This reviewed first appeared in The Alien Online

It seems such a beautifully simple idea that I was initially amazed that no one had ever thought of it before: what if you could extract the DNA of Jesus Christ from an ancient and supremely holy relic, and then tried to clone him? Well, Charles Covington has now thought of it and has written The Holy Blood, a near future thriller examining how it might happen.

In actual fact (and thank, ahem, god for observant and knowledgeable editors) Mr Covington is far from the first to publish on this subject - in fact, if you know where to look it seems there's a whole sub genre of millennial religious wish-fulfilment writing that sits in a kind of parallel universe near to, but entirely isolated from conventional sf and fantasy - I'm thinking mainly of the completely workmanlike Left Behind series here, but of far greater interest is the head-spinning Apocamon, a manga/Pokemon take on the book of Revelations, if you can imagine such a thing. The Holy Blood is a slightly more reverential, though sceptical, look at the whole decidedly Promethean business of Religion meeting Science.

Covington assembles an interesting cast of characters to support his story. Jena van Rooykens is a Belgian professor of Religious History who has recently relocated to Oklahoma to teach at the Keer University, formerly a bible college, now reformed and endowed as a cutting edge modern institute of learning by the multi-millionaire businessman philanthropist Wallace Keer, who with some reformed hippy friends is on something of a crusade against organised religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.

Wallace has a track record of debunking papal relics and has now set his sights on the big prize – the Holy Blood of Bruges, a vial supposedly containing the blood of Christ, collected from his wounds as he died on the cross two millennia ago. He wants to prove the church to be full of frauds and liars, but he’s a powerful man – he has his own university, for heaven’s sake, with some of the best biotechnology minds and labs in the world. The Vatican hasn’t survived for almost two millennia by being stupid, however; they know why Wallace wants access to the Holy Blood and they’re not prepared to give it to him. Then, when fall-out from his anti-crusade strikes those close to him, Wallace finally changes his mind, deciding that after 25 years of hot-blooded atheism he has better things to do with his life than debunk sky-gods.
But can he be believed...?

The Holy Blood has two major problems as a story. The first would appear to be a failure of nerve on Covington’s part (and I don’t think I’m giving away too much of the book here, but skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know any more before reading The Holy Blood).

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The book concludes just as the cloned baby is born. I mean, obviously a clone is produced from the Holy Blood, right? That was never in doubt, because without the clone this book is an absolute non-starter, but surely the really interesting stuff only begins when the supposed clone of Jesus Christ is born and the Second Coming kicks off (albeit in an unconventional fashion)? There’s no sign or hint of a sequel to The Holy Blood, so I can only conclude that this is it, which is monumentally disappointing. For me a postnatal scientifically induced Second Coming is where the real story starts, everything before that is just the curtain call. And when you have the taglines ‘Playing God is not a game, it’s reality’, and ‘Move over Dolly the sheep, Jesus is coming!’ on the back cover I don’t think it’s unfair to expect a bit of heavenly action.

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The second problem is not unrelated to the first.
The Holy Blood is 326 pages long: 326 pages of fairly small type (and no pictures). It could probably do without roughly 176 of those pages – that way you’d have a much tighter, much faster-moving, much more action-packed and much much more interesting book. Too often The Holy Blood feels like it’s in completely the wrong gear for the story, forever trying laboriously to pull away in third or fourth rather than zipping away in first. Charles Covington is not such a bad writer at all, he just needs a really vicious, mean and slash-happy editor to enable him to show his talent off to best effect. Parts of this book regularly go on for tens of pages, bloated with frankly dull details and unnecessarily full descriptions. Much as the back-story behind the purloining of the Holy Blood and the laboratory engineering of the Second Coming are important, their main purpose is only to bring some anchoring reality to an otherwise unbelievable tale.

There are some interesting passages in the text that are reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s latest effort, The Baroque Cycle – mainly through the character of Jena van Rooykens – because we are basically given lectures about some pertinent subject. These could be dull, and in most books such digressions frequently sit like gristly lumps amidst the flesh of the story, but Covington, like Stephenson, manages to make them interesting and digestible, so well done for that. Well done also, it must be said, for keeping a reasonable balance between the good guys and the bad guys throughout. The anti-religious types are by no means depicted as crusading positivist heroes and neither are the clergy and the believers universally depicted as evil or stupid, but rather there’s good and bad in them all. This even-handedness also helped keep me guessing somewhat about the exact nature of the Holy Blood throughout – and I promise that even if you’ve read my spoiler above then you’ll still be surprised...

The Holy Blood is, it must be said, far from perfect, but it does have some very tangible merits. Covington can write well, showing real potential and managing action scenes and exposition equally well at times. He does fare rather less well with characterisation, and one character’s – Wallace’s friend Gene Graham’s – abrupt and unsatisfactorily accounted for swing in personality is just rubbish, which is a shame as it’s quite a major plotting point.

At times I found myself really enjoying this book, at others I confess I had to force myself to keep reading, but Charles Covington is demonstrably quite a clever and well-educated chap, and for a first effort The Holy Blood isn’t too shabby at all.