What would you do if you came back to your hometown and found everyone gone? No explanation. No notes. Nothing. How would you start putting the pieces together? What if a gargantuan psychopath also happened to be on the loose? If this story became your story, how would you write it?
In Jared Wilson’s Echo Island, four high school students return from a camping trip to find their town utterly vacant. Their family, friends, and acquaintances—all gone without a trace. Jason, Bradley, Archer, and Tim each take their own approach to understanding and addressing the problem. But things get more threatening when a girl Jason meets (Beatrice) reveals that her giant, menacing father has taken all the guns from the police station and is searching the island for her. The terror and mystery reveal the marrow in each character’s bones.
Jason (the protagonist) is honestly seeking answers but doesn’t know if heroism or resignation is the better option. He’ll need to choose. Bradley, a shallow, muscle-touting jock, will need to learn that real strength comes by losing. Tim, ever in Bradley’s shadow, will see where being a follower leads him. And Archer, the rational empiricist, will either need to come to grips with the limits of his intellect or else lose himself. As an old man says in the story, “Some things are meant to be calculated. Mystery isn’t among them.”
Eventually the characters realize that their story—what’s happening to them at each moment—is being written by a mysterious, invisible author, but it’s also being written by themselves. Under the sovereignty of the author, their choices produce words in a series of green notebooks that catalog their thoughts, words, and actions. Their story is being written.
That’s when the great question surfaces, the question that gets at the meaning of life and the nature of reality: What sort of character will you be in your own story? The answer involves more than a simple decision. It calls for courage, danger, and resolve amidst harrowing evil. It doesn’t call for being safe, since “safe does not make for a good story.” How will Jason and his friends live in the last chapter of their story?
Echo Island brings forward several themes, each of which has applications to the Christian life.
Identity in the midst of turmoil
The limits of human understanding
The true nature of bravery
Life as a grand narrative
The mystery of life after death
I enjoyed the ways in which Wilson’s story telling made me ponder and keep turning the pages til the end, and I highly recommend it!
