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	Apocalypse Tim Bowler Margaret K. McElderry, 2005 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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But Kit has glimpsed someone else, a girl who seems to be wild. He's also seen a strange man who looks just like him, only older, with the same birthmark on his face. Kit goes in search of the girl, looking for answers to the eerie goings-on. He returns to find his parents gone and their tents torn to shreds. Have the islanders killed them? Kit sets off in a desperate search for them as he struggles for his own survival. Will the girl help him? And will he be able to escape the islanders, who clearly want to kill him?

Journey on a startling voyage into the unknown, where an ordinary teenage boy faces a world filled with malice and a terrifying vision of the future, in this haunting thriller from award winner Tim Bowler.

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Fascinating reading

As a general rule I comment on books at my blog, not at Amazon, but I was so surprised by the reaction of Shawn Watson that I felt compelled to add something here. I don't expect other reviewers always to agree with my taste, but I most certainly do expect them not to make assumptions about agent demands and unfinished work, which singularly betray an agenda on the reviewer's part.

Apocalypse is a tender and sensitive novel which marries myth and contemporary concerns in an allegorical fashion, all without losing sight of pace, tension, and character development. Questions go unanswered deliberately in order to allow room for the reader to ponder and mull and imagine. The very best books leave room for wonder. Read this one, and you won't be disappointed.

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Heavy-going stuff with a totally disappointing ending!

I have only read one other book by Tim Bowler and that was Starseeker. I loved it and regarded it as the best book of that particular year. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading one of his other novels but I grabbed Apocalypse from the store shelf almost randomly. It was a good read, until the end came!

Kit and his parents are sailing around near what one assumes to be the Northwest Coast of Scotland in their boat the Windflower. Kit has been suffering from vivid nightmares and a fog unlike no other engulfs the boat. While steering, Kit sees a model boat floating in the sea, he reaches over to inspect it and sees what appears to be a man with his own (admittedly ugly-he has a large black birthmark down his face and neck) face clutching the boat from beneath the waves. His momentary lapse in concentration causes the Windflower to crash into a huge rock and they end up run aground on a nearby island.

The island isn't so big so they go off in look for help. Kit sees the strange man (who is constantly naked for some reason), bruised and beaten, trying to pull himself out of the water down on the beach. His parents don't believe him and continue their search for inhabitants.

They find them. But they are less than welcoming. And a lynch mob almost chases them off the island before a wise elder gives them the chance to heave-ho by themselves. That night Kit's parents disappear and he is left to scour the island on his own looking for them.

He meets a 15-year-old girl called Ula who is an outcast among the islanders. She's is suspicious of him at first but they end up sticking together as the islanders become increasingly murderous, the strange naked man builds a huge cairn, a sea monster circles the island while moaning long and terrifying cries and massive tidal waves bomabard them repeatedly. Kit, Ula and the strange naked man are constantly put through unreal amounts of agonising pain over and over and you think there's no escape and no answer to any of this madness.

And you'd be right to think that. Dozens of questions go unanswered in the last pages. Who is this strange naked man with superhuman powers? Why does he have Kit's face? What is the deal with the Sea Monster? What is the deal with the waves? Why is the sea on fire? Why does Kit have nightmares? Why does he have intense connections to all of this madness that Ula doesn't? Why the time travel? What is the world building up to at the end? You'll be asking all of these and many, many more.

It's almost like Tim Bowler had some half-baked idea and wrote it down without finishing it. But his agent demanded a book right away and he just popped the unfinished Apocalypse in the mail to him. To stick with so much heavy-going reading all the way to a practically truncated ending is well out of order. His subtext of religious futility is at once underdeveloped, inconcruous and perhaps even hypocritical. He uses fantasy when he needs it to work and ignores it when the story speaks for itself.

I stand by my theory that this book is a work in progress that was printed before he got the chance to finish it and wrap up the zillions of loose ends. To tease us with so much mystery and leave without paying the bill is criminal.

If it made sense this would get 4, possibly more, out of five. As it is I can only give it a 3.

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