Lew Wallace (1827–1905)

I read this by mistake, thinking it was the original. It's not. It's an "updated" version to coincide with the gigantic flop that was the movie remake. Warning bells started going off as the language sounded too modern and it seemed like a novelization of a movie rather than a book. Unfortunately I can't say if the problem is that she's adapting a movie rather than the original novel since I haven't read the original. But given the additional material in this book where the author confesses show more to not liking the original book, chances are this isn't very faithful to the material.

Ben-Hur seems to have been a bait and switch originally with a "tale of the Christ" that's really just tacked onto an adventure tale. It's hard to see why this was one of the best selling book of its time, but easy to see why it made for a great movie adaptation. show less

My copy of Ben-Hur is over 50 years old – broken spine; brown, brittle pages; looks like it was written on a type-writer. It belonged to my father, who had an entire collection of books from the same publisher – Bancroft Classic. I’ve inherited this one, as well as Robinson Crusoe and A Tale of Two Cities. This one, I’ve been meaning to read the longest.

Ben-Hur follows the story of Judah, Prince of Jerusalem of the house of Hur, a young Jewish man who is wrongly accused of the show more attempted murder of a Roman General by a man he thought was his friend. After spending years as a galley slave, rowing the boat of another Roman General, Judas is set free and adopted by a Roman whom he saves from drowning. The rest…well, the rest is spoilers.

The novel ties in historical happenings around the time of Roman-Judea to the life of the infamous Jesus Christ. In fact, the whole novel is framed by his life and death. Judas, a faithful Jew, encounters Jesus Christ (and those affected by him) multiple times throughout the story, and it becomes most prominent at the very end.

The whole novel is, therefore, a very Christian tale. You can tell it is by the way Wallace wrote about people’s interactions with Jesus, and the way the miracles are portrayed. Rather than being a purely historical tale, the whole thing stinks of Christian propaganda and the teachings the religion brings.

Now, I’m not the most religious person in the world, but I did enjoy reading this. While the whole thing felt a bit like a morality tale at parts, and the glorification of the Christ figure is a bit too much for my taste, it’s still a classic that deserves to be read.

So, I did just that.

Final Rating: 3/5 – Not a waste of time to read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. show less

I was going to try to come up with a somewhat shorter review for this, but, hey. It's Ben-Hur, folks. Besides, it was a pretty special decision of mine to read Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by author Carol Wallace.

Lover of classic literature that I am, I'm not someone who "worships" classics or who thinks all of them have to be marvelous to me just because they're old and celebrated. But even with its few aspects that I must have read with a lifted eyebrow, I truly appreciated the original show more Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, finding it engrossing, thought-provoking, and amazing on more than one level.

I'll admit that I don't normally go for contemporary adaptations of classics when the originals are available. It's not my preference to read a reworded or whittled down version that may leave out much of what the first author wrote, since it was written for a reason, and I'm not looking for an easier read. Even if a classic novel may be a challenge, I'd rather set out to rise to that challenge.

With that said, I chose to read this 2016 adaptation of a novel from 1880 specifically because the present author is a direct part of her great-great-grandfather's legacy. I was curious to see exactly what she did with his work.

And I think Carol Wallace has done a fine job, taking the great material she had to work with and doing justice to it for a new audience. There's action and intrigue, tragedy and triumph on the journey that leads Judah Ben-Hur to a peculiar Nazarene, the one who's rumored to be the imminent king who'll liberate his people from Roman rule.

The historical and biblical settings on land and sea are wonderfully realized, and I especially enjoyed Judah's process through disillusionment, rage, determination, and the path that ultimately humbles and gives him a new purpose. I wasn't particularly impressed by the romance here but wasn't expecting it to be one of this story's strongest points anyway. I did miss the omitted opening, some of the dialogue, and Judah's musings that were left out, as I found much of the original novel's richness in those parts, but not everyone will miss them. And I liked the depiction of Christ here better, as the older version of the character came off as overdone and soft to me, too much of an ethereal beauty.

My inevitable comparisons of the two novels aside, I still enjoyed this new work from beginning to end. I'm sure many other historical and biblical fiction fans who like epic reads will enjoy it as well.
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Tyndale House provided me with a complimentary copy of this book for an honest review. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3240503.html

The film improved massively on the book, which is rare but not unique. My biggest regret about the adaptation is that the most interesting character, Balthasar's daughter Iras, who is Ben-Hur's alternate love interest (the Naughty Girl to Esther's Good Girl), is dropped from the film (as she is apparently from all the screen adaptations). But apart from that, the book is much more of a Shaggy God story, with Jesus healing Miriam and Tirzah (after a show more dramatic rescue from prison) much earlier, and Ben-Hur and Balthasar becoming active disciples of Christ in the years before the crucifixion (and it is Ben-Hur who gives the dying Christ his last drink via a sponge). The chariot race and downfall of Messala are also also much earlier in the book, and even if you haven't seen the film you get a sense that it's running out of steam in the last third or so, where Ben-Hur recruits an army of rebels who we don't hear any more of after he throws in his lot with Jesus, and then the biblical stuff is reiterated in some detail. Gone With The Wind would have been a much better film if it had been as ruthless with its source material.

It's interesting to note that Lew Wallace had not himself been to Palestine at that point in his life (he did go later, when he was American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire), so the very convincing descriptions of Palestinian landscapes and peoples are a combination of wide reading in the Library of Congress and observing the horse-crazy ethnically mixed environment of Santa Fe and New Mexico generally, where he was Governor while finishing the book. Indeed, I wonder if the relatively sympathetic treatment of Pilate comes directly of empathy from one colonial governor to another. New Mexico had been under US rule only a little longer in 1880 than Judæa had been under Roman rule at the time of Pilate.

Incidentally, Mary is explicitly fifteen years old at the time of the birth of Jesus in Wallace’s novel.

It's not a bad book, it just takes itself a bit too seriously and goes on a bit too long. show less