By Nancy Connors in the Plain Dealer:
In his way, Faber remains true to the Prometheus myth, but he also has a lot of fun: Theo's surname is the same as that of a German artist who painted a four-part mural of Prometheus, and his re-creation of Amazon reader comments about Theo's book is dead-on.By Stephen Finucan in the Toronto Star:
Yet there's a tenderness about humankind and our inarticulate, profound need to believe that shines through Faber's tale.
Or as Malchus himself writes: "The hand that holds the pen is attached to the body that aches and growls. And that is our misfortune, brothers and sisters: we speak of things that cannot be spoken. We seek to store understandings in our gross flesh that gross flesh cannot contain, like a madman who would snatch a moonbeam and put it in his purse."
Faber's strength is his irreverence. No one is left unskewered, from academics and religious bumpkins to book publishers – not even the poor, soon-to-be-blown-to-smithereens curator of the Mosul museum is spared. The Fire Gospel is a very funny book.Background here.
Where it suffers is in the strictures placed upon it by the Myth series itself. Faber hasn't enough room here to flex his writerly muscles. In the end, the reader is left with is a collection of amusing set pieces more than a cohesive novel.
