I am currently reading The Order by Daniel Silva. It is the first of his books I have read and I am enjoying it to the point where it won’t be the last. I decided to look up the reviews on Goodreads and to my surprise there were a few one star reviews that didn’t like it because it got too political.
I am nearing the end of the book and can’t figure out what is so off putting about the politics the book displays. Let me lay out the plot. There is a secret cabal within the Catholic Church that wants to install a pope sympathetic to the cause of the extreme right. The leaders of this group are literally Nazis.
I saw one review that said this book was very unfair to conservatives. The main bad guys of this book are Nazis. If you are someone that views being a Nazi with the same as being a conservative I think you might have admitted to something you didn’t want to.
It is strange reading those reviews because I wonder if they know what they are saying. This book isn’t making any political statement above and behind that Nazis are bad. This should be everyone’s position. It does briefly mention Charlottesville where one of the main bad guys is giving a speech on how popular his views are around the world but I don’t think any sane person in the world views the events of Charlottesville as good or representative of any mainstream political movement.
Perhaps I am wrong and soon parental control advocates or school board members will be challenging Anne Frank’s Diary. It is a scary thought that even some people view a book with the seemingly uncontroversial statement that Nazis are bad as being too political for them. Or I could be missing something. I still have a few chapters left. Maybe this big bad boogeyman of political bias is lurking at the end, but I don’t think so. I think the people that wrote those one star reviews are just a little confused.
David Huzzard Writes 