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Andrew Daily, August 4, 2008

What a strange beast of a book this is. Part historical novel, part spy thriller, part philosophical rumination, part radical political manifesto, this book portrays the history of the radical reformation as an allegory of our own troubled days. All written by four authors posing as one.

The book opens at Frankenhausen, the climactic battle of the German Peasant's War (1524/5). A charismatic former monk, Thomas Muntzer, led a largely unarmed peasant army against the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, believing God would intervene and bring victory. The result is not hard to predict. We meet the main character (whose name varies) attempting to escape the resulting massacre.

The rest of the book follows the narrator's trail across Europe, from one heretical sect to another, all plotting to overthrow the existing powers and establish a heaven on earth, contra the landlords and the Church. He is haunted and blocked at every turn by Q, a sinister papal agent.

The book is an allegory of the fortunes of radical, particularly radical Italian politics, in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. The novel's closest contemporaries are Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, in that it is a crowded, sprawling, entertaining, hilarious, anarchic, messy joy of a novel, one that pleases at many levels, from straight-ahead thriller on to a novel of ideas.

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