This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
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Nothing feels quite like the experience of returning home from your mission. You feel like you are in some sort of limbo, where you are no longer saving people’s souls, you haven’t really started on your path toward establishing a family or career, and you know how to live independently but don’t have the means to. Yet you are walking on clouds–such an immense spiritual high. You are in the prime of your life and ready to conquer the word.
I suppose the closest metaphor for this time in a man’s life is Maximus in The Gladiator standing in the silhouetted gate of the Collesium waiting for his cue to charge the killing field. Once a general of Rome reduced to a slave but intent on achieving the unimaginable. In Brett Cain’s thriller ‘Whiteout’, what we get feels like an old Western. The return missionary is riding around aimlessly in a trusty classic car, as if he were a cowboy on his horse traversing the plains of Montana, and he inadvertently comes across evil-doing. The reluctant hero is trapped in a blizzard-bound town and must solve the murder mystery before he can go on his way. The red-headed damsel in distress is there. The surely town lawman. It is an unexpected take on the return-missionary experience, but Brett Cain captures it well with all of the elements in place.
Keep this background in mind when you start to question why the main character behaves the way he does. The story reads in first-person, yet I immediately found myself thinking, “There is no way that’s what I would have done.” In a good story, the main characters make choices that are just a little more clever than what the reader would do, providing a glimpse into an intelligent brain and inspiring the reader to become smarter. Or at least the reader can understand why the characters would make those choices. In this book, he makes some baffling choices with no explanation, and unless you know the experience of returning home from a mission you probably wouldn’t get it. Maybe he had some head injury that makes him thoughtlessly break the law, or maybe it’s his stressful predicament and setting.
I think back to that time in my life, and other times like it. My very first day of elementary school I cautiously approached the playground during recess. A cacophony of running children swirled around me. As I edged toward the zenith of the slide and prepared for my descent, I witnessed two older kids run up the slide from the bottom. “Don’t break the rules,” I ordered. They looked at each other. “Let’s get him!” one kid said to the other. Suddenly, something inside me snapped. The playground suddenly appeared like the warzone of Vietnam and I was running as fast as I could, dodging fauna and wildlife. The kids thought I was playing along, but it soon became clear I was a wild berserker when I kicked one in the shin and bit the other one. A parent intervened and calmed me down. But over the years I’ve reflected, what made me behave like that? The first days of school are more traumatic than almost anything in a person’s life, or at least it was for mine–leaving the comfort of home and being trained like a machine. This is why people go the rest of their lives having nightmares about forgetting a test. The other recurrent dreams I find myself still having are of being on my mission. Such a shocking change of lifestyle and purpose can make a person erratic.
This is the kind of erraticism the story explores. He is often eager to fight yet very well-natured, conscientious of what strangers think of him, yet doesn’t think one day ahead. At times it reads like a bizarre dream. Yet somehow this is more realistic than those Western action movies where the hero acts with high virtue simply out of the goodness of his heart. He is more than anything the knight in shining armor, the hero who can’t stand idly by. There is nothing very profound about any of this, but it makes for terrific story-telling. It seems like a slam-dunk for Latter-day Saint authors and I’m surprised that more don’t talk about it.
The tone and pace make it sound as if this were a new roommate at BYU, hot off his mission, talking about his crazy road trip through Montana. And as I listen, sometimes I would pause skeptically and interject, “That really happened?” “I swear!” he would reply.
I enjoyed the inner dialogue and thought process in the story. Some of it is pretty random, but I guess that’s really how it is sometimes and it serves to set his erratic yet well-meaning state of mind. Some of the scenes are described in great detail. The final chapters are told with obvious expertise, and are very much worth the build-up (unless you aren’t into violence.) I wish the action of the final chapters had been carried along the entire book, but then that probably would have made the story less believable. I don’t think this was intended to be a John Grisham novel, but more of a psychological fantasy. I would love to read a horror story along the same vein with a return missionary confronting some terrifying situation. The reviewer at Deseret Book didn’t seem to appreciate the mindset that she couldn’t understand, and also complained about the lack of fear. Well, but that’s how it is! As a missionary you confront so many crazy situations that you just don’t have time for fear anymore, and when you return home you feel numbness. I certainly did. This book repeatedly describes the numbness the main character felt from exposure to the cold, and I got a sense of numbness emotionally as well. That’s got to be frustrating to read if you like books to emotionally inspire you, but for me this was appropriate. It made it primal, raw, and accurate.
But again, there’s nothing very profound here. It’s an entertaining and fun ride that I didn’t want to put down.