The Truth Teller by Angela Hunt

First published: Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 1999

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Science fiction; thriller/suspense

Core issue(s): Acceptance; children; trust in God

Principal characters

• Lara Godfrey, a physician’s assistant
• Michael Godfrey, Lara’s late husband, a painter
• Dr. Olivia Densen-Braun, Lara’s boss at the clinic
• Dr. Helmut Braun, Olivia’s husband, a genetics expert
• Devin Sloane, a billionaire villain and eugenicist
• Connor O’Hara, Lara and Michael’s next-door neighbor
• The Iceman, a fifty-three-hundred-year-old Copper Age corpse
• Hunter Shephard, Lara’s son

Overview

With The Truth Teller, Angela Elwell Hunt creates a kinder, gentler techno-thriller in the mold of the works of Michael Crichton. Although some murders do take place, the level of violence is not ratcheted up to the point of gruesomeness, and all the violence is driven by the demands of the plot as well as the necessity of making the villain look suitably callous. Also, the plot presupposes the existence of God, not merely in the minds of the main characters, but as a verifiable event, which rarely if ever happens in a genre that exalts the efficacy of modern science while at the same time warning of its Faustian dangers.

In The Truth Teller, Lara Godfrey, a health-care worker in the women’s clinic in Charlottesville, Virginia, has just lost her husband from bone cancer and plans to bear his child, using the sperm he had frozen before his death. The villain, Devin Sloane, is an eccentric billionaire whose handsome face makes him attractive to the media. According to Sloane, modern society along with humanity is not evolving but devolving, and the main cause of this general debasement is the variety of pollutions throughout the modern environment, ranging from the physical to the cultural. Thus, when the frozen body of a Copper Age man, Homo Tyrolensis, is discovered in the Alps, Sloane obtains a tissue sample in the hopes of siring a new type of human being with it—a purer, less debased human being, whose genetic material would have been closer in time to “the divine spark” that created humanity. Sloane is also a practical eugenicist: The charity hospital he underwrites not only studies patients to find ways to genetically eradicate their diseases but also sterilizes them so they cannot pass on their imperfections and, it is hinted in the narrative, probably exacerbates their conditions, since nearly 80 percent of them die after they are released.

The character who links Lara to Sloane is Dr. Helmut Braun, who is married to Dr. Olivia Densen-Braun, Lara’s boss at the clinic, and is a genetics expert. Sloane pressures Braun to implant Lara with an egg fertilized with material taken from the Iceman; when she comes to term, she will be sedated, her child taken from her, and then raised by Sloane in a physically and culturally antiseptic environment. After she has been implanted with the embryo, Lara discovers this attempt, and escapes with the help of her next-door neighbor, Connor O’Hara, who is a librarian and information specialist.

Lara and her son, the aptly named Hunter Shephard (after his hunter-shepherd “father”), live in Florida for five years, until Sloane’s minions discover them, and they return to Virginia, where Connor convinces her to stop fleeing and to fight Sloane; Connor also becomes her husband. During this courtroom battle, the fact that Hunter is a living lie detector, the truth teller of the title, emerges, and after several carefully prepared plot reversals and revelations, the book ends, not with a superficial fairy-tale ending, but an ending in which all the main good characters do live happily ever after, but in the Christian sense.

Christian Themes

The chief religious denomination mentioned in the novel is the Baptists. Lara’s benevolent and Santa Claus-like lawyer is a deacon in his Baptist church, and a crucial plot point is highlighted with a reference to the nineteenth century split between the Lying Baptists and the Truthful Baptists, a congregation that split over the question of lying to save lives. Connor O’Hara’s father is a minister, and while his denomination is not given, he is said to be still preaching in Lynchburg, Virginia, home to Jerry Falwell and Liberty University.

Almost all the good characters pray, and even Helmut Braun prays for Lara at one point. Sloane himself seems to be religious in that he wants the mother of the Iceman’s child to be a “spiritual person,” but his use of the word “spiritual” rather than “religious” betrays him. Sloane does not believe that the Iceman was closer to the Christian God, but to all the gods of earlier humankind. His beliefs are rootless and ungrounded, and thus he becomes a kind of anti-father figure in the novel, wishing to control Lara’s child totally. Sloane stops at nothing in his pursuit of the tree of knowledge.

The good characters, and Lara in particular, struggle to learn God’s will and to accept it. She has to learn this in her strategy to oppose Sloane and in her marriage with Connor. Most of the religious judgments about reproductive therapy are based on a primary belief in the sanctity of human life. Lara will allow only one of her eggs to be fertilized at a time, and her boss Olivia’s clinic is known for its respect for the right to life. All of Lara’s further decisions about reproductive therapy are based on whether it seems as if God has permitted humans to develop the procedure. The entire question of gene therapy and genetic manipulation to cure diseases seems to be accepted, although in terms of the plot, they become moot points.

Even if Lara cannot be absolutely sure of the rightness of the procedures, she puts their result in God’s hands—if it is his will, they will be successful. Thus she permits herself to be impregnated with what she thinks is an embryo created from Michael’s sperm and her egg. When Hunter is born, she knows that it is God’s will that it happened, and she views Hunter as the tree of life. A small inconsistency here is Lara’s refusal to have Hunter’s DNA tested to ascertain his parentage. She says she does this because she does not want Hunter to be treated like a piece of property, but the real reason is to complicate the plot. If Hunter is tested, the conflict collapses.

The question that the novel never fully answers is why Hunter has been given the gift of truth telling. He not only can detects lies but also can discern “absolute truth,” as Lara puts it. Even though she regrets calling Hunter a “little prophet,” that is exactly what he is. One of the truths that he proclaims is that God loves everyone, a fact universally accepted by most Christians, and thus almost a greeting-card sentiment. However, when a Buddhist tells Hunter that “All paths lead to God,” Hunter answers, “You have believed a great big lie.” Hunter is not merely a child who makes adults uncomfortable by pointing out their hidden selves; he denounces the modern tendency to acknowledge the validity of all religions. The main problem for the author at the end of the novel is what to do with this prophet after he has been revealed to modern America, and Hunt’s solution is predictable and might seem evasive, but the reader has to admit that dealing with the career of Hunter Shephard O’Hara would require a volume all its own—and prophets are without honor in their own country.

However, the main message of the book is hope. When Lara struggles over whether to have Michael’s child, she reads in Proverbs: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy.” A woman on a bus (who disappears like an angel) leaves Lara a handwritten copy of lines from Psalm 139, a hymn of hope. The tree of life defeats the tree of knowledge in this world, and certainly in the next.

Sources for Further Study

“Angela Elwell Hunt.” Contemporary Authors Online. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2007. A short biography of Hunt that lists her many works.

Butler, Tamara. Review of A Time to Mend by Angela Elwell Hunt. Library Journal 131, no. 6 (April 1, 2006): 78. This romance between a nurse and a doctor examines what happens when an oncology nurse gets breast cancer.

Hunt, Angela. “To Hollywood with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Tampa Tribune, December 10, 2006, p. 1. Hunt describes her experiences writing a book to accompany the film The Nativity Story (2006). She talks about the process of writing.

Moore, Waveney. “Prolific Writer’s Goals Are Lofty, and So Are Her Themes.” St. Petersburg Times, August 21, 2005, p. 11. Article describes Hunt’s methods as a writer and her work on a novel about Mary Magdalene.