"[O]ne of the best Christian novels about forgiveness and grace I've ever read."

The novel? Michael O'Brien's Island of the World, published earlier that year by Ignatius Press. Olasky recently, in the July 4, 2009, edition of World magazine, listed O'Brien's novel as one of the Top 40 books he's read and reviewed since 2007. It is particularly interesting that—as far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm mistaken)—O'Brien is the only Catholic on the list and Island of the World is the only novel on the list. Most of the other books (all non-fiction, it appears) are works of history, theology, or cultural criticism.

All those books make sobering reading, but—as is often the case—fiction shows best the friction of ethnicities and ideologies in combat, as well as the opportunities for healing. Michael O'Brien's Island of the World (Ignatius, 2007) is one of the best Christian novels about forgiveness and grace I've ever read. Its central character is Josip Lasta, a child born in Bosnia in 1933 who loses all he loves at the hands of Serbian nationalists during World War II and Tito's Communists during the 1950s.

The book is long but hard to put down. It includes brilliant scenes of the love of a father for his son, of terror that would make a boy want to die, of a wondrous love at first sight, of terror that would make a man want to die, of a prison island where only dreams of vengeance keep a man from dying, of despair that outweighs vengeance, and of a tipping point where grace outweighs despair.

In the end, the book is about the worst and the best. Flashbacks of the hell Josip has seen keep him from even entering a church. He yearns to leave this world and finds God sending him to a new world. Crucifixion, through God's providence, leads to resurrection, and in turn the opportunity to save other lives. Such a summary of Island of the World sounds theoretical and dry: O'Brien, though, like the best novelists, turns words into flesh.

Prologue

I am old. Time has revealed itself and shed its pretense of eternity; though it is of course contained within eternity. I clean the hallways, take out the

garbage, try not to be irritated by the roar of ten million automobiles, and by the jackhammers that are breaking up the street outside the front door, only to lay down another stratum of tar for future generations to dig up. This is a big city, and though I have lived within it for close to forty years, I still do not understand how it survives.

Its people display an astonishing variety of colors, languages, temperaments, and ratios of good and evil (as is everywhere), but they do not seem unhappy. Neither do they contemplate the body of the world. Its foundations are below them, they believe, in the concrete and tar, the pipes and wires. During my time among them I have noticed this delusion particularly. Seldom have I encountered the few who are awake, who cast their gaze to the real foundations, which, as human beings should know, are above.

Soon I will leave this place and return to my first home. Perhaps I will find myself waiting for me there. Is this a candid admission that I have failed to know myself? Yes, of course it is. What else is there to learn save that we know almost nothing? I am not referring to biographical data, but to something more important, the character of presence that appears to be displacement, as a stone or tree displaces air as it fills space. That I am a displaced person is true enough. Yet this is true of all men, each in his way. What is to be learned of me now rests in memory; the interior, a country that contains ranges of mountains and their shadowed vales, the beds of alpine glens, the crevasse and its fall from which there is no return, and the summit from which one does not wish to return.

Why do we in memory seek ourselves, when it is ourselves who shape the memories? The truth is, we shape and are shaped. In the beginning we unwittingly find our forms, as the first steps of a child. Later we take our longer strides, with secret timorousness, preferring a crowd of companions. Then, in time, we go farther out into the world with blind and knowing willfulness, with good intent and ill, alone inside ourselves. For in solitude the blur of safe indistinction becomes sharp and dangerous identity. Then, when identity has sealed its form, we seek union with the other islands, within the island of the world.

Of my life I can only resort to pictures. It began, as most lives do, with warmth and milk and love.The village was hidden from the world. At least it thought itself so, for it was ringed by peaks, and its people assumed that a valley suspended so high above all others was exempt from tribulation. We the young believed this. Our elders encouraged the illusion. They did not want to rob us of our joy and perhaps desired to share in it a little. And so the mountains were the meridians of all creation. The brook that came to us from the upper crags ran unfailing, clear and swift between the houses. The little fields and flocks fed us well. From other places men of wisdom came from time to time and taught us of the world beyond, which was a place of fear and confusion. For us, the children of Rajska Polja, which is the fields of heaven, their accounts seemed more remote than the tales of Anthony and Francis, who could talk to fish and birds.

In this place where we first appeared, we did not doubt that love is the path of ascent. We did not think of it, as we did not think of the air we breathed. In time our flesh received instruction as we grew, and our hearts and our souls. We came to know that love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence.

We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.

THE MOUNTAINS

I

That summer, three gifts come to him.

Because the entire year has been full of interesting events, it is not clear at first that they are gifts. The first is the journey he makes with his father to the sea, leaving the mountains behind, though they cannot be left behind really, because they reach as far as the waters of the coast, and tower always in the composition of his mind. The sea itself is the second gift, for it is not an aspect of the world that he has seen before. The third is the miracle of the swallow. This last gift, it seems to him, is the least of the three.

"Josip, tomorrow you will see a great thing", says his father as they rise by candlelight before dawn, putting on their clothes beside the stove while mother makes a fire. "You will see the waters of the Adriatic."

"Is it like a lake?" Josip asks. He has seen photographs of the ocean in one of his father's books, but it is hard to tell its size from them.

"Much bigger than a lake."

"How big is it, really, Tata?" he presses with earnest curiosity, for he believes that his father has an answer for everything.

"It is beyond measuring, Josip."

"Is it as big as the sky?"

"That is a difficult question. When you go there you will see that the sky above it is greater than the sky above our mountains."

Josip furrows his brow in concentration.

"This I do not understand!"

"You must see it with your own eyes and then you will understand."

The boy closes his eyelids and touches them with his fingertips.

"The sea will show you many things, Josip."

"Fish?"

"Yes, fish", says his father, smiling, as he lights the oil lamp above the kitchen table. "But more than fish."

"Squid?" He has seen a picture of squid and read a little about them.

"Perhaps we will see a squid."

"With a spear I will catch one, and we will cook rice in its ink."

"First you will have to catch one;"

"Will we play in the sea?"

"We will play in it."

"Miro," interjects his mother, "do not let him be too. . ."

"Too?"

"Too like himself. If you see him about to throw himself into deep water, stop him."

"I will stop him", laughs his father.

"He cannot swim. He is nine years old, and he cannot swim."

"Marija, if we do not play in the dangerous surf, we will drown in puddles."

She scowls and crosses her arms--her usual response whenever her husband is too witty.

"No one swims in Rajska Polja," Josip pipes, "except in the rain."

"You and your friends pretend to swim," says his mother, kissing him on the forehead, "but if it was anything more than rain, you would drown, you would die, and how would you like that!"

"I wouldn't drown", says Josip, cramming bread into one side

of his mouth and tilting a crock of warm milk toward the other. 1k chokes on it, coughing and sputtering.

"Already you're drowning!" cries his mother.

As they eat the remainder of their meal on the little wooden table beside the window, the roosters begin crowing. A slice of red flame slips over the crest of the mountain, drawing in its train a veil of pink. His father's eyes wander toward it.

"Rose-fingered dawn", he murmurs.

"Will we bring The Iliad or The Odyssey with us?" Josip asks. "Will you read aloud to me when we sleep at the sisters' convent?

"Finish chewing before you speak", says his mother. "Miro, please, enough of war."

"It is an old, old war, Mamica", Josip pleads. "The rage of Achilles is very interesting."

"We will bring no books", the father answers. "Instead we will see with our own eyes what Odysseus saw. We will see the waters he sailed upon in Argo."

"Will we see monsters?"

"That is always possible."

The sun is just rolling over the ridge of Zamak mountain by the time Josip and his father are ready to go. In the yard the night-chill lingers, and the smell of sheep droppings is pleasant to the nose. While his father leads Svez the donkey from the shed behind the house and harnesses him to the cart, Josip gazes down the lane, which is the only street in Rajska Polja. Two dozen houses are scattered haphazardly along its muddy ruts. Most of them are made of field stone, a few of wood, many with their back walls under the slopes of the hills. On both sides of the village, pastures rise to the east and the west. Beyond the grass there is forest, and above the trees high bare ridges merge with sharper peaks.

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I could not put it down, quite literally. I read in in one sitting, about 8 hours.

All of O'Brien's novels are worth reading. Strangers and Sojourners explores the coming persecution when parents passing on the Christian/Catholic faith will be declared child abuse because of our opposition to the same-sex agenda. Cry of Stone explores both the soul of the artist and the "little way" of poverty--both material and spiritual poverty. Sophia House takes up the irrationality of modern art, the tragedy of same-sex attraction resulting from abuse as a child but offers the drive of the ascetic/monastic/artist's embrace of suffering as a Christian way to deal with a burden one did not ask for--and then translates that into how one deals with the horrors of war when they are visited upon oneself (as well as the relationship between Christianity and Judaism).

Some may not have a taste for O'Brien's philosophical/theological digressions, but he can also write movingly of what goes on in the soul. And, if one's not in a hurry, the philosophy/theology is actually quite profound.

I read this book 2 months ago, and simply could not put it down.

It is, without doubt, the very best fiction novel I have ever read. Bar none. It caused me to re-examine my entire life and the way I live.

It is everything that the posters above say it is.

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