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God's Fires, 1997
Most of Patricia Anthony's books explore the theme of human reaction to alien visitors and can fairly be catalogued as science fiction holding a particular interest for UFO buffs, although her work is always deservedly praised as skillfully crafted and intellectually provocative. God's Fires fits the foregoing remarks, but it also tells an absorbing story of passion and doomed lives depicted with insight, sardonic humour, and bitterness--a far larger book than its disguising science-fiction component would immediately imply. In its wider dimension God's Fires challenges readers to perceive how certain aspects of modern times may actually differ from an often deprecated past historical period only in particulars of custom and prevailing beliefs, not in the impulses and capacities of human nature, and how rash we might be to suppose that a cruel and tragic conclusion could not ensue today were we abruptly forced to deal with the complex problem Anthony persuasively imagines in this adroitly written novel.
During the days of the Inquisition in Portugal a "star" falls to earth near the small town of Quintas where perplexed local priests have recently been hearing rumours of miracles, including a virgin pregnancy, and receiving strangely heretical confessions about contact with "angels"--all of which ordinary folk of the 20th century would probably leap to interpret in terms of the clichés (alien medical experiments, kidnappings, crop circles, etc.) associated with our popular UFO mythology regarding "close encounters of the third kind," although of course our theologians, scientists, and politicians would surely find plenty to say about a verified event, just as our unnerved governments might find plenty to do. Likewise, Quintas becomes the focus of an urgent Holy Office investigation conducted by an incompatible, bickering team of harassed priests and secular lawyers whose views range from the skeptical to the credulous, the politically expedient to the mystical, but who are required to come up with firm decisions that will settle the matter before it gets out of hand and restore such order as the Church and Society of the era demand.
The interrogators warily begin to examine witnesses and suspected heretics, their task complicated by the inconvenience of the mentally retarded, adolescent King Afonso having set up camp beside the fallen "acorn," convinced by telepathic dialogue with the damaged space-vessel's failing computer that God is granting him personal revelations about the nature of the universe. While the confused young monarch shocks the assembled clergy with his Galilean heresies, notably a quaint though accurate (according to modern-day astronomy) description of the formation of the solar system, his brother Pedro mounts an efficient political coup and wrests the regency from Count Castelo Melhor. And two silent, passive, enigmatic aliens docilely allow themselves to be imprisoned, gazing upon their captors with huge, unfathomable black eyes. Imps, demons, angels, pygmies from Africa or Borneo, strange New World animals "catapulted" into Portugal by the Spanish foe in a fiendish plot to sow civil unrest?
God's Fires is a semi-historical novel of unique humanity, with a cast of well-drawn, lifelike characters whose interplay is both tragic and exhilarating: the soul-searching Jesuit Manoel Pessoa, a rationalist without faith, who hopes at first to defuse the dangerous situation with a cursory proforma inquiry sparing the Quintans dire consequences; his lover Berenice, a herbalist hiding her Jewish origins, who cures the town's sick and is shunned as a witch; the kindly old Franciscan Soares, who believes in the angels; the selfish and gluttonous Inquisitor-General Gomes, who overrides the tribunal with his authority to light the pyres; the tense, high-strung mystic Bernardo; the enchantingly quixotic King Afonso.
Anthony's ruthless and arresting account of the imaginary happening immerses the reader in an unusual, compelling story and also provides a lucid demonstration of how the unprecedented and the mysterious can only be analyzed and (mis)understood in terms of the dogmas accepted as tests of truth by the people of a given time and culture, within the limitations of their religious and philosophical convictions, their scientific knowledge, their political prejudices, myths, and popular superstitions. While intently following the Quintan affair to its inevitable, splendid, and terrible end, readers will be stimulated to thoughtful musing on both past and present systems of belief.
© Wordreign, December 1999
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