- Beck, Glenn and Harriet Parke.
Agenda 21: Into the Shadows.
New York: Threshold Editions, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-4767-4682-1.
-
When I read the authors' first
Agenda 21 (November 2012)
novel, I thought it was a superb dystopian view of the living hell
into which anti-human environmental elites wish to consign the
vast majority of the human race who are to be their serfs. I
wrote at the time “This is a book which begs for one or more
sequels.” Well, here is the first sequel and it
is…disappointing. It's not terrible, by any means, but
it does not come up to the high standard set by the first book.
Perhaps it suffers from the blahs which often afflict
the second volume of a trilogy.
First of all, if you haven't read the original Agenda 21
you will have absolutely no idea who the characters are, how they
found themselves in the situation they're in at the start of the
story, and the nature of the tyranny they're trying to escape.
I describe some of this in my review of the original
book, along with the factual basis of the
real United Nations plan
upon which the story is based.
As the novel begins, Emmeline, who we met in the previous book,
learns that her infant daughter Elsa, with whom she has managed
to remain in tenuous contact by working at the Children's
Village, where the young are reared by the state apart from
their parents, along with other children are to be removed
to another facility, breaking this precious human bond. She
and her state-assigned partner David rescue Elsa and, joined
by a young boy, Micah, escape through a hole in the fence
surrounding the compound to the Human Free Zone, the wilderness
outside the compounds into which humans have been relocated.
In the chaos after the escape, John and Joan, David's parents,
decide to also escape, with the intention of leaving a false
trail to lead the inevitable pursuers away from the young
escapees.
Indeed, before long, a team of Earth Protection Agents led by
Steven, the kind of authoritarian control freak thug who inevitably rises
to the top in such organisations, is dispatched to capture the
escapees and return them to the compound for punishment
(probably “recycling” for the adults) and to serve as
an example for other “citizens”. The team
includes Julia, a rookie among the first women assigned to
Earth Protection.
The story cuts back and forth among the groups in the Human Free
Zone. Emmeline's band meets two people who have lived in a cave
ever since escaping the initial relocation of humans to the
compounds. They learn the history of the implementation of
Agenda 21 and the rudiments of survival outside the tyranny.
As the groups encounter one another, the struggle between normal
human nature and the cruel and stunted world of the slavers
comes into focus.
Harriet Parke is the principal author of the novel. Glenn Beck acknowledges
this in the afterword he contributed which describes the real-world
U.N. Agenda 21. Obviously, by lending his name to
the project, he increases its visibility and readership, which is
all for the good. Let's hope the next book in the series
returns to the high standard set by the first.
April 2015 