Help! Author Intervention needed!

What to think when you read a book written by God himself and all you can do is pray it'll end soon? Okay, it wasn't really God. Actually just a god of literature, the kind whose reviews always include words like "greatest" and "best" and once, "greatest...ever." (By the way, this is NOT a review, more like a musing, a quiet wonder at what the author was thinking and why no one staged an intervention.)

Perhaps, whatever it is, it's a bit schoolmarmish. I'm in writing-teacher mode these days, working on turning my erstwhile writing course into an ebook, so right now, just at this moment, I'm the kind of prissy little nobody who might have the nerve to stand up and point a finger at a giant of letters for splitting an infinitive. Only that isn't what he did. If one of my students did what he did, I'd have to commit ritual suicide for having failed him so badly.

First, he sets the scene: Gorgeous filmmaker and getting-on but savvy and daring assistant are courageously setting sail (though in a powerboat)  to do a documentary on Somali pirates. They'll be out there, helpless and vulnerable for 27 days. This takes Mr. god four chapters and thirty-four pages , and he has me on the edge of my seat. Great set-up!  But here's how Chapter Five begins, slightly paraphrased:  "They were out on the boat for 27 days."

HUH? Hold it! I was ready for action. Totally locked and loaded. What happened here? Has the author just changed directions? Is this book about to be about something else entirely? Well, in fact it pretty much is, which almost no author could get away with but this one, because most people will go wherever he takes them. But he doesn't take them anywhere for the next ummm....sixty pages. Roughly. 

What he instead perpetrates is  a sixty-page flashback told in dialogue by two people watching film clips together. Like this:
"Remember this? Here's where the pirates boarded us."
"Yeah, the timing wasn't so hot. That was just after your gun fell overboard."

"Only because you got me drunk."

Those are actually my words, but trust me, I've been true to the spirit. I'd liked to have SEEN those three actions--and in reverse order, like in, you know...a story. Sixty pages of exposition through dialogue! (As the schoolterm term goes.) What was he thinking? And flashbacks at that.

 Are you there, god? It's me, Julie. I sincerely apologize for dissing such an Olympian as You, but could you let me know why did You did this to me? Couldn't You have just sent a plague of locusts?