God's Fires

This is the first book by Patricia Anthony I have ever read and it will not be the last. What is so atypical about this story is/are the many genres covered - history, mystery, science fiction, religion - and each and every one superb. The novel is a virtual time machine (reminiscent of Carr's "The Alienist" in that respect). To step into such a "foreign" time and place - Portugal, the Inquisition, the pre-Industrail Middle Ages, the budding of science and the Renaissance and the resistance by the Catholic Church - do "Become" a reporter of those times is a task that few will undertake and still fewer accomplish well.The aliens remain at a distant, known through vague and illusive visitations and in the end, are in the end as mysterious as they were when first mentioned. The Jesuit hero, the man who assists the inquisition despite his own sins and inner thoughts, is as real as any character I have ever encountered. His lover is an altogether different person but incredibly attractive in her own right.The portrayal of a society mired in mysticism, ruled by an Iron Fist of religious zealotry, is intimate and just - even fair. The lives of people below the surface, beyond the public utterances of loyalty and fealty and devotion, is what attracts one to the many varied characters. The young Father Bernardo becomes a foil for all that is right and wrong with the Church of that age. The parallel story of the retarded King Alfonso and his brother Pedro meshes beautifully with the tale of aliens and unrelenting persecution by the Inquisition. In a brilliant move, the living machine of the aliens (the "acorn") imbues this retarded prince with advanced scientific ideas that he feels compelled to share. The ending finds one breathless with anticipation and dread, hopeful yet at the same time resigned to the inexorable chain of events that must happen. There is no intervention - either military, divine or alien. Things play out to a horrible but strangely satisfying conclusion. This is an incredibly vivid work, soaring and shocking and in the end, meditative.

After reading "Flanders" by Patricia Anthony, and loving it, I decided to read another of her books, and "God's Fires" was the one I found at the bookstore. The decision to purchase it is one that I will not regret, for it is a wonderful, and well-written, work of fiction. The year is 1662, and a feeble-minded but good-natured teenager reigns in Portugal, but the Inquisition actually rules. In a remote village strange sights appear, and an "acorn" crashes to earth, leaving two live, and one dead, "creatures". But what exactly are these beings, and what about the other signs and wonders appearing in the area? The Holy Office of the Church will get to the bottom of the mystery, or people will burn. This book shows the fine line between faith and fanaticism, courage and foolishness, and love and lust. The language is all that I had expected from the author of "Flanders", and the pure emotion of this book practically leaps off of the page at you. The Church, and certain clergymen, do not fare well in their portrayal, but then, the Church has much to apologise for concerning the Inquisition. As I said when I reviewed "Flanders", read this book!

What a fine (if lengthy) novel. High themes and low farce combine in this genre-busting book. It ain't quite science fiction and it ain't quite historical fiction, but who cares? I would guess that fans of this book will enjoy "An Instance of the Fingerpost," and vice versa.

In reading this book I was struke with how much societies in Europe were bounded by the Catholic Church. No where did Rome hold more sway than in Spain and Portugal. The Inquisition stayed in business there until well into the 1800's. The problem the Portugese faced had to do with winning their freedom from Spain and trying to re-establish their dominate culture. The story opens six years after Portugese separtation from Spain.Into this turmoil drops a spaceship. The computer onboard can speak to minds, but has been severely damaged. The aliens onboard have visited this small Portugese town before and raped some of the women. Or so it looks like. It could be atrificial incemination. It is never clear.The King of Portugal at the time is retarded and childlike in his twenties. He sees the "acorn" fall and goes to see the wonder. He finds one of the aliens dead and two others unable to speak.At the same time you find a circuit riding Inquisition Officer trying to keep the people in the villiage from being burned as heritics. The king says something to the effect that Galileo was correct and the Earth goes around the sun. This causes a high official from the Inquisition to hurry to the villiage to stamp on the king.This is a Tragedy. Yet it reveals how people looked at the world up until just recently. The conflict here is between the Rule of Law, the power of unrestrained heirarchies, the Rule of Whim, and the Rule of the Church.

There are many ways through Heaven's Gate. The recent cult occurrence gave many of us pause. What could prompt reasonable people to take faith to such lethal extremes? We seem stymied by the cult phenomenon and yet adhere to the standard religions of our day; belief structures depending on virgin births, celestial rewards, ETERNAL punishments, and the damning of unbaptised infants to limbo. These ideas are orthodox, and therefore not absurd. Beliefs that run counter to our own personal experience of life and the human condition are tolerated in the name of a higher reality. Patricia Anthony's latest book takes us back to a time where belief was less optional and carried a higher tariff than our current institutions exact. The action takes place in Portugal in the 1600's, when the 2nd most powerful colonizing power in Europe was ruled, by divine right, by Afonso, an idiot. The rest of Europe has undermined the Church as the single arbiter of human intercourse and political power, but the Portuguese aristocracy is still fighting for its piece of the temporal pie. Into this volatile mixture send a parish Inquisitor with a human connection to his flock, a post-Sephardic witch who has died once, a pregnant virgin, a wheel of Fire, and a silver Acorn descending from the heavens to confound the Holy Inquisitor and his cranky bowels. This is not a happy type of story. In fact, this is a story filled with apprehension, with emphasis on the terror many of us find in dealing with the reality our socieites inflict in the name of orthodoxy, but it is not a tale without hope, or beauty, or triumph of the human spirit.