The Left Hand of God
by Paul Hoffman

Release Date: 7th Jan 2010
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 978 0 7181 5519 3
RRP: £12.99

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A child killer, a religious cult and a single bloody skermish...

Thomas Cale is not your usual fourteen-year-old. In fact, nothing about Cale accords itself to what one would consider “normal”, “ordinary” or “usual”. Raised in a deprived and depraved manner by an extreme religious cult known as the ‘Redeemers’; Cale has known violence and hostility his entire life. The brutality of life in the Sanctuary is at once appalling and yet, for Cale, strangely edifying – indeed, he has thrived in this extreme environment and particularly under the brutish and equally nurturing tutelage of the Lord Millitant, Bosco. Cale’s foundations are ripped from under him, however, when he stumbles upon a Redeemer undertaking acts so atrocious that even his callous mind finds them repugnant – the consequences of which send him and two other acolytes out into the unknown world and into the hands of the Materazzi and the intoxicating and complex life in Memphis.

Hoffman’s style in writing The Left Hand of God is unlike most fantasy writers – lacking as it does the usual literary flourishes and embellishments, imaginatively created creatures or uniquely devised mutations of humanity. Instead, his writing is distinctly ordinary and severely crude at times. There is a grittiness and pragmatism to the narrative; as though, the author has little time for anything other than the telling of the story – the problem is: there is no real story here. The build up lasts four hundred and twenty pages; staggering over improbable love stories and thrashings in equal parts to the final few pages in which we discover the ‘terrible’ secret of what Cale is to the Redeemers. In the end, the secret is as improbable as the rest of the story and left to the last moment fails to hit the high note that it is intended to.

What remains in the wake of this anti-climatic finale is a great sense of unfairness – that so much time was lost wading through the murky and unnecessary trivialities of the plotline (such as it is) only to be fed what is essentially a one-liner that is the pretext of the entire story. That Hoffman succeeds in making you endure hundreds of pages of pointless meanderings for very little is to his credit as an author of some skill – it is just a shame that that skill was not put to better use.

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