Review by Ed Quillen
Novel with local setting – July 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Refuge
a novel by Mark Olsen
Published in 1996
by Sardis Press
ISBN 0963946528
The idea of writing a novel as a political tract is neither new nor ignoble; indeed, it has produced some books I have greatly enjoyed, such as The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and The Magic Journey by John Nichols.
The polemic novel offers a struggle between good and evil. The author creates sympathetic heroes in mortal conflict with despicable villains, who are usually poorly defined — they’re symbols, not characters.
Nichols is the exception here, with villains who laugh and love while they’re exploiting the landscape and destroying local cultures. But Abbey’s Bishop Love, arch-foe of G.W. Hayduke and company, is a cardboard caricature, and Steinbeck’s California farmers are vague but malevolent shadows.
Refuge is a polemic novel set entirely in Colorado, and much of it happens in Central Colorado, whose high peaks hold a sanctuary for people on the run from a madness that has taken over the Front Range.
In Refuge, set in Colorado’s near future, gay-rights activists have taken over, subverting First Amendment rights. Ministers have their sermons monitored and can be charged with hate crimes. Workplaces are not places where jobs get done, but where diversity is celebrated — and enforced. Homophobia, which is very broadly defined, is a psychological disorder that requires expensive counseling and therapy, and children of homophobic parents can be taken away.
The protagonist, Vern Yates of Boulder, gets hit with all this. His church is destroyed, he loses his job, the Diversity Police are after his family — and so he and his nine-year-old son John flee to the mountains.
First they take six days to get from Boulder over Arapaho Pass to Fraser, whence a fundamentalist minister hauls them to the Leadville area, and they start hiking up Clear Creek toward Winfield and points west.
Their destination, passed on by whispers in a resistance underground, is the Three Apostles — a triple-peaked massif at the north wall of Taylor Park dominated by 13,957-foot Ice Mountain.
They’re being pursued by Sonya the Lesbian Avenger Tracker — a woman of many vices, among them the apparent inability to read a road map, since her route from Denver to Leadville takes her over Vail and Tennessee passes, when most people would have just driven over Frémont Pass and saved about 60 miles.
The wilderness refuge at the Three Apostles, operated as a modern variety of Underground Railroad layover, lies inside some old mines. Olsen’s descriptions of mountain scenery are almost lyrical — that’s his best writing — but his mines are difficult to understand, since he doesn’t know the difference between a tunnel (horizontal) and a shaft (vertical).
Meanwhile, back in Boulder, Vern’s wife, Gail, sees their four-year-old daughter Heather taken away from their “abusive” household and placed in a shelter for some hard-core diversity education.
And of course, the Yates family is re-united in an action-packed finale, yet the details of the action are often skipped — even though action is the part I presumed would shine when I started a book that is touted on its cover as “The year’s most controversial thriller!” Instead, Refuge is a 200-page tract on “what might happen if society operated by the most extreme statements of the most extreme gay-rights activists.”
It doesn’t work as an action-adventure novel. It’s hard to identify with the protagonist, or anyone else. Olsen’s exploration of media corruption neglects the major factor: the usual forces of American commerce.
So much of this book runs so shallowly and counter to my own experience (most gay people I know, just like the oppressed Christians in this book, just want to be left alone to go about their lives) that I never could indulge in that “willing suspension of disbelief” and just get into the story.
I think that’s more Olsen’s fault than mine, since I’ve managed to get comfortably submerged in other modern Christian novels, like This Present Danger, and in other ideological novels, like Atlas Shrugged. If it’s a good story well told with credible characters, then I’m willing to set aside my own religious and ideological prejudices, and enjoy the tale.
Alas, that didn’t happen with Refuge. At first glance, I had fears that life might imitate art, and the book might inspire some fundamentalist militia to set up shop in the westernmost reaches of Chaffee County where this fictional refuge operated.
But there’s precious little art here for any sort of inspiration — what could have been an entertaining adventure is, instead, merely tedious preaching to the choir.
— E.Q.