J's Pages

I've written about the Casca series before. In fact, I've even gotten e-mail messages from a Casca fan who's read my reviews. (It was very scary to discover that people actually read these things.) Anyway, The series is about this Roman soldier, Casca Rufio Longinus, who was one of the soldiers at Christ's crucifixion and was cursed by Jesus to wander the earth as a soldier until He returns. The theology is a bit lame, but I was really intrigued by the idea back in the 80s and bought a number of the books in the series. Of those, I remember Panzer Soldier as being the best. Well, I've just reread this one and now wonder "what was I thinking?" This time I found the book disappointing. It seemed unrealistic. Why I didn't catch it before, I don't know. Maybe it was because I'm more sensitive to the bad theology I mentioned above. Maybe I'm just more mature and can't swallow the Russians as the two dimensional bad guys they are protrayed as in the book. Maybe the old married man can't believe the male-female relationships the way the ignorant young punk once did. Maybe, with the drums of war sounding on the news every day, I can no longer relax and enjoy a tale of men slaughtering each other. God only knows. Anyway, the book is not totally worthless. As always, the character Casca has a streak of nobility in him. It's also a bit inventive to have the hero serve with the World War II German army. In this genre you would have expected him to have served with the Brits or the Yanks. (Of course he did soundly denounce Hitler and the SS.) Finally, in this book Sadler downplayed Casca's immortality, focusing more on the realistic action. So, for those few good points, I'll keep this one dry and rate it as waiting room material. 

LibraryThing link

Labels: BarrySadler, Casca, WaitingRoomMaterial

// posted by John @ 11:53 PM