Big League Dreams Book

I have read only one other book by Paul West, and both Terrestrials and A Fifth of November show him to be a writer intoxicated as much by his subject as by the words he uses. Expecting more of the post-modern guessing games about who is actually writing the novel, which figured prominently in Terrestrials, I was pleasantly surprised to see I was dealing with a straight forward narrative about the Gunpowder Plot and Father Henry Garnet, superior of the English Jesuits, who is by association implicated in the events.

The novel makes clear the schism that ran through English life at the time, that despite more than a century of Protestantism, the country was still riven by religion, and persecution. A novel like this makes clear that the events behind England's fun-filled annual celebration of effigies, bonfires, and fireworks on November 5th have been blithely forgotten, and that the supposed conspiracy was half baked and worked into a fever pitch crisis of state by political figures intent on maintaining unquestioned power, exerted with force and torture, with bodies mangled and maimed and displayed with bloody glee.

Father Henry Garnet's personal predicament is made all the worse because he is innocent, which is of little concern when it comes time to expunge from the country the Jesuitical influences that "conspire" against James I.