Resurrection

Day

REVIEWS

South County Chronicle

"Out of the Future, Into the Past"

 by Aileen Torres

     The question of faith may be on the forefront of more people’s minds after September 11, making the present a perfect time for the introduction of Springfield resident Tom Wyckoff’s debut novel, Resurrection Day, which tackles religion head-on in the context of more secular issues. For those who are wary of Christian writers who pontificate from leaden pages, fear not for Wyckoff does not belong to this group of proselytizers. That’s not to say that he’s not a Christian; he is  . . .

    Resurrection Day is a novel that crosses several genres and incorporates religious, political, philosophical, and moral themes in a complex narrative that follows the evolution of an exclusive team of Recovery Force Commandos as they perform various time-travel missions into the distant past. Tom Anderson, Enid Welch, Dixon Shade, and Billy Gene Brooks are the main characters who form a tightly knit circle of professional associates and personal friends. The narrative moves in a postmodern landscape connecting all space and time through the time traveling capabilities of the 22nd Century. The Recovery Force Commandos infiltrate such places as ancient Babylon, Scythia, Pompeii, and Jerusalem in order to recover elusive historical artifacts. The team soon becomes entangled in a web of politico-religious intrigue as the President of the United States authorizes a top-secret mission to recover the body of Christ after his crucifixion in an attempt to debunk the myth of Christ’s resurrection; an act that has the potential to fractionalize the contentious religious right and render it politically impotent.

     “The whole idea of somebody going back to take Jesus’ body from the tomb and the implications of that were just so fascinating to me that all the pieces just started coming together. I really wasn’t so worried about the theology of it,” says Wyckoff, emphasizing the precedence of the narrative plot over the novel’s religious or theological implications.

     In addition to tackling questions of faith and morality, Resurrection Day also addresses the debate over the nature of time, which is the pervasive, although somewhat underscored, backdrop of the novel. The preface includes a quote from Einstein on arbitrary chronological categories: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent. Time is not at all what it seems.” This philosophical quote is an appropriate lead to the extent that the novel tackles the question of whether man can change history by going back in time, or whether history is already predetermined, and therefore immutable. The notion of time and the theories of relativity and quantum realities are all issues that loom large, though mostly implicitly, in the background of Resurrection Day.

     Now that Wyckoff is officially a published author, he’s already thinking ahead to his next project, a nonfiction piece this time, tentatively entitled, Mission: A Cold War Remembrance. It will center on his experiences during the four years he spent in East Germany. But even though he has chosen to abandon fiction writing for the moment, Wyckoff is unlikely to ever stop telling stories.