Book Review: Halo: Cole Protocol

Welcome to my review section something that I am hoping can go to add a bit of extra learning and interest in the blog. For this review I'm choosing the most recent book I read; Halo: The Cole Protocol. I'll go over a few points and talk about my general experience reading it and some personal thoughts about the work.

The Halo series is probably my favorite video game universe to date. The lore, the characters and the setting just managed to hit a very special place in my heart at a very young age for me and has stuck with me ever since. So getting the chance to go through and finish off the books I missed reading of the Halo universe has been an interesting experience to be sure. I must admit my thoughts going into this particular book was one of the more unique ones in the series to be sure and that had me both worried and excited.

The Plot: The Cole Protocol is one part the story of Lieutenant Keys as he gets back into the military and his rise to becoming the Commander we all know and love, in the other part it is the story of a young Delgado and his investigation through the asteroid colony known as The Rubble. While Lieutenant Keys seems to be there to show us more of the setting and the world through his journey across space enforcing the new 'Cole Protocol' a new law that means any ship under attack by the alien Covenant forces must delete their nav databases before losing, Delgado is on a mission to find out who is trying to steal and sell the very same information to the Covenant in his home colony. One story is filled with more guns a blazing and the other more political intrigue, neither is focused on enough to really bring out the best of either unfortunately and this may be a result of the third character I hadn't talked about yet.

Thel is an alien Elite and the leader of his keep. His journey across space to find out who is selling weapons to the humans illegally and to bring them and the humans involved to ultimate justice with intense plasma fire. His journey is filled with as much intrigue and gun shooting as either of the others and seems to be a sort of middle ground between the two feelings in the book. His story I would argue is probably the most emotionally rewarding and perhaps the most interesting of the three, which was a pleasant surprise.

The Structure: How well is the story written? Well maybe it was just my digital copy of it, but I continued to find editing mistakes, typos, and incorrect words all over the place. It got so heavy in some places that it kicked my butt right out of the story. Many a Facebook post was made in protest to this. Where there isn't typos, however, I can say that the narrator and the voice of the story were on point.

The Characters: There are three 'main' characters in this story that really matter. Keys, Delgado, and Thel. The three of them all have personal ideas and views on the war, the people in it, and how things all work. Each one of them goes through a journey and start having their views and ideas disillusioned as they realize that things are not what they believed. Keys, as much as I love him as a character in the Halo series as a whole is the weakest of the trio in terms of personal story, not really being more than a tool to explain the setting for most of his story. Delgado is a much more active character but his path to investigation is far too straight forward with few red herrings if any. Thel on the other hand actually has a journey which goes to show us how the Covenant's religious views and Elite honor affect their culture, laws, and actions Thel's personal journey to learning that things are far more complicated in politics than he could have imagined, and worse yet the leaders of his civilization, The Prophets can actually make mistakes changes him into a much different person than he started out as.

Setting: The setting is arguably the most interesting part of any Halo novel in my opinion. There is just something special about this universe that I have always loved. This novel goes deeper into the politics behind warfare, and shows some interesting ways humanity has survived in the face of an impossible alien threat hellbent on their extinction. The Rubble being a colony made out of different asteroids stuck together was insanely interesting, and seeing all the political madness was also interesting. They could have spent a bit more time on showcasing each of the unique settings in my opinion though. For example I'd have liked to see more of Thel's home other than having it described as a 'castle'.

The Theme: Finally we have the themes of the book. Here is where I struggled unfortunately. With having at least half a dozen view points through the story, with only three characters truly being important, and a bit of jumpiness to the story as a whole it was hard to pinpoint any particular theme. Hard but not impossible. I believe the theme of this book would be something like, 'discovering that the world doesn't work the way you think it does.' Each character goes through a sort of 'revelation' moment where they seem to find out that what they knew was false and the truth usually sucked. I won't go into exactly what they learn as that would ruin the climax of the story, but I feel for Thel's journey it was not only the strongest, but had some real weight behind it.

Final Conclusion: I personally enjoyed this novel. As a fan of Halo I would suggest this to anyone else looking to get deeper into the Halo lore. For people who either haven't played the game or wouldn't want to, I can't strongly recommend this tittle unfortunately. I enjoyed it, but it's my love for the setting, universe, and games that really helped me with that. There were lots of nice parts of the book, but the entire whole of the novel feels somewhat flawed or shallow due to lack of time to go indepth with any of the ideas shared in here.

My rating would be 3 alien smiley faces out of 5