Artistically, it creates some problems. Some stories just don't work that well as trilogies, suffering from pacing issues, tangents, or artificial-feeling subplots. The Fire Sermon is one of these that I feel would have been better told in a much tighter manner, as a more efficient long single novel than three scanty short ones.
Haig's starting with a great concept here: after some kind of worldwide disaster in which the world was swallowed in fire (I'm guessing nuclear, but obviously the narrator doesn't know exactly what happened and neither do we), every person is born into a pair of twins. The Alpha twin, physically perfect, and the Omega twin, with some sort of deformity. The Omega twins are removed from the Alpha population, sometimes early when the difference is obvious, and sometimes late when it is subtle. The main character, Cass, is the Omega twin, but she has no deformity. She is a Seer. She dreams things that will happen, or sometimes sees things far away, or sometimes knows where things are--it's all very vague and mystical. She's Special, though, with a capital S. She's Different from all the others.
But it's important to separate concept from plot: a great concept is wonderful. But it only gets you 25% of the way there. You still have to use that concept to tell a good story. To illustrate the specific issue with this book, I direct you to The Hero's Journey:
Now the applicability of the Hero's Journey to literature can be contentious. I think some would argue that it doesn't have to apply to a piece for it to be considered a good story, and I agree. However, I think it is a useful tool for understanding when something doesn't work quite as well as it could, and how to improve it.
In specifics: The narrator of The Fire Sermon spends about 75% of the book refusing the call.
Literally: line after line of characters asking her to use her abilities to help the Omegas, and line after line of her absolutely refusing. Yes, it's a little more nuanced than that. She doesn't see their situation as an us-vs-them like most people do (remember, she's Different!). She sees the twins as two parts of a whole, and not something she wants to fight against. Yet again, I get it. But narratively, spending three quarters of a book stuck at the same stage is not good for a story. As a reader, I got bored. I got annoyed. I started to roll my eyes at the narrator. I wanted the story to progress, and instead, Cass just keeps running. Early in the story she's placed in a kind of prison: she escapes, and she runs. They get to an island Omega sanctuary: but it gets attacked, and she runs. She's just so very passive that it gets a little grating.
A lot of that may be my personal opinion, obviously. I prefer characters that are active, that make decisions, that push the narrative forward by their choices, not just by what happens to them. Other people may like this kind of narrator. To each their own, really, I won't deny that. It just doesn't do anything for me.
Partly this probably has to do with the fact that I'm not really the target audience for this book, either. YA is really aiming at teenagers, and so it's very probable that they want different things out of a story than I do. One part of the book that I was ambivalent about may play right into something that's popular for the YA audience: it's all very internal. Things do happen externally, but a huge amount of time we spend in Cass's head, with her thoughts and her memories and her feelings, to the point where some of the things that happen externally seem almost incidental. It's been a while since I've been a teen, but from what I remember, in general we were all pretty internal in that way: what was going on inside of us was just so incredibly important, because hey, it was a big confusing time we were trying to make sense of. So while I was unsure about the effect, I have the impression that in particular would work well for a YA audience.
One thing I did find really interesting was the age of the narrator. Typical YA books have the protagonist around the same age as their audience: sixteen, maybe seventeen, something like that. But Cass is nineteen when she goes into prison, and in her early twenties when she escapes. Even if we're sticking with a lot of YA tropes in other parts of the books, I think it's refreshing to see something different now and then.
Lastly, I'm a little tired of amnesia as a plot device. It rarely works in real life the way it works in books and movies: where a person can function perfectly normal, but simply doesn't remember personal information like their name or their family or memories of their childhood. It's just overused at this point, and I'd like to see some new directions taken, personally.
Overall there's nothing particularly abhorrent about this book. It's fine, the writing is well done, the plot does move, albeit sluggishly, and it feels artificially stretched out to fill three books. It'll probably do pretty decently in the YA market, though I'm just not interested enough to pick up the second book.
What does my opinion matter, though? Haig has already optioned the rights to the film, so she's taking it to the bank. Some of us writers should be so lucky!
Overall: 3 stars
Amazon: The Fire Sermon
More reviews: The Fire Sermon on Librarything (Average 3.65 stars)
The Fire Sermon on Goodreads (Average 3.68 stars)
AWESOME cover.
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