The Shack (2008)

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.

wow, can't find the words to describe it, but a really good book about God.

thanks pops

After his daughter's murder, a grieving father confronts God with desperate questions -- and finds unexpected answers. When Mackenzie Allen Phillips's youngest daughter Missy is abducted during a family vacation, he remains hopeful that she'll return home. But then, he discovers evidence that she may have been brutally murdered in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in this midst of his great sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note that's supposedly from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment, he arrives on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change his life forever.

My Review: I really didn't like this book at all. To me, it wasn't inspirational, just boring. ( )

"He looked up into the open rafters. 'I'm done, God,' he whispered. 'I can't do this anymore. I'm tired of trying to find you in all of this.'" (pg. 82)

William Young's The Shack made its way onto my radar because it was given as an example of successful self-publishing, but I decided to read it because of its compelling premise. Though I was wary of the dorky "Christian rock" vibe I got from it, the idea of a man confronting God in the disused shack where his young daughter was abducted and murdered was irresistible. It promised a dramatic confrontation that would tackle the age-old question: Where is God in a world of such pain and brutality? A question asked by a man with more right to know than anybody. That premise is surely, regardless of its source, to be considered literature.

So does it succeed? Yes and no, though more 'no' than 'yes'. I should state that I am not a practising Christian, nor have I ever been except in the broadest cultural sense. Therefore, the criticisms of the book that it is undogmatic or disrespectful to church teachings, perhaps even heretical, hold no weight with me. I am, however, interested in Christian theology and open to spiritual questions, and even though I am nowhere near the middle-America church-going audience that the book was targeting, I was keen to see what the book was about.

The Shack, however, doesn't have the bandwidth to answer its forbidding philosophical premise. It does create a few thought-provoking responses to 'where is God in a world of pain?', not least the argument that humans have free will and we create the pain in the world, including the murder of the man's young daughter, and that God then uses "every choice you make for the ultimate good and the most loving outcome" (pg. 127). Like lemonade out of lemons, the more cynical among you might be thinking (and the lemons are increasingly sour…), but despite some scepticism it's a legitimate interpretation of the world. A sort of Order Theory rather than Chaos Theory. A hurricane in China causes a butterfly to flap its wings, or something.

The Shack is at its best when it stays on topic with this dangerous philosophical dilemma posed by the murder of the young girl. The first part of the book is particularly affecting, as we share the father's anguish at the abduction, the police investigation and the heartbreaking acceptance that Missy, the beloved precocious girl, won't ever be coming home. When Mack, the father, approaches the titular shack with a loaded gun in his pocket, preparing to confront God, we share his visceral yet impotent hatred at this unspeakably cruel world.

From that point on, however, the book goes off the rails. Whereas up to this point it had been an agreeably benign story, sort of like a Hallmark adaptation of a Stephen King book, from here on in it starts to get a bit kooky. I was excited by the prospect of a dramatic standoff between a desperate Mack and a pensive, patient God wringing his hands, as they trade blows across a table in a grotty shack where a frightened little girl was murdered. Instead of a shack, however, what we wander into is a sort of Sunday School classroom hijacked by a New Age teacher.

God, you see, is a trinity in Christian teaching, and the God that Mack encounters in the shack is in fact three characters. God is a black woman who likes to bake. Jesus is (of course) an Arab carpenter making stuff in the back room, and popping his head around the corner every so often. The Holy Spirit is a small Asian woman who likes to collect tears in a jar. All speak with big smiles and exclamation marks and Mack responds with "Wow!" at the end of the didactic and undramatic passages of dialogue. Self-esteem and understanding the nature of the Trinity appear to be more important than the Gordian knot of a question that bad things happen to good people. The focus and energy dissipate.

It's not all bad though, and even in the narmy moments I still found plenty to interest me. The book's short and pacey enough, even in the didactic dialogue, to retain the reader's goodwill. The author, thank God, has a sense of humour about his story ("I can just see you scaring the living daylights out of some poor hiker," one of Mack's friends says before the trip to the isolated shack, "asking him if he's God and then demanding answers" (pg. 75)). His theological arguments are delivered honestly, not by sleight of hand.

However, as I said, the bandwidth isn't there to match the premise. The question is too weighty for a limited storyteller; though plot holes naturally emerge in a story that tries to tackle a personified God, a better dramatist would have found a more robust reason for God to invite Mack to the shack in the first place (or perhaps avoid the trap entirely by having Mack just go there and stumble into Him). Instead we have "this is special", that 'we don't normally do this' but Mack was hurting so much they just had to (pg. 114). Not only is this not consistent (why had God not appeared in person to anyone else who'd lost someone?), but the intervention doesn't track with this God's rationale for why Missy wasn't saved: 'we don't intervene'. It becomes even more peculiar when the events at the end only come about because God had intervened. And yet God also says he/she didn't intervene to save Missy "for purposes that you cannot possibly understand now" (pg. 224). The sense of what God's plan might be remains as obtuse as it was when we first opened the book.

Ultimately, though, I never went into The Shack expecting to find a satisfying answer to such a profound question, so I wasn't too disappointed when I didn't. It would have been rather a surprise if the unassuming Young had found something that countless generations of artists, novelists and philosophers had failed to discover, that he had an answer to a question that stymied Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Kierkegaard.

Where I was disappointed, however, was in the story itself. The concept is remarkable, and I couldn't help but imagine (perhaps ungratefully) what a great writer or dramatist could do with this premise if he or she had thought of it first. Mack and God speaking across the table – something like Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, though with a roaring and vulnerable actor like Liam Neeson. I mentioned the book as being like a Hallmark adaptation of a Stephen King story – but imagine what even a writer of the second-rank like King could do with this material. When I reached the final chapters of the book, and the pages returned to the narrator who frames the story, I half-expected it to be revealed that the narrator was Missy's killer, or that Willie was. Not as a cool but shallow plot-twist, you understand, but because such a framing, especially if revealed at the end of the journey, would have tied in brilliantly to the 'forgiveness' theme that emerges.

Then I realised that, ambitious as it is, the story was not going to be – and never had been – of that calibre. Certain moments of The Shack carry emotional weight – such as Mack's temporal meeting with the departed Missy near the waterfall ("she signed the words – 'love you'… Mack wept for joy" (pg. 169)) – but rarely any literary weight. Such moments show that whilst we can be touched by The Shack, we can never be fully grasped. ( )

Durante uma viagem de fim de semana, a filha mais nova de Mack Allen Phillips é raptada e evidências de que ela foi brutalmente assassinada são encontradas numa cabana abandonada. Após quatro anos vivendo numa tristeza profunda causada pela culpa e pela saudade da menina, Mack recebe um estranho bilhete, aparentemente escrito por Deus, convidando-o para voltar à cabana onde aconteceu a tragédia. Apesar de desconfiado, ele vai ao local do crime numa tarde de inverno e adentra passo a passo no cenário de seu mais terrível pesadelo. Mas o que ele encontra lá muda o seu destino para sempre.