Book Review! Catholic World on SWAN KNIGHT’S SON
I had not seen this until a sharpeyed reader pointed it out to me:
Deep down, human beings know we’re made for something epic…
Although a modern teenager, Gil wants more than anything to become a knight. His chivalrous outlook on life has led to his expulsion from school for taking on a gang of juvenile delinquents in combat.
Thrust into the world on his own, but with the help of a talking stray dog, Gilberec trains for knighthood under the gruff tutelage of a magical bear.
But when a stranger claiming to come from his father delivers him the key to a disappearing door, Gilberec’s life will change forever. With what he finds beyond the door, Gil goes a-questing; and serious trouble finds him right away.
Fighting terrible foes beneath the town’s enormous Christmas tree, Gil discovers that evil both fears and hates what the Nativity really means.
A monstrous wolf snarls an ugly denial of the Incarnation: “God does not rut! He is neither begotten nor begets! There is no Christmas because there was no Christ!” In the ultimate blasphemy, echoing the sacrilegious claims of the so-called historical Jesus Seminar, the wolf continues, “No one has ever drunk the blood nor taken the flesh of Jesus, save wolf and wolf alone!”
It is a demonic perspective on Christ because, in the world of John C. Wright, the forces of evil include demonic and supernatural powers.
As Gil’s mother tells him, “Men are the thralls and serfs, the gladiators and poppets, the concubines and cattle, the pets and toys of powers they do not see, do not know, and do not recall upon waking.”
But there are good powers as well. We find good talking animals, good trees, and a powerful good magic which, as the mermaid tells him, “ultimately boils down to love.”
Indeed, Wright’s greatest accomplishment must certainly be this belief in what Hamlet once told Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Wright’s universe is a deep one, a fully real one that includes all the planes of existence denied by so much materialist fiction of our day.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
