observatine, who informs him he must allow her daughter, Ayla, a London barrister, to guide him into Lebanon’s Tannourine mountains. It is there that they will find a cave holding secrets about the Testament of Lucifer and Lucifer’s Book of Deathly Things.
Who is serving whom becomes problematic, but the world’s fate has been thrust upon Braverman, Emma, and Ayla, who, secretively, is a Fallen. Character development? Not much really, but there’s much details about things real and imagined, like the sign of the Unholy Trinity. The narrative is complex, with everything from alchemists to a cure for blindness to Saint Bella dell’Arca, an Italian convent ruled by the Fallen where rituals are sexual. This tale often makes references to Yeats’ The Second Coming but doesn’t reach that poem’s level of disquietude though.
Intelligently written and well-researched, the book is quite unsettling to the first time readers of Lustbader’s book. Nevertheless, it is a thriller worth checking out for both fans and new readers.
