The Left Hand of God: Review

Paul Hoffman’s The Left Hand of God is a poorly written bundle of fantasy and religious stereotypes with nonexistent characterisation and a plot that never leaves the ground. We can’t recommend highly enough that you don’t go out and buy The Left Hand of God. And if you already have, leave it on the shelf.

After all of the pre-launch hype that the book received, we were expecting something more than this. We were expecting a book that would at least be an interesting and engaging read, if not the next Assassin’s Apprentice or A Game of Thrones. What we got instead was a book that was so painful to read that we didn’t finish it. A book that has characters which are never fleshed out and a plot that never made sense in a world that didn’t have any detail.

If you read the synopsis of The Left Hand of God on the back cover, you will probably believe that you are about to read a book along the same lines of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind.

Like Rothfuss’s epic tale and many other fantasy books, The Left Hand of God is about a young boy – and, true to the stereotype, he is an unusual boy in a land of hardship. Thomas Cale lives in The Sanctuary of the Redeemers – some form of religious sanctuary cum prison where boys are taken at a young age to be put through the brutal training that will enable them to live up to the sect’s particular vision of God.

But Cale is not like the others.

Where they cling to their illicit friendships as the only comforts they have in the face of the sheer mindless brutality of their redeemer masters, Cale is cold and friendless. Where the other boys seek merely to survive, Cale appears to be thinking below the surface of events, beyond the daily grind.

You can see where this is going.

As the book’s synopsis states, soon Cale “will open the wrong door at the wrong time and witness an act so terrible that he will have to leave this place, or die”.

In short, it is Cale’s fate to leave the Sanctuary of the Redeemers and make his escape to the world outside his walls, a world where he will grow and develop while simultaneously moving towards some unknowable destiny that will change the face of the world.

We gave The Left Hand of God quite a chance throughout its opening chapters. Because of the hype, we were prepared to overlook some of the glaring examples of poor writing in its pages. And if the book had been written with more skill, after all, the setting could have been a fruitful one. It is often through adversity that characters are best developed, and Hoffman certainly sets up a series of difficult situations for Cale in his book.

However it speedily became apparent as we moved through the book that it was just poorly written.

Cale’s role – as the mysterious child with unexplainable powers – think Paul Atreides from Dune – is to make his speedy advance throughout the world outside the Sanctuary, learning more about it at every turn while still being part of a wider plot that is slowly being unraveled. He will be pursued, he will make friends, he will gawk at young, attractive women and fall in love with them.

And yet the way that this journey takes place is so different from the mental and physical journeys of similar fantasy protagonists such as Pug in Magician and Fitzchivalry Farseer as to be a world apart. Hoffman doesn’t bother to explain why his protagonist is different from those around him (apart from, in one memorable occasion, to attribute Cale’s swordsmanship to a fall on his head). Cale is simply, somehow, different.

Fair enough, you might say. Hoffman might explain Cale’s difference later on. But trust me, it’s not like that. Cale’s difference is not the difference of a character in a Steven Erikson book, or a R. Scott Bakker book. It’s the difference of a character who an author has not created a complicated character for. It’s the difference of a stereotype of “the unusual boy, mature beyond his years”.

The same can be said for all of the book’s other characters. The Redeemers are utter stereotypes of religious zealots. They’re not human. They merely proselytize and commit casual acts of brutality on their charges, randomly, without meaning. Often-times Hoffman appears to use the blows of the Redeemers as some form of attempt to help build Cale’s character.

But without any meaning attached to the violence by either side, no character development takes place.

It’s a similar situation with other characters in The Left Hand of God. The young, nubile, innocent woman. The likably roguish wanderer who turns out to be of noble blood. The corpulent chancellor. The sidekicks who never quite understand Cale. The arrogant sons of noblemen who Cale cuts down to size. Every single character in the book is a stereotype of one form or another and it wears insufferably on the reader. There is no complexity to any of the characters.

There are two other aspects of the book which grate. Firstly, the plot is a nonsense. Characters commit certain acts for no discernible reason, or for reasons against their apparent character. The world itself seems to shift to make way for Cale’s progress through it, while he himself appears to be an immovable object.

It’s as if everyone who meets Cale decides that because he is the focus of the story, everything should shift around him. If there is a wider plot to the book that doesn’t involve Cale himself, we couldn’t discern it. And yet, this is the sort of world backdrop that makes fantasy novels so rich and makes the fans enjoy them.

The other thing which frustrated us about the book is the constant comments from the author’s point of view which are inserted into the text. The author will comment that somebody is “obviously” this, or obviously that, as if he is making a snide aside comment on them from the right of stage.

These “editorial” comments are incredibly amateurish and totally break up the flow of the book. They’ll make you feel as if you’re reading writing from a high school student. You just can’t do this sort of thing in an adult novel. Hoffman also uses them to avoid having to describe details of certain scenes. It’s like he’s taking the reader aside for a second and saying: “Hey, you know what a dungeon is like, right? So I don’t really have to describe it, right? OK then. Let’s skip that bit.”

There are one or two redeeming features about The Left Hand of God. Hoffman has an interesting concept in the Sanctuary, and of course everybody likes reading fantasy stories about cold, calculating youngsters – this sort of character has an intrinsic fascination because they’re so far outside the norm.

But The Left Hand of God does not represent a good effort at exploring that setting and that character. It is an amateurish, poorly written third-rate fantasy novel packed full of stereotypes and devoid of anything interesting for the experienced reader. Avoid it like the plague.