There's a lot to love about this book if you are a reader who loves literal morality plays wrought from a dystopia made up of a religious dictatorship, a-la Blade-Runner meets V for Vendetta meets religious nutters.

However, it's not quite so clean as it may appear. It's not a perfect Passion Play that recreates Christ and his death and resurrection... rather, we have empaths and telepaths, hunters and a murder mystery revolving around Mask, a very interesting and important actor who has been murdered and our MC must go deep immersion into his life, unlike a standard Sherlock tale, in order to gestalt the whole mystery, untangling all threads by getting to know everyone.

Of course, this means we get to know the dead actor, his part and his hypocrisy as a spokesman for the church, and all the people who knew and might have wanted him dead. It's quite fascinating, if simple on the surface.

The best part of the novel is it's clear prose and often poetic turn, the way this plays on a very old literary form, and how it also manages to remain fresh and timely for us modern peeps.

I can appreciate this novel more than I outright enjoyed it, but that's kinda the point, too. It is, after all, *important* the way a tragedy is *important*. It's not often pleasant, but it rolls around ideas in a very heavy way.

It's a very decent novel, but it's really only for those who like or have the patience for Christian allegories. The conclusion isn't precisely what most people would think, either. I personally thought it was quite dark and rather counter to normal Passion Plays. :) In that respect, Sean Stewart writes for himself. :)

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this ARC!

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I'm planning to run down Stewart's bibliography and this is his first novel. This one is about an empathic bounty hunter in a fundamentalist Christian future. The story is intense, narrow and twisted in upon itself. The plot didn't quite work for me - but maybe I wanted redemption too. (October 05, 2005) ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/review-of-passion-play-by-sean-stewar... ( )

From the reviews plastered over the front and back of the paperback edition, this first novel of Sean Stewart's was clearly well received. But though Stewart is one of my favorite authors, this book for me has all the flaws of a first novel. Published in 1992, the story is set in a future near enough that technology hasn't changed much, but the government has had time to become radically fundamentalist (Redemptionist specifically) and a few thousand people are shapers, which seems to mean empath plus, but the plus is unclear. That's the first flaw: lots of things are unclear. What country we're in is hidden under generic names like National Television. Why shapers arose is unclear. How the world swung so far to a right-wing Christian government and what happened to those of other faiths is unclear. The reason they're unclear is because Stewart is more concerned with forcing the arc of the main character through a particular path. The slight SFnal idea is that as a shaper/empath, working as some kind of bounty hunter for the police (again, a vaguely defined relationship), the heroine's repeated exposure to extreme emotional encounters with murderers and such, has left her numbed and burned out when she's not on the hunt. We know this because the story is told in first person and her feelings about her lack of feelings is described over and over. That's the second flaw: too little showing, too much telling, and not always in a voice credible to the character's thinly given background. The third flaw is that all this leads predeterministically to a conclusion that is unconvincing, so much so that the protagonist spends several pages about how inevitable it really is.

This is not an unreadable book. Stewart's skills for plotting, dialog, observation, and his sympathy for all his characters are apparent. It's just a book with where he had to get out a lot of preconceptions about what a novel was supposed to be. Once expunged, he was able to let his later books take more interesting and complex turns.

For fans of Stewart only. I would recommend readers new to him to start with Mockingbird, Galveston, or Night Watch. ( )

Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Read this for: The atmosphere
Don't read this for: The world-building
Bechdel Test: Pass*
Johnson Test: Fail
Books I was reminded of: Soldier, Ask Not, by Gordon R. Dickson; Wrapt in Crystal, by Sharon Shinn
Will I read more by this author? Yes.

This is an impressive first novel. Stewart's pacing is steady, his characters are well-drawn (if a bit stereotypical), and his prose is assured. The novel works equally well as science fiction, with its dystopic future and telepathic narrator, and as a mystery, with its cast of distinct suspects and very memorable dead man. It's lean and taut and packs a punch.

I actually wished it were a little less lean. . .

Read more on my book review blog, no spoilers. ( )