Review : The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove

Tittle : The Age of Ra (Pantheon Triptych #1)
Author : James Lovegrove
Publication date : July 28th, 2009 by Solaris

I am a big fan of mythology, no matter where it comes from be it China, Greece or in this case Egypt.  The Age of Ra is the first military novel I read. Usually, armies and guns don't catch my attention, but since this book is mixed with mythology, I picked it up. I'm all for mixing and matching genre, after all and it's enough to get me exited to finish reading it as soon as possible.

The Age of Ra was a story about the world where the gods and goddesses of ancient Egyptian religion defeated all of other deities and once again rule the world by dividing it among themselves. Egypt is the country that citizens do not care about them and live secular system, thus in this book it is called Freegypt. Since the Gods and Goddesses are really fond of fighting with each other, it is very likely that their followers have to get involved and fight in their name. Blood shed, wars done and it's hard for people to live peacefully. One man, called the Lightbringer is tired of it all. He, along with an English paratrooper David Westwynter and Freegyptians were there for war against the gods and goddesses.

For me, the premise sounds very interesting. I admire the author's idea because it's so unique and quite unusual to mix mythology into modern military science fiction. But too bad, it doesn't work really well. I found the story to be lack of world building. There's no explanation on why those deities are involved in human politics, for example and there's no history on why they have to defeat gods and goddesses of other religions. I as a reader do not know what went wrong because there is almost no back story in this book.

The setting is another problem. There's no clear explanation on where and when exactly the story takes place. All the information I got is from the summary which says "in alternate history", as on what year, none. As the result, I kept on guessing while reading this book. From The Age of Ra's cover and the equipments they used in the story, it looks they're in modern times, but since the summary said alternate "history" then I assumed it's from the past. It made me confused, well I still am (at least when I'm writing this review). 

As for the characters, I only like David Westwynter and The Lightbringer. They're strong enough, in my opinion, while as for the others, I think they're a bit underdeveloped. There's nothing special in them, and I didn't feel any emotional attachment to them.

The Age of Ra is one of the hardest books to rate. The book has flaws, just like what I mentioned before, but then again, I think what the author does on mixing deities with military scifi is a very interesting idea. I may not be crazy about this book, but yes, I'd definitely read the next novels in this series. 3 ratings from me.

Do you like military or war novels?