Before reading Francisco Tatad’s first novel, “The Last Holocaust” that carries the sub-title “A Fable for Our Times” this gardener could not help wondering what it may be all about. Would it educate and edify and simultaneously entertain as did the history-based novels of Gore Vidal, for instance? I was warned not to start reading it immediately if I had many other time-sensitive things to do because the novel promised to be a page-turner.
The warning was quite justified. Ogling almost 500 pages of contemporary story-telling did prove to be a time-management challenge.
Be introduced fast to a dictatorial head of state whose title was neither Prime Minister nor President, nor King nor Queen nor Emperor nor Empress – but “Empressident” and you knew you were going for a roaringly funny experience with an author who has the sharpest sense of what political power consists of and the background and relationship between the very few who rule and the many who are ruled, oppressed and exploited.
It does take a novel of this unique kind to show quite clearly in multi-dimensional terms what the principal contradictions are in our present-day world. It is, as in centuries past, a world of believers and apostates. Tatad takes us on the ad absurdum route and succeeds. All the technological advance of humankind can be the most cruel thing that ever happened to human beings when moral relativism becomes absolute amorality.
The universal belief and knowing used to be that all is law – eternal law, natural law – but when denied as such, what is left , quite incredibly, are positive (in)human laws of constitutions, statutes and decrees against life and true happiness. Ruling groups that apostatize from belief in eternal law and natural law logically declare illegal births and illegal old-age continuance in life. But the very few – 26 to 23 ruling groups in the planet – who “win” and lord it over the many could also be the biggest losers in the end when the indomitable human spirit, earthly manifestation of Holy Spirit, proves itself that: indomitable, unconquered. The “strategies and tactics” of the faith-full over the seemingly invincible apostates, when described by Tatad, become a temptation to the reader to take note: faith can lead to real hope if allowed to be fueled by love. Yes, the Tatad fable leads the reader on in a historical fiction that is full of vivid, richly wrought detail.
I mentioned being reminded of Gore Vidal at the beginning of this review. Julian, nephew of Constantine the Great, a military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive philosopher and essayist, decided that the new world view of the crucified Jesus was only for the weak and the humanly unworthy. Julian chose, rather, to devote himself to the gods of Hellenism and embroil himself in a fierce intellectual war with the Christianity that Paul of Tarsus had earlier admitted to be the foolishness of God (which was wiser than men’s). Fact or fiction – in the end Julian the Apostate has to surrender, uttering the famous line, “Pale Galilean, thou hast conquered.”
As for “The Last Holocaust” – well, read it, read on but be warned as I was. You may not have time for much else. You will be looking around and seeing facts and truths and suspecting that the book in your hands is a recipe for change and commitment, for conversion from apostasy to a faith that is ever ancient and ever new. FINIS.