(2008)
Synopsis: Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his great sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.
Against his better judgement he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.
In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant THE SHACK wrestles with the timeless question, 'Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?' The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him.
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Review: One of the most interesting facets of this book for me was on a comparative scale – I am also studying Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche) in a Philosophy class, and the two books are polar opposites. Naturally, being a Philosopher I come down on the side of Nietzsche, but it added a fun critical side to The Shack which I may well otherwise have missed entirely. The point at which I noticed this was when The Shack referred to the concept of ‘will to power’ – and how that is a concept humans must abandon in their return to God. Well, Nietzsche would agree with that, but then again, it was he who noted that ‘dead are all Gods.’ Will to power is related to independence, an individual power over oneself, uninfluenced by society, dogmas, environments, etc. For Nietzsche, it is THE whole, the overall individual created by the interrelated drives inside any given person. And we must give this up to return to God? Riiiight.
Virtually everything in The Shack is about giving up things to return to God. We must give up our rights, authority, responsibility. In fact, according to Sarayu, the Holy Spirit, we must give up all nouns. Expectation is apparently bad, while ‘expecting’ is okay. Didn’t make a whole load of sense to me. It’s all a very round about way of saying, give up your individuality. God in The Shack doesn’t endorse hierarchies, so no politics, economics or society structures, please. In fact, Jesus goes so far as to say he doesn’t like religion and he never wanted an institution. This in turn brings me to another point – this book isn’t really ‘theologically accurate’, as I’ve heard it put. I’ve found that about 1/3 of people think this book is great, while the rest complain it’s either completely rubbish or that it doesn’t adhere to ‘what God said’ at all. The 1/3 who do like it sound, to me, like ‘peace and love’ hippies who read into the happy relationships/no evil philosophical values behind it all.
Notably, the core question behind Mack’s going to The Shack in question, ‘why did God allow my daughter to die?’ has a very simple answer. Because we chose free will, and God although God has the power to, he won’t intervene because he would be going back on that. Wow. That’s original. Notably, however, it’s okay for god to use our screw-ups to perform good deeds and move us all along the path to that perfect world he originally had in mind. (If we really have free will, I don’t see how indirectly using what we do for good purposes is any different from intervening in those bad actions in the first place, but there you go.)
The actual writing itself in this book is beautiful I have to admit, although the characters are few and somewhat lacking. Mack is pretty much impossible to relate to, (possibly because the idea of really relating to all that God stuff is never going to happen on any coherent scale?) and he ‘wants’ and ‘cries’ and ‘understands’ as necessary. During what I presume were supposed to be some of the most heart-wrenching events in the book, I couldn’t help but not care very much. In fact, the best parts of the book were the murder at the start and the revelation of the same near the end. By the end of it, you’ll discover absolutely nothing new is suggested, much of it is clichéd and never going to happen anyway, and even if it does (according to this book) it pretty much involves giving up who you are as an individual.
One final note: at the very end, a couple of pages publicize something called The Missy Project, which basically encourages the “now-reformed” reader to head on out and pick up a few more copies of The Shack – hell even send one to a stranger – it may just change their life. Church collection plate much? It’s hard to believe people so geared towards money making have anything in them that resembles the traits endorsed by God in the same book.
Rating: 1/5
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