Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

The cold war between pro-capitalist and pro-communist spooks is trasplanted into the killing fields of Reformation Holy Roman Empire by the collective of writers known as Luther Blisset. The story attempts to follow the careers of a radical protestant and an underground member of the inquisition ("Q") for over 30 years, as they circle and try to dispose of each other. The set-pieces (the battle of Frankenhausen, the revolution in Leyden) are well-told, but most of the characters are not well-defined and so it is difficult to care for them.

It is as if though the characters are an excuse to retell the history of the times. That wouldn't be so bad, except that the history is not fairly told. The authors obviously intended the radical fringe of early protestantism as a metaphor for radical leftist revolutionaries of the XX Century. This impression is heightened if one considers the attachments to the book, which besides a few pictures of the main characters, includes instruments of torture of right-wing or pro-Western governments of recent times.

In reality Thomas Müntzer, the radical theologician that led the German peasants into senseless slaughter at Frankenhausen was not an idealist who wanted to redeem the masses, but a millennarian prophet who cared more about destroying the old world than about creating a new one (see Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millennium" for a fascinating review of Müntzer in the context of a very old tradition of religious radicals that actually reaches to our very day), whose rethoric of bloody extermination of opponents strikes a reader as very similar to that of Stalinists in the show trials of the 1930s. And it is surely ridiculous to attribute the failure of the Münster Anabaptists not to sectarian politics but to manipulation by popish agent-provocateurs as appears in this book. This is a common accusation among radical left groups, who are inclined to impute their inability to get along and work together to divisive actions by obscure class-enemies or imperialists.

In fact, the hagiographic presentation of Müntzer is a dead giveaway of where this book is coming from: East German history presented this enemy of both Pope and Luther as a proto-Marxist, and in fact the largest painting in the world refers to Müntzer at the battle of Frankenhausen and is titled "Bourgeouis Revolution in Germany", painted by Werner Tübke, and commissioned by the East German leadership (400 feet long, 45 feet high, and still around, in its special built-to-purpose museum) prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The analogy between radical reformers and XX century Marxist revolutionaries is not subtly evinced, and it is a pity, for subtleness would have had more impact on the readers.

The book is not only manichean in its portrayal of good, but misguided revolutionaries and an all-powerful and a malignant Catholic Church (represented by Cardinal Gianpietro Carafa, later elected Pope and known as Paul IV) where political calculations trump all religious commitment (as evidenced by s fictitious conversation with Cardinal del Monte who acknowledges his essential agreement with reform partisans, but indicates that he will be unable to do anything about it since he has just been elected Pope). It is also very defficient in character portrayal (as already noted, all characters sound the same), and has a a tenuous plot (it ties together many episodes that in reality were not connected, so that the parts of the book are greater than the whole). On the other hand, these episodes are so thrilling in themselves, and so little known about them by most people, that even a mediocre novel such as this one may be defended on the grounds that maybe some of the readers will be interested in learning more and finding out the truth. If you would like to know more about this era and can be bothered to take up a hefty but wonderful book, don't bother with this one. Go for Diarmaid McCullough's "The Reformation", which tells the whole story in a readable fashion, and without hidden agendas.