Books like The War of the End of the World

Practical EschatologyAt precisely the time that Fyodor Dostoevsky was writing of the Grand Inquisitor and his confrontation with a Jesus returned to the world (1879-80), the events he was fictionalising were playing themselves out in the scrublands of the Brazilian State of Bahia. In fact, the Brazilian drama surpasses Dostoevsky’s plot by including all the celebrities from the original biblical stories. Who says history doesn’t repeat itself?Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World is a docu-fictional account of the so-called War of Canudos and the events leading to it from 1877 to 1897. In Vargas Llosa’s account it doesn’t take much imagination to identify Antonio, The Counsellor, as Jesus; the revolutionary Scotsman, Galileo Gall, as St. Paul; the local administrative power, Baron de Canabrava, as Pilate; and the psycho-fanatic, Big Joao, as Judas. The Mystic, The Revolutionary, Satan, and The Betrayer could be playing out their cosmic roles rather than merely bit parts in a provincial theatre.Antonio’s disciples (the wretchedly poor, the dispossessed, criminals, the psychologically needy), followed Antonio in increasingly large and militant groups as he roamed the Galilee of Bahia State. Wherever they went both plagues and miracles were reported, thus combining Old and New testament references. The disciples had no means of support but lived off the contributions of food and water offered in the villages they entered. Antonio preached and the band grew.What he preached was a kind of repentance: the rejection of political republicanism and the return to monarchy (Brazil became the realm of the Portuguese king after the Napoleonic putsch of his country in 1807). The details of things to be held anathema were derivative: irreligion, taxes and the metric system. Let the Samaritans of the South in Rio and São Paulo have their republican apostasy, Antonio and his followers knew the joys of the true Kingdom of God (ruled by Dom Pedro of course) with its capital in Salvador. They resisted the forces of the state like the Maccabees at Masada. Their attack formation was that of a religious holy day procession; they used whatever weaponry available in close combat. They did not mind suffering casualties of ten to one for the cause.Galileo Gall was the (mythical, unhistorical) Osama bin Laden of his day. He represents how the movement was shaped by cultural forces outside of Brazil and often quite opposed to the teaching of Antonio. Gall was persona non grata in his native Britain, jailed in Turkey, Egypt and the USA for proletarian agitation and unionising, and wanted for murder in France, in Spain, and in Portugal. His gospel was that of the anarchists Proudhon and Bakunin. Gall's anthropological vision was only slightly less radical than that of St. Paul. He was convinced that phrenology, the study of the shape of the head, told all. For Paul, only belief mattered, for Galileo it was hat size.As with the movement of Jesus, Antonio’s went well at first. But success, as so often, was its own undoing. As a fiction structured around historical events, there is never any doubt that everything will end in tears and death. Vargas Llosa’s brilliance lies not in creating suspense about the outcome but about the development of the characters as they realise what they are themselves creating. For me this is the magic of The War of the End of the World.It is also a rather splendid allegory of the early development of Christianity. Vargas Llosa's insertion of the Paul-character in the form of Galileo Gall suggests that he meant such an allegorical interpretation. The rebel who ensures both the dissemination and the distortion of the message of hope was an ideological as well as literary temptation he couldn't resist.