Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is clearly an influence (notably his portrayal of Catholic martyrdom in 1930s Mexico in The Power and the Glory), Bennett is his own man. No one today writes with such sombre clarity of divided loyalties and shifting political allegiances.
A small town in northern England is menaced by Irish vagrants and other imagined ‘Romish’ undesirables. In a panic, the town fortifies itself with harsh Puritan laws and sets out to torture and execute presumed subversives. The age of Catholic saints and miracles is over; a dour new religiosity reigns.
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