The God Particle - Page 2

After Steve returns home to the U.S., his "hallucinations" become even more pronounced. The net of deception around Mike's work at the super collider continues to tighten. And Cox brings the two seemingly unrelated storylines together in an explosive finale. The problem? The novel seems largely composed of the "set up," with that explosive finale coming too quickly, truncating in the process any real sense of character development or relationship building between the various characters.

Cox clearly understands quite a bit about modern physics, but his attempts to convey much of this information, and the "debate" about science and faith that he launches into early in the novel, are quite long-winded considering the overall length of the book. It opens rather leisurely, in fact; not even Steve's headlong plunge to the streets of Zurich can alter the fact that Cox seems bent on featuring character conflict that doesn't really lead very far, but which nonetheless takes a long time to get there. And the villains of the tale don't really appear until so late, and their participation is wrapped up so quickly, that one barely has an opportunity to feel much suspense at all.

In the end, The God Particle is something like its subject matter: an experiment gone awry. Cox clearly envisioned the story as a meditation on the meaning of life, interspersing personal topics (such as the vagaries of dating) with the more complex notions of particle physics. He handles the science and even some of the dating with wit, but he falters quite a bit in establishing an appropriate sense of pace or plotting. The story stalls out toward the end, and it seems as though Cox simply rushed it to its seemingly "inevitable" conclusion.

Author's Note: This post was originally posted at Wallo World.

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

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