'The Five People You Meet in
Heaven' has received wide
critical acclaim and become hugely popular amongst the
public, accolades which in my opinion this easy-read does
not in any way deserve. What's more, Albom has previously
produced another best seller, 'Tuesday's with Morrie', and
it is difficult to understand why this over-simplistic
style is so greatly welcomed by today's readers.
The plot concerns a character, our
hero, beginning at the
time of his death and continuing as he ascends to heaven,
encountering characters from his
life along the way. These
characters vary from prominent figures in his life to
people that he has never even met, and provide a hint of
colour to an otherwise dull and rather predictable tale.
Although we learn much of our hero's past, and many details
of his physicality and morality, nevertheless it is hard
for the
reader to have sympathy for the hero or indeed to
feel anything about him at all. The character appears
wooden and two dimensional, as are the 'lessons' he is
supposes to be learning throughout the book. Albom intends
to be deep and philosophical but the answers the man is
given in heaven are trite or obvious. The reader is left
feeling deflated when the promise of, if not the
meaning of
life then at least a meaning to someone's life, is left
unfulfilled.
The happy ending is a blessing and is provided by the man
and his wife being reunited in heaven; the
sense of peace
and joy the reader feels when the book is completed is not
however due to
happiness felt for the 'hero' in the book,
but more to the fact that love succeeds, something which
every reader is perhaps able to relate to. We are happy
because we are reassured that we will be reunited with out
loved ones after death just as the man in the book is.
Maybe this sense of happiness is what makes Mitch Albom's
books so popular in a modern world of depressing or morbid
novels.