Ted Dekker Blink

Ted Dekker Blink

This is a really different book. I won't tell you any plot details, but I will suggest that if you have much experience playing chess you will find certain aspects of the core idea here very interesting. When I say, "playing chess," I mean playing it against a clock, where you have five minutes to make a move--and you are thinking, "If I move my pawn to that position, what are all the possible--or at least likely--responses? And for each of those possible responses, what is my next move?"

I participated back when I was in high school in a chess tournament; I wasn't very good, partly because I didn't have the patience to look far enough forward in time, and I couldn't keep track of the vast number of possible future moves. This is an area where chess playing computer programs have the advantage. Really good chess players may be able to see four or five moves into the future because they have learned that certain steps two, three, or four moves into the future are more likely than others, and they discount the time consuming branches into the future. As computers have speeded up, chess playing computers have gotten very good at examining all possible moves, and categorizing which ones lead to victory, and which to loss.

Blink carries this idea forward--and with an interesting twist of Muslim extremism that, when it came out in 2002, must have seemed like Dekker was enjoying some of the same future predicting abilities of the hero of the novel. Let's just say that Saudi Arabia's internal power struggles play a significant part of the book.

There's another aspect of Blink that is quite startling: it is written from a Christian perspective, but it isn't clumsy or heavy-handed. It raises some very interesting philosophical and theological questions about determinism and free will--and in a way that may cause some Christians to prematurely put the book down for being heretical.

There's another area where Blink pleased and surprised me. I'm afraid that many explicitly Christian novels out there leave me a bit cold. I was sitting in the lobby of George Fox University some months back, waiting for my wife to finish teaching a class, and I noticed one of the novels in the Left Behind series sitting on a shelf, and I thought, "This series has sold extremely well. I wonder if they are any good?" I don't remember the title of this particular book--but even after about three chapters, I found myself responding to it the way that I do to many explicitly Christian novels: disappointed at the pedestrian quality of the writing--like something a reasonably sharp high school kid might write for a Creative Writing class.

Blink, by comparison, is pretty decent writing. A couple of the bad guys are a bit too lightly drawn to keep them straight in my mind, but overall, it compares favorably in writing style and skill with many mainstream novels. Another interesting aspect: I suspect that more than a few secular readers might pick Blink up, start reading, and get several chapters in before they noticed that there was something...peculiar...about this book. There's no foul language. There's no sex (although there are implications involving what one of the bad guys intends to do to the heroine). There is surprisingly little violence. But there is an engaging plot that makes you think about serious questions such as:

1. Is the future determinate?

2. Do changes that we make now change the future?

3. Is there is a single future, or multiple futures, dependent on decisions we make?