Product Description

The Story of B combines Daniel Quinn's provocative and visionary ideas with a masterfully plotted story of adventure and suspense in this stunning, resonant novel that is sure to stay with readers long after they have finished the last page. Father Jared Osborne--bound by a centuries-old mandate held by his order to know before all others that the Antichrist is among us--is sent to Europe on a mission to find a peripatetic preacher whose radical message is attracting a growing circle of followers. The target of Osborne's investigation is an American known only as B. He isn't teaching New Age platitudes or building a fanatical following; instead, he is quietly uncovering the hidden history of our planet, redefining the fall of man, and retracing a path of human spirituality that extends millions of years into the past. From the beginning, Fr. Osborne is stunned, outraged, and awed by the simplicity and profundity of B's teachings. Is B merely a heretic--or is he the Antichrist sent to seduce humanity not with wickedness, but with ideas more alluring than those of traditional religion? With surprising twists and fascinating characters, The Story of B answers this question as it sends readers on an intellectual journey that will forever change the way they view spirituality, human history, and, indeed, the state of our present world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40255 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-01
• Released on: 1997-11-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Quinn returns to fiction after a five-year hiatus with a sequel of sorts to Ishmael, winner of the Turner Tomorrow Award in 1991. Like its controversial predecessor, this book is not really a novel, but an extended Socratic dialogue that promulgates the same animist solutions to global problems that the author recorded last year in his spiritual autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. The narrator, Jared Osborne, is a priest of the Laurentians, a fictional Roman Catholic order under an ancient, covert mandate to stand watch against the coming of the Antichrist. Although skeptical, Jared is enjoined by his superior to investigate Charles Atterley, an expatriate American preacher known to his followers as "B." Allowing Jared into his inner circle in Munich, B soon dispels both the concern that he is the Antichrist and the shivery intimations of apocalypse that make the opening chapters darkly intriguing. Through long, often numbingly repetitive parables and speeches, B instructs Jared in the solutions to overpopulation, ecological despoliation, cultural intolerance and other ills that have dogged civilization since the time of "the Great Forgetting" 10,000 years ago. B's smug pontificating and his disciples' unquestioning devotion reduces them to interchangeable mouthpieces for Quinn's philosophies. As a result, Jared's spiritual conversion away from Roman Catholicism and toward Quinn-ism, intended to be the book's dramatic high point, falls painfully flat.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Quinn, author of the best-selling cult classic Ishmael (LJ 12/91), returns with another quasispiritual tale about a priest who awaits the arrival of the Antichrist.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Father Jared Osborne journeys to Europe to seek out the one the masses call "B"--whom the church calls the Antichrist. B's message returns us to the time, millions of years ago, before mankind's "Great Forgetting," when the earth had a single religion-- a deep spiritual connection to the universe that was as unconscious as breathing. Heald's performance is masterful, almost intoxicating. The very nature of the story demands that it be heard, the way Jared hears B's teachings. Listeners are directly included in the story's final moments. More than a suspenseful story of good versus evil, The STORY OF B is about the power of minds that have changed--and chosen the truth. R.A.P. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Good story...very preachy
I purchased the Story of B excited to read the continuation of the thought provoking Ishmael. While Ishmael opened the door to new concepts (at least new to me), The Story of B simply reiterated those concepts using a different story with different characters. There was a point in the novel where the magic of the message got lost in redundancy. There was an "I get it, move on" moment for the reader that actually made me consider putting down the book. I felt like the book was written as a brainwashing mechanism to perpetuate the author's point of view. While I understand all written works function to perpetuate a point, the novel came off as pushy and forceful. There were a lot of questions I wished I could ask, that were not explained in the text. The redundancy is explained by the author in the beginning of the novel. The main character "B" explained that he uses redundancy for the same reason people attend mass every Sunday. You have to hear the message more than once to make it your own.

I can see how this novel could be described as anti-Christian. Another reviewer attempted to dumb down this aspect of the book by saying that the novel is not anti-Christian, but it is anti totalitarian Christian (meaning it is anti Christian as the only religion). I disagree with this statement emphatically. I believe it is anti-Christian but not exclusively anti-Christian. It is anti-taker religion. Not in a hateful way that one would expect when talking about "anti" positions in general. However, the novel almost views these religions how a Christian would view modern day scientology. These religions were created ten thousand years ago. Humans have been around for much much longer than that. Believing in them is therefore ridiculous (according to the novel) because it is ludicrous to think that God simply appeared to people once modern culture began shunned those who lived previously. The novel also speaks of the absence of the Judeo-Christian God in our everyday lives. Would the ultimate God be so distant and detached from his people? I must point out that this is not the main theme of the novel in anyway. It is just a point I thought would be important to people.

The book also works to propagate the idea of animism. I found this section of the book boring and least enlightening. I liked Ishmael because it spoke in a cultural language rather than a religious one. The original ideas in Ishmael could appeal to a broader range of audience. The novelist might say that the reason I found this section so unappealing is because I'm so rooted in "taker" culture. This might be true, it might not. Regardless, if you choose to read this novel, prepare to be preached to about animism throughout the later part of the novel.

I have to admit his ideas on culture make sense. They explain the void that humans continue to search to fill. Whether this is just an artist interpretation of a solution is beyond the scope of this review. However, the story was good and a recommend this book as an interesting read.

A necessary tale
Don't miss this one. This deceptively simple tale may be the most profound critique of agricultural civilization that I have ever read. It cuts to the heart of the experiment we began about 10,000 years ago -- the way of life which has come to dominate our planet and which threatens to undo us all. (See Wes Jackson's work, BECOMING NATIVE TO THIS PLACE, Counterpoint, 1996, etc. for an agronomist's perspective on the same issues.) B opens a window on the preceding 3 million years in which humans exactly like us lived, created, dreamed and invented without choosing to dominate the rest of nature, and then indicates a door through which we might exit our failing paradigm. This is the part of history you were never taught in school and might only have inferred from the work of Louis Leakey, Margaret Meade and other students of the "uncivilized" past. The inevitability of farms, cities and nations that is assumed in classic history is artfully shown to be anything but inevitable. It is also a good story. Whether you emerge from this book, as I did, convinced as never before of the imperative change demanded by the dangerous path we now tread, or choose to oppose Quinn's challenge, you will be shaken by this book. To your core.

Rip Van Wrinkle coming out of his sleep.
I think both books have some truths in it. I am awakened to find there is a nation of people who did fall asleep they lost 10,000 of their history and Quinn has been bold enough to put it in fiction. What a revolution the question is now when the people wake up from the forgettfulness does anyone knows what that will do to the world or will the world already be at the end of its story and those people ascended to the blue ethers from the disaster.
Science is beautiful. Creation is something unseen yet everything manifested is after creation. The thought was the creation. What a mighty good thought it is. Leavers. Leave this place of limited life. A hologram. When one knows that begins must end. They have meet the leavers.....Leavers never began and they will never end.