Desert Child - or just how amusing can a nightmare be?

Desert Child - or Just how amusing can a nightmare be?
By Simon Parke
Hodder & Stoughton. 166 pages. £5.99
ISBN 0 340 69412 2

Jenny Jewel is reinventing herself from radical stand-up comic to quirky TV presenter. She goes to the monastery of St. Raphael's, situated halfway up Mount Sinai, next to the Burning Bush! Jenny's purpose is to make the next programme in a series called 'Blackpool it isn't' which takes a sideways look at God, history and the desert. What was meant to a comedy developed in other directions! What went wrong? Was it the drunk psychologists, the skulls, the men in black dresses, the sexual innuendoes in the library, the Strict Baptists from Bournemouth, Poirot, Van Gogh, or the search for a child?
Yes, in 166 pages, all these things feature in a novel about lists which sort out absolutely nothing.
This is an allegory for those who have loved and lost when, despite being torn apart by pain, they are trying to love again.
Simon Parke writes in an irreverent, racy style. The book is a journey through the cynical despair of post-modernism to - I'm not sure what! I was disappointed to read a Christian novel which contained bad language, blasphemy and sexual innuendo on many of its pages and, on those grounds alone, I would be reluctant to recommend it.

Val Maidstone

© Evangelicals Now - May 1998
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Main Articles

• Churches and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995
  The provision of facilities in church buildings for disabled people
• A still small voice about sex
  An account of one parent's action at a preview of a new school course in sexuality
• Mad for it in Manchester
  An interview with Andy Hawthorne of The World Wide Message Tribe about evangelistic outreach among teenagers in Manchester
• After God's funeral
  Extracts from a talk given by Ravi Zacharias on the problem of moral relativism which follows atheism
• Why DO we go to church?
  The meaning of worship in the Old Testament and New Testament and its implications for our Sunday services
• By faith - the life of George Muller remembered
  An account of the life of George Muller the great Brethren philanthropist
• Eastern orthodoxy
  A brief history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Orthodox church in Britain and evangelical witness to Greeks in London
• How are we to learn? (Bulldog for May)
  Ten points concerning teaching and preaching in the church with reference to the New Testament

Other articles

• News of the Hour (Marks Gospel)
• Gattaca
• IVP New Testament Commentary Series - Matthew
• Making Progress in Church Life
• Desert Child - or just how amusing can a nightmare be?
• Picking Up The Pieces - can evangelicals adapt to contemporary culture?
• Farm Sermons
• True Happiness - Exposition of Psalm 1
• Promise Keepers - and the rising tide of ecumenism
• The End of Science - Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
• A Guide to the Puritans
• Pathway Through Grief - Ten accounts of people's experience following bereavement reviewed by Carol Gulliford and Barbara Morland
• At Break of Day
• Our Awesome God