Lord of the World - Book 59

Lord of the World is an amazing dystopian novel, perhaps among the first of its kind, written back in 1907 and seems to prophesy the rise of people like Lenin, Hitler and Mao. It also foretells our own era's break from traditional morality and all the destruction this has wrought, even as the leaders of these movements spout words that expressed or do express noble humanitarian ideas.

It is so weird that I decided to read this book right after Liberal Fascism. I was so done with thinking about what the progressive movement and the socialist/fascist movement had brought into the world's politics. This book's whole premise is sprung from those same ideas and it takes the darker elements to their natural conclusions.

I had heard of the name of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, for many years, but I had never read anything by him. He was apparently very popular in his day but fell into obscurity. Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and did the unthinkable by converting to Roman Catholicism. He was a priest who wrote 15 books in various genres and as I said was quite popular in his day. His reputation needs to be revived! Pope Francis mentioned this book and how much he liked it and somehow I got alerted to the fact that it was free on the kindle, so I downloaded it and started reading.

First a mention about the quality of the Kindle version. Alas, you get what you pay for. There were many typos, not quite as plentiful as some free kindle books I've encountered but enough there to be annoying. I noticed that often the word 'had' was rendered 'bad,' and once the world 'raid' was typed when clearly it should have been 'read.' And there were several times when a sentence just didn't make sense to me but I wasn't sure which word had been substituted mistakenly.

Benson writes in a very descriptive way that goes deeply into what a character is thinking or how their senses are perceiving things. Often these things are odd, futuristic and dramatic, but the author has you so deep into that person's very personal sense perceptions that I found I did not really know what was going on for several paragraphs before it would become clear to me. This went throughout the book, and it was rather disorienting, but I think this was deliberate on the part of the author.

Anyway, let me get to a summary of the plot. It is in the future, at some undesignated time. The world is now divided into three factions, Humanitarians, Catholics and Eastern. The Humanitarians are in ascension in terms of power. The Church is being marginalized. The Humanitarians are scientific, intelligent, logical, idealistic and non-believers. They are represented by a young married couple, deeply in love, Oliver and Mabel Brand. Oliver is a higher up in the new Communist government in England. England itself is part of a unified Europe (shades of European Union here!). They are completely dedicated to the cause of world peace. There has been growing tension between the West and the East and war may be imminent, but a mysterious American leader by the name of Julian Felsenburgh rises to power by negotiating a peace treaty, he then gets elected Lord of the World.

In the meantime, there is an English priest by the name of Percy Franklin whose job is to report to the Pope from England on all the apostasy, defections and loss of faith going on, as seemingly the Catholic Church shrinks in the face of the rise of this new philosophy of life. There are many rumblings of persecution against Catholics. Father Franklin has a couple of encounters with the Brands and these encounters play out later in the novel.

I'll let Joseph Pearce, at Catholic Authors, express the significance and uncanniness of Benson's portrayal of what godless humanitarianism:

The world depicted in Lord of the World is one where creeping secularism and Godless humanism have triumphed over religion and traditional morality. It is a world where philosophical relativism has triumphed over objectivity; a world where, in the name of tolerance, religious doctrine is not tolerated. It is a world where euthanasia is practiced widely and religion hardly practiced at all. The lord of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent on power in the name of "peace," and intent on the destruction of religion in the name of "truth." In such a world, only a small and shrinking Church stands resolutely against the demonic "Lord of the World."

In Benson's book, euthanasia is the logical way to end suffering in the world, governments are hostile to those who are religious, and the idea of exterminating whole groups of people is a logical result of the new thinking.

It is an amazing, scary book. It is also spiritually profound. Following Father Percy's interior life as he deals with the terrible upheavals that portend the end of the world is really inspiring. The story of Mabel is also especially poignant. Benson is a magnificent writer.

This is my last book of 2013! Time to start the Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge all over again!