A man with a silvered head, glistening with teenage behavior and incredible pomposity, and a zealous girl with no bad habits mourn their recent bitter losses, remain faithful to the memory of their "only ones," and, of course, throw themselves into each other's arms at the first opportunity. The story of their relationship would have been worthy of a paperback love story, but here the spice of the text comes in - a woman is tried to kill, over and over again. Of course, unsuccessfully - it's so hard for a professional terrorist to kill a defenseless woman!
Wilbur Smith was the bestselling author of many novels, each researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His bestselling Courtney series includes Assegai, The Sound of Thunder, Birds of Prey, Monsoon, and Blue Horizon. His other books include Those in Peril, River God, Warlock, The Seventh Scroll, and The Sunbird.
There are countless Arabs running around - stupid, lazy and greedy, of course. The Ethiopian coloring for this dish did not seem to the author enough, and there appeared a bear with a balalaika and a bottle of moonshine... Oh, no, not a bear - a Russian man with a black wife! Of course he was paired with a Nazi with a Hitler Youth insignia on his chest (no, no, not a Nazi, just a pervert who spoke German). The cast of characters is clearly self-divided into "good" and "bad" and engaged in a no-nonsense, teenage-stamped struggle for the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.
By the way, the self-distribution didn't stop all the characters from being cretins. The main character constantly falls off waterfalls. Sometimes twice each. Secondary characters remain just names - not enough to come up with characters and biographies for them yet!
All this is unimportant - the main thing - a lot of all sorts of shooting, running and "death" fights, albeit described in the same way and boring! There is no mystery, as all the mysteries in this book do not qualify for mystery.
Everything is resolved with an all-conquering happy ending.
Anyway, anyone who didn't have time to escape when the nineteenth episode of The Mummy was shown knows what it's all about.
It's all laced with the author's undisguised, overt narcissism and his own awful language.
With this book in hand, you can safely begin to make a rating of techniques that kill literature and which no writer should ever use. You should never praise yourself in your own book! You can't select other people's ideas for your own novel based on their hackneyedness, stupidity, and frequency of use in B-movies. You can't write sloppy. You can't build characters based on national prejudice. You can't make every character, without exception, a dumbass halfwit. You can't fail to check historical and geographical facts - at least on Wikipedia. You can not "save" the hero from deadly situations only by timely coincidences or supernatural, alien superpowers, who knows where they came from and it is unclear where they went. One cannot ignore logic-the logic of events, actions, and deeds. We cannot simultaneously preach ethics and justify crimes. You can not use someone else's story over and over again, especially if twenty (two hundred) other authors have already used it before you. You can't finish a book without "tying up" or at least "veiling" the main plot threads. You can't write a book so that it is predictable immediately and until the very last page. You can't, you can't, you can't!..! I hope the Literary Institute goes over this novel with future writers--as a shining example of what literature should not be.
"The Seventh Scroll appeared in 1995. It was preceded by the novel The Deity of the River, which was a much better piece of writing. However, I don't recommend either one. The book probably would have been better received if it had been written in a parodic style with an emphasis on exaggeration. But the author lacked a sense of humor, self-criticism, or self-irony for that.
In fact, "The Seventh Scroll" is constructed in the style of an eighties-nineties television series - each episode (oh, no, not an episode, of course - a part) ends with the protagonist in the deadliest superhazard, the next part begins in another place and another time, and the superhazard is somehow casually resolved later. That said, each series (I keep forgetting they're parts, not series!) is basically a text with secondary plot "drag-ons" - corrupt guides, third-party love adventures, made-up rituals, "wrong" deeds in the past - all as dumb and predictable as the main plot.
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