Lord of the World

[SPOILERS!]

Nobody can accuse me of not being truthful on this here blog. Well, 85 to 95 percent truthful. But I’m going to be brutally honest right now. I wanted to like Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World more, much much more, than I actually did.

There were parts of it I really, truly, deeply, madly loved. And there were parts of it that disappointed greatly. Not enough to cause me to despise the novel, but just enough to seed some disillusionment. Some critic in the preface asserts that Benson’s novel deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. After reading Lord of the World, I see now why it’s not.

It’s a novel of dystopic warning. Written in 1907, Benson, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, was extrapolating out to an England about a hundred years in the future. He gets some things eerily right and other things humorously wrong. The things he gets wrong are irrelevant to the plot, mostly technological things like how we travel about and where we live in the 21st century. What he gets right, though, is right on the head. Benson’s novel is a theological novel built on an epic philosophic struggle, and that struggle is nothing less than the battle for the hearts and minds of men and women everywhere.

What am I trying to say?

I’ve heard it said from a variety of sources that man is a worshiping being. That is, there’s something hardwired into our brains that cause us to desperately seek to worship something. Or Something. You find it in the Bible, you find it in theological writings of all faiths, you find it in Hollywood and on Madison Ave, you even find it in the lyrics to Bob Dylan songs (“ya gotta serve sumbodeh”). Benson details a world that has no longer decided to worship a deity. No longer will mankind worship God. From now on, mankind will worship – Man.

Now he doesn’t come right out and say it on page 4. It takes a hundred and fifty to two hundred pages to gradually and incrementally establish this … change of course, to speak polite about it. Though it’s labeled as “socialism” in the book, it’s remarkably similar to the secular humanism that’s ever more and more prevalent and outspoken in our culture today. Anyway, this new religion of Man coincides with the arrival on the global political scene of a diplomat named Julian Felsenburgh. This man is responsible for the outbreak of global peace for the first time in over a century. Soon governments are clamoring at his feet, begging for him to accept the presidencies of their various nations.

Any idea who he’s supposed to be?

The back cover calls him the antichrist, and I think that preface mentions it, too. But I don’t remember whether he is outright called so in the novel. Regardless, it’s clear he is intended to be that figure. From about page two hundred or so, after this new Religion-of-Man-which-is-not-a-Religion is established, after Felsenburgh has ascended to the newly-created presidency of Europe, things seriously start to change. Despite promises to the contrary, the fewer and fewer adherents of traditional religion, represented in the novel as Catholicism, begin to be persecuted. First with imprisonment, later with worse. After being consistently outpaced and outmaneuvered at every turn, Rome is attacked and annihilated. The Pope and the College of Cardinals are all killed. The few remaining believers in God assemble at Nazareth, and even there they are found out, and plans are made for their elimination.

On the eve of the attack upon Nazareth, the Second Coming commences.

And that’s how the novel ends.

Now as far as I can tell as a practicing Catholic, it was all theologically sound. Where it fails, I believe, is in a few fundamentals of storytelling. We follow three major characters through the novel. One becomes close to Felsenburgh and expresses some interior doubts, I think, toward the end of the novel, but nothing significant ever comes from this. Another character grows somewhat and shows some promise to change, but falls victim to the rampant euthanasia in this society. And the nominal lead character turns so mystical towards the book’s ending that I kinda found it difficult to relate to him as a human being.

Most importantly, I felt cheated that the ending did not involve any confrontation whatsoever with Felsenburgh. Upon reflection, though, this gives me cause for concern. Perhaps I am a product of my time (of course I am) and demand that the “bad guys” get their comeuppance. We all do. Is this a human thing, or a thing that’s been conditioned into us through years and decades of entertainment conditioning? Did not Jesus command us to love our enemies? Does this go as far as The Enemy? Or am I just reading too much into all this? Hmmmm. You know, after further thought, I realize that the reason I felt cheated is this: I wanted to hear what this Felsenburgh had to say, and I wanted him to lose simply through reasoned argument. I wanted his words turned back upon him and exposed for the lies that they, no doubt, would be.

If you read the Book of Revelation, however, you know that this is not how it all ends. To this point Benson remains true. I don’t want to give the impression that these literary failings derail the book. They are minor in comparison to the tidal pulls of ideas in direct conflict. What Benson says, what he predicted and predicts, is very important. All Catholics should read this book. I think most would be tremendously better off having read it than not.

So, in all honesty, I grade Lord of the World a solid B. (I always go with what my gut tells me five minutes within reading the closing words of a book.) Idea-wise, it’s an A, and story-wise, a C. And if you are a Catholic and are trying to deepen your faith, I have to say that you have to read it, at least once.


N. B. This was the most difficult book review for me to write. I don’t know if I’m satisfied with it even now that it’s posted. Something to do with wanting to achieve that fine balance between objective analysis and subjective meanings and the tension between what’s worthy in a written work and what’s poorly executed. I know that’s the essence of every book review, but this one just gave me a hard time. Perhaps it’s because, of all the books I’ve read recently, this one demands a re-read, which I simply don’t have time for.