Ted Dekker, Blink

I've heard a lot of good things about Ted Dekker, and this is my first forray into his work. He writes fast-paced christian fantasy fiction much in the mold of Frank Paretti. In Blink, Dekker follows Seth Borders, a brilliant graduate student who develops a very strange power, the ability to see alternate futures. At first, he can only see a few seconds into the future, but the gift develops into allowing him to see hours into the future. He is able to see an almost infinite number of possible outcomes for any situation, and thus is able to manipulate reality toward the outcomes he wants by doing the things in that particular future. Seth comes in contact with a Saudi woman named Miriam, who is on the run from an arranged marriage in Saudi Arabia. They meet by chance, and the book is the chronicle of their flight across the globe.

Intertwined with this plot is Seth's wrestling with the possibility of God's existence. He starts out intellectually open to the idea, but unwilling to actually believe that God really exists. His own ability to view alternate futures seems to debunk the idea of God's existence for him because it seems to mean that the future is open and this appears to be incompatible with an all-knowing God. But as the book goes on, Seth realizes that he can pray to the God of Jesus Christ and the possible futures that he sees change, pointing toward God's involvement in the world.

Miriam, meanwhile, is wrestling too, both with the cultural difference between Saudi Arabia and the United States and between Islam and the Christianity that Seth is exploring.

All of these plots come to a fast-paced conclusion as Seth rescues Miriam from her husband-to-be's palace and God delivers them from a seemingly inescapable standoff.

Dekker wrestles with some interesting questions in an imaginative way, and that makes the book work. The biggest weakness is in the characters, who seem rather flat. All told, the book wasn't bad, and I'm going to dip into Dekker's work again.