CSFF Blog Tour: The Spirit Well Day One

This month's selection for the CSFF tour is Stephen R. Lawhead's The Spirit Well, the third installment in the Bright Empires series. According to Lawhead's essay “On the Road Again” at the back of the book, he is planning five books for the Bright Empires series. I like the essays Lawhead places at the end of each novel. In this one, he talks about traveling old roads and pilgrimage.

Placing my feet exactly where countless others have placed theirs, often over many millennia, I can easily imagine emerging at the other end of the passage a different person, in a different time (pp. 373-74).

That's precisely what happens to the characters in this series.

The Spirit Well is very much a “middle book.” There aren't many resolutions to problems posed in the previous books. Rather, Lawhead presents some new characters and fills in the details behind some of the characters's stories. We learn about Mina's initial experiments with ley travel and how she met her teacher, Brother Lazarus, a monk at a monastery in Spain. Lawhead tells us the story of Arthur Flinders-Petrie's death in Egypt, how the skin map came to be, and why it was separated and scattered. We don't see much of Archelaeus Burleigh in this book.

The Street Called Straight, Damascus,

c. 1890-1900.

Among the new characters are Cassandra Clarke, Rosemary Peelstick, and Brendan Hanno. Cassandra is a paleontologist working a dig in Arizona. She stumbles into ley travel with the “help” of a Native American who immediately returns her to the present and cautions her that the Ghost Road is not for her. Cassandra experiments with the Ghost Road on her own and eventually lands in Damascus, Syria. There she comes across the Zetetic Society and two of its members: Rosemary and Brendan, who try to convince her to join their effort to trace Arthur Flinders-Petrie's discoveries. Brendan tells her that they don't know exactly what Flinders-Petrie discovered but that they think it has something to do with the manipulation of time, perhaps a way to select the desired course of the future. Brendan and Rosemary mention Cosimo and Sir Henry as Zetetic Society members. They also paint the society's mission in broad terms as a struggle between good and evil, a struggle to save the omniverse from a future of ever-expanding evil and suffering. I don't recall Cosimo or Sir Henry mentioning the Zetetic Society in the previous books, which leads me to wonder if this organization is a late edition to Lawhead's plans.

The Spirit Well contains much theorizing about ley travel and the nature of the multidimensional omniverse. In a discussion that I still haven't wrapped my head around, Mina tells Kit that she does not have any memory of rescuing him in Egypt because it hasn't happened for her yet. I won't attempt to explain that one. Mina and Kit also conclude that each person has a single consciousness and that consciousness cannot be split among different worlds. In other words, there is no chance of meeting oneself. The soul is indivisible.

Finally, has anyone else noticed that the overwhelming majority of major characters who die do so in Egypt? Cosimo dies there. Sir Henry dies there. Arthur dies there. If you're a character in The Bright Empires series, don't go to Egypt.

The Spirit Well is a wonderful addition to an engrossing series. I'm already looking forward to book four The Shadow Lamp. If you haven't read the first two books, you must read them before dipping your toes in The Spirit Well or else you'll be as disoriented as Kit and Mina on their first ley jumps.

In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of The Spirit Well from the publisher.

To learn more about Stephen R. Lawhead, visit his website at www.stephenlawhead.com or his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/StephenRLawhead.

To read what other CSFF bloggers are saying, follow the links below.

Jim Armstrong Julie Bihn Red Bissell Jennifer Bogart Thomas Clayton Booher Thomas Fletcher Booher Beckie Burnham Brenda Castro Christine Karri Compton Theresa Dunlap Emmalyn Edwards April Erwin Victor Gentile Jeremy Harder Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Janeen Ippolito Becca Johnson

Jason Joyner Carol Keen Emileigh Latham Rebekah Loper Shannon McDermott Meagan @ Blooming with Books Rebecca LuElla Miller Anna Mittower Joan Nienhuis Lyn Perry Nathan Reimer Chawna Schroeder Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Dona Watson Shane Werlinger Phyllis Wheeler