The Beating of
his Wings
Paul Hoffman
Michael Joseph £14.99
(978-0-718-15522-3)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50 (Use code
CT205 )
IMAGINE a world that is part
medieval and part 19th-century, but contains flashes of
anachronistic modernity, where the Church's army is intent on a war
of attrition against the earth, so that God can start again. This
is the fantasy universe created by Paul Hoffman in The Beating
of his Wings, the concluding novel that follows The Left
Hand of God and The Last Four Things in his
trilogy.
It is like looking at our
own global history of intrigue and random incident in a distorting
mirror. Leeds and the Mississippi are geographically close to one
another, and, somewhere in the dark past, Alois Hutter has once
established a Fifth Reich; but an assassination attempt on Franz
Ferdinand has failed.
The narrative revolves
around Thomas Cale, who is 14 years of age when the trilogy begins.
As an infant, he had been taken into "the Sanctuary", an
impregnable rock fortress, by the Redeemers, the military arm of a
religion dedicated to the worship of "the hanged Redeemer". Here,
Cale has been trained to defend himself, to kill mercilessly, with
immense expertise, and, furthermore, to lead and defeat armies with
ruthless cunning.
Although he does not know
it, his mentor, Bosco, soon to be pope, believes that Cale is the
left hand of God, destined to serve God's purposes by wiping out
mankind. Cale has other ideas, and escapes the Sanctuary with a
handful of similarly lethal teenagers. Resembling Steerpike, of
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, he is a damaged youth. A
renegade nun tells him: "The Redeemers got you and murdered your
soul."
Hoffman is clearly working
out some of his own revenge in this series, having been educated at
what he calls one of "God's concentration camps", a Roman Catholic
boarding school in Cowley, which gave him inspiration for the
underworld he has spawned. The Church here believes in an Old
Testament God who demands absolute fealty and total
annihilation.
The trilogy charts Cale's
escape, the fatal calamities that dog him, and, ultimately, the
circumstance by which - at 16 years old, almost fatally weakened by
a mysterious illness - he finds himself facing his nemesis on the
battlefield. Cast as a reluctant agent of history, he is the only
one who can save the world.
The narrative creaks at times, and loses its way towards the
end, but it has, none the less, a feral, gruesome momentum, and is
darkly funny and endlessly fascinating.
