Here’s a book I got for free from the publisher, for reviewing purposes. They’ll probably be sorry they asked me. I didn’t hate it, but I find at the end that I don’t have a lot of good things to say about it, though I have several bad things.

Asgard Park, by Ronald Simonar, is a novel about Intelligent Design, but not the kind you’re thinking of. In the imagination of the author, there is some kind of intelligence guiding the universe and human life, but it’s not the God of the Bible. To the limited extent that it involves itself in human affairs, it does so through various Chosen Ones, born with special inherited genetic traits, and through the world-wide organization these Chosen Ones lead, the Midgard Group. Kind of like the Illuminati, but in a good way. The Norse god Heimdallr, the guardian of the gods who can hear grass grow, has had his most recent avatar up until now (now being 1991, the year when the novel is set) in a psychologist named Dr. Karl Leamus, who runs Asgard Park, an insane asylum in upstate New York. But Leamus is getting older, and the god has chosen a new vessel, a young Swedish neurologist named Birger Wallenberg who is, more or less, the hero of the book.

Dr. Wallenberg is not happy about having his brain inhabited by a heathen god (a sentiment with which I highly concur), and much of the story centers on his gradual acquiescence in the possession. It also involves an American spy and a beautiful Albanian widow who gets into big trouble with the corrupt government of her up-till-recently-Communist country. Most of the reader’s sympathy will center on her.

There’s also the rather nasty plot element of the widow’s friend, an underage prostitute with whom both the male heroes sleep (though Dr. Wallenberg, to be fair, does it unwittingly, thinking it’s someone else).

Aside from my objections to the theology of the story, and the creepy prostitute angle, I can also complain about the author’s style. Ronald Simonar is an Icelander, but he seems to have a pretty good grasp of English. Unfortunately, it’s not up to the challenge of writing a novel. He has trouble with his diction, confuses English and American slang, and sometimes doesn’t seem to know how to use a contraction. He also misses a big opportunity in his presentation of the whole back story of the Midgard Group and the business of Intelligent Design. It’s all just summarized as something Dr. Wallenberg reads about in a scholarly paper. A more dramatic reveal would have been possible, and would have improved the story.

So, although it could have been worse, I can’t really recommend Asgard Park.