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The Holy Blood by Charles Covington
01/11/2004 . Source: Sue Davies 
pub: Skoobe Books. 326 page enlarged paperback. Price: ??. ISBN: 1-904498-04-3. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.skoobe.biz
Cloning Christ is an interesting speculation. Would cloning prove he was a man or a God? Would it destroy faith or enhance it? If it could be done, should it be done? Well, unsurprisingly with the amount of talk about the real possibility of cloning and controversy about stem cell research, this is one of many novels currently using this idea as it s starting premise.
'The Holy Blood' is set at a mid-western University where freedom of speech is taken for granted. Billionaire Wallace Keer bailed out the Tulsa Gospel College and it has been reborn into Keer University. One of his fascinations happens to be religious icons.
Keer has recently taken on a visiting professor, lecturer in European religious history, Jena van Rookyens from Leuven, Belgium and Keer's long-time friend, Gene Graham, also works for him in the Genetics Department.
When Graham and Keer travel to Bruge in Belgium to make a scientific presentation, they also want to take in the Festival of the Holy Blood. This annual ceremony is the only time that the Holy Blood, a relic believed to contain the blood of Christ, is seen in public.
What happens in Belgium draws all three of them into a sequence of event that may turn civilisation on its head. When it comes to the attention of the Catholic Church and other fundamentalists, wheels within wheels are set in motion to maintain the status quo.
Towards the end, the pace of the novel speeds up considerably. This is probably because the pace is only achievable when there is not too much information to pass on to the reader. Like many other books such as 'The Da Vinci Code' the amount of information to be disseminated to the reader is immense.
Years of research have to be condensed into paragraphs, characters frequently have to share their own knowledge with other characters and sometimes the omniscient narrator must pass it on to the reader. It is a minefield, complete with tripwires, too much of 'and he quickly explained to her the complete history of the true cross' can be rather wearing on the reader.
The blurb on the cover picks out Jena van Rookyens as the main character but in truth the focus moves between several and is unsatisfying. There is not one character that is developed fully enough to become 'the reader's friend'.
It is very clever, very well researched and it has a lot of good action-driven sequences but there is such a quantity of information that it drags the first third of the book down.
Ultimately, this left me rather adrift not really caring for anybody in the story and it was a struggle to get beyond the first few chapters. I enjoyed learning new facts but am always a little wary in works of fiction as to how much is really 'fact'. It is not a blockbuster but has action sections. It is not an intellectual thesis but has parts that read like that, too. Its chosen path wavers too much and ultimately is disappointing.
Sue Davies
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