As characters navigate the chaos within and without, each story bears witness to human nature and the fine-grained texture of revelation, suffering, and doubt ... Children of God exposes the turmoil of illumination, a striving that exists alongside what’s confusing, inscrutable, and seemingly contrary. Puzey’s impressive translation delivers an astounding voice to English-language literature.
Turning the last page, a reader will have little sense of what Sveen himself believes with regard to Christianity. Its neutrality seems to me a strength. Another is its indirection. Focusing primarily on minor characters from the Gospels—the Samaritan woman at the well, a crucified thief, the disciple Andrew—the book conjures more power from (and for) its shadowy central figure than it might have. It remains a story rather than a lesson. And yet, the book is almost thoroughly inert. The voices, from an abused woman to a murderer to a child, all sound exactly the same. The prose is nowhere distinguished and is occasionally absurd ... The tone aims at the severe clarity of a parable and is most effective in this mode ... But then come moments of obvious modern psychology or, worse, 'poetry,' and the effect is shattered.
Children of God is an original and unsettling text, a ruthless dismantling of the Bible ... Jesus and his disciples wander around ... often to no clear purpose, alongside imaginary biblical characters: soldiers, prostitutes, children. The stories undermine biblical composition in stylistic ways, too. The poetic cadences lack confidence. A story seems to build and coalesce only to dissolve into stammering uncertainty ... Sveen teases out every ambiguity and paradox in the biblical parables. The characters stumble into and out of enlightenment. This is the Bible as narrated not exactly by a purely evil Satan, but a skeptical, unsure-of-himself anti-Christ ... These stories never get close to redemption, or even hope. They are coldblooded assessments of our Jewish and Christian forebears.
Both historical fiction and allegory, the book is insightful in both contexts ... the stories’ consistent message speaks to the insidiousness of evil and self-doubt. While reflecting individuals’ long-ago struggles for faith, autonomy, and survival, Sveen’s linked stories also have significant modern relevance that reaches a powerful crescendo by the book’s end.
[The book opens with] prose that is taut and crisp yet ancient — and paradoxically, utterly contemporary ... At its core, this novel is about good and evil, that theme humanity cannot stop exploring. That’s not to say Children of God is recycling tropes, but the novel does feel familiar — partly because these Christian narratives are pervasive across the world ... Readers who approach Children of God from a purely religious standpoint might struggle, but those — from any or no spiritual background — eager to be challenged will find a wonderful story waiting for them in this book.
The defining quality of the book is its dark, sparse prose. This makes it hard to like the book in any intimate way ... Children of God is an imperfectly crafted novel, but an impressively ambitious one, and it comes to exert a strange pull on the reader. If the novel reads in a disjointed fashion, it's perhaps cleverly intentioned that way. The story leaps around chronologically, offering bits and pieces of stories (rarely whole stories) which the reader gradually links together. Yet toward the conclusion, as the final narrator reflects back on Jesus' life, he reflects on the episodic nature of the stories people have passed on about Jesus, and the increasingly dogmatic and militant fashion in which some disciples are trying to force those stories into a coherent, chronological narrative ... Children of God struggles to offer more hope than despair in its telling, and only barely succeeds. But perhaps its bestseller status in Norway can attest to the appeal of a tale which offers even a tiny bit of hope in these dark times.
What keeps one reading is the structure ... the structure Children of God seems to be planned after is, unsurprisingly, the Gospels. Different characters retell the same event with differing results, unified by a thorough thematic coherence ... The deviations from the Bible are playful and bold ... In addition to the structure, Sveen makes skillful use of other Biblical elements that lend themselves to fictionalizing ... The novel uses its interpretation of Biblical material not so much as a viable retelling of the message, but more so a way to examine the mechanics and importance of storytelling. See new patterns and value them. New stories, particularly people’s decisions to write their own new stories, can save.
For the most part, Sveen’s prose is clear; he doesn’t try to imitate the archaisms of an ancient language. As a matter of fact, he occasionally goes too far in the other direction, opting for phrases too modern ... Sveen doesn’t seem particularly interested in the historical figures who appear in the New Testament, and though he cloaks his stories in a certain mysticism, he doesn’t seem entirely committed to their poetic possibilities, either. He’s stuck awkwardly in the middle, and his stories, therefore, ultimately fail to satisfy. By turns gritty and vague, Sveen’s stories seem undecided, wavering in both tone and intention.
...inventive ... daring ... Devoid of proselytizing and written in muscular, gritty prose...Sveen has brilliantly remade an old story into something compulsively readable and chillingly modern.
