Hell on Earth and the Hope of Heaven | Interview with Michael D. O'Brien | Ignatius Insight
Hell on Earth and the Hope of Heaven | An Interview with Michael D. O'Brien on his new novel
Island of the World
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/mobrien_interview_dec07.asp
This interview was originally published on December
26, 2007, by LifeSite News (www.lifesitenews.com),
Combermere, Ontario. It appears here with the gracious permission of LifeSite
News and Michael O'Brien.
Question: Tell us about your new novel, The Island
of the World, to give readers a sense of it.
O'Brien: The Island of the World is the story of a child born in 1933 into the
turbulent world of the Balkans and tracing his life into the third millennium.
The central character is Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher
in a remote village high in the mountains of the Bosnian interior. As the novel
begins, World War II is underway and the entire region of Yugoslavia is torn by
conflicting factions: German and Italian occupying armies, and the rebel forces
that resist them—the fascist Ustashe, Serb nationalist Chetniks, and
Communist Partisans. As events gather momentum, hell breaks loose, and the
young and the innocent are caught in the path of great evils. Their only
remaining strength is their religious faith and their families.
Q: Is this primarily a historical novel, or perhaps a political one?
O'Brien: No, it is
neither, though of course history and politics play important roles in the
story. Its primary focus is on persons, dramatized through the life of a
person, a soul. However, the history that is part of the plot recounts
accurately what happened, and as such the book may be somewhat controversial.
For more than a century, the confused and highly inflammatory history of
former-Yugoslavia has been the subject of numerous books, many of them rife
with revisionist history and propaganda. The peoples of the Balkans live on the
border of three worlds: the Islamic, the Orthodox Slavic East, and Catholic
Europe, and as such they stand in the path of major world conflicts that are not
only geo-political but fundamentally spiritual. This novel cuts to the core
question: how does a person retain his identity, indeed his humanity, in any
absolutely dehumanizing situation?
Q: How does he retain his humanity?
O'Brien: In the life of the central character, I try to show
that this will demand suffering and sacrifice, heroism and even holiness. When
he is twelve years old, his entire world is destroyed, and so begins a lifelong
journey to find again the faith which the blows of evil have shattered. The
plot takes the reader through Josip's youth, his young manhood, life under the
Communist regime, imprisonment, hope and loss and unexpected blessings, the
growth of his creative powers as a poet, and the ultimate test of his life.
This novel is about the crucifixion of a soul — and resurrection.
Q: Why did you write this particular book? What story
are your trying to tell through it?
O'Brien: The
original conception for Island was personal, in other words a
novel that just grew in my imagination as I came to know people who had lived
in former Yugoslavia during decisive moments of its history, especially in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the same time, there was an interior
spiritual prompting, quite strong, a sense that the experience of these people
has significance for the entire world. Both senses struck me simultaneously.
Q: In what sense does their story have significance for the world?
O'Brien: The 20th
century was a period of crucifixion for many nations and peoples, not only because
of geo-political reasons but also because a definitive stage in history was
enacted before our eyes, a multi-dimensional one. The consistent religious
persecution that always accompanied the crushing of genuine democratic
aspirations in those nations had roots in existential strata deeper than
ideology. The wars of the past century and those currently underway are, in
essence, spiritual struggles. And it is far from over.
Q: When you say "spiritual" doesn't this imply abstract concepts? How does the spiritual
affect the powerful forces of nations, wars, economies, culture, and other
factors that shape mankind's future?
O'Brien: Man's spiritual condition changes how he
understands himself and the world around him. When a sufficient number of
people are spiritually impoverished, or deformed, they can be motivated to
unite into factions that work toward radical changes in society—and this
effects negatively the entire human community when their "abstractions" work
out their terrible logic. The revolutions and tyrannies of the 20th
century provide ample evidence of this. Yet the decisive events of that era are
not yet resolved, the effects go on. In the 21st century, new forms
of the old beast are materializing in the contemporary world, but they are
cosmeticized, disguised, masked.
Q: What is this mask, precisely?
O'Brien: I believe we must exercise great caution about any
collectivist ideas that present themselves to the mind as solutions to "the
problem of man." I include in this category the new globalists' models of what
is called universal "governance." As all ideologues do, they offer us
superficial either/or choices. Supposedly, one must choose between war and
world government. They do not understand that globalism will not change the
fundamental human condition. Globalism is ultra-nationalism expanded to a
planetary scale, without the safety measures of cultural and religious
diversity. World-reshapers are long familiar to those people who have lived
through political experiments. The survivors have heightened awareness, good
antennae: They understand that beneath the supposed humanitarianism of
collectivists, in whatever guise they appear, you will always find a killer.
Survivors know that presumption and arrogance over mankind brings forth, in time,
the fruit of death.
Q: Do you know many survivors?
O'Brien: In my
life I have known many people who suffered under Fascism and Soviet Communism.
I also have close friendships with a number of Croatian people who are surely
heroes, and some of them quite possibly genuine saints. Though the republics of
former-Yugoslavia have not received the public attention in the West that other
nations suffering under Communist regimes have received, its story is unique
and informative. For several decades, Yugoslavia was incorrectly viewed in the
West as a benign form of Communist government, Tito's "socialism with a human
face." Nothing could be further from the truth. The illusion was created by
massive propaganda, carefully engineered cultural impressionism for export
abroad, and the corrupt motives of some Western governments, which had powerful
political and financial investments in their so-called friendship with the Tito
regime. When it crumbled, new forms of hell broke loose. I believe that what
took place in those lands east of the Adriatic is a microcosm of the ongoing
war that will last until the end of time.
Q: What is it about dehumanizing situations —
such as those in this book — which can be instrumental in helping or
inspiring people to retain their faith and family identity, and perhaps even
affirm it?
O'Brien: When
human beings are assaulted by radically dehumanizing experiences, as
individuals or as part of systemic catastrophes, each of us is put to a
fundamental test of character, our core belief about what really goes on in the
universe. In such situations, man without God feels that he can rely only on
himself, or on politics as pseudo-salvation. By contrast, man in union with God
experiences a transcending hope, and a gradual union with Christ. Little by
little he learns that his sufferings are redemptive. Easy to say, much harder
to live. In fact, the blows of radical evil put the soul to an ultimate test.
Q: What is this test and how does one react to such a
test?
O'Brien: One
either collapses inwardly and withdraws, escaping further into the realm of the
autonomous self, the world of fear and self-preservation at all costs,
regardless of what is betrayed. Conversely, one strikes outward in rage,
strives to seize the weapons of death in order to overcome death. Both
solutions are inevitably short-lived and breed more forms of destruction. The
third way is Christ's way—one which is open to all of us, but which is
impossible to discover, let alone live fully, without an ever-deepening union with
Jesus. It is a way that is neither passive nor aggressive. But to find this
way, man must begin to learn, at least at a fundamental human level, that he is
more than a clever animal or a cell in a collective. In our times, man no
longer knows who he is, cannot apprehend his eternal value, because historical
and social forces all around him define him to himself in tragically stunted
terms, minimize or negate his value for the sake of "the People" or variations
on a perceived "common good." This is as true in so-called democracies that are
based in materialism as it is for overtly oppressive regimes. Only in Christ
can we discover who we really are; only in Christ can we discover the paths to
authentic common goods.
Q: Are there relatives, friends, or people you've
actually known on whom this story is based?
O'Brien: Many of
the sub-plots and secondary stories and characters, and numerous details of
crucial scenes, were told to me by the people who experienced them. The
background historical settings are more the fruit of three years of extensive
research. Again, because of the massive amount of revisionist history regarding
those times, it was absolutely necessary to cross-check every detail, and then
cross-check the sources. This process was painstaking, yet highly instructive
for me, because it revealed something about the nature of disinformation in our
times, the distortion of historical facts and their significance by sources in
both East and West. It was, in an empirical way, very important for me to meet
many Croatian and Slovenian families, whose uncles, fathers, brothers, had been
slaughtered in Partisan death-pits. Some escaped to tell about it once they
reached the West. Only since 1991 has the extent of the mass murders at
Bleiburg and Maribor and also in the forested regions just south of the
Austrian border begun to come to light as more and more mass graves are
discovered. I am not referring to the later genocide committed by the Serbs in
1991-95, but to the genocide committed immediately after the WWII by the
government of Yugoslavia. Here in Canada, I personally know six families in
exile who lost family members through that wholesale slaughter. Hundreds of
thousands of unarmed people, a large portion of whom were civilians, were
exterminated by Tito's Partisans with the knowledge of the Allied forces.
Later, the concentration camps on Yugoslav soil were established. In one of the
worst, Goli Otok, for example, it is estimated that 30,000 to 50,000 political
prisoners and religious prisoners of conscience died under conditions of
extreme brutality.
Q: What can people learn through reading this work of
fiction about the effects of disastrous global events of our times?
O'Brien: It is
estimated by human rights watchers that more than 170 million people died at
the hands of their own governments during the 20th century. This is a sobering
statistic. It is not paranoia to ponder the possibility that Statism,
especially in its social revolutionary forms, by its very nature negates what
is most human in man, his absolute value, his eternal value I should add.
Whenever his ultimate worth as an individual person is denied, the whole of
society is damaged, because the very architecture of genuine human community
has been damaged at its foundations. In Europe and North America,
state-sanctioned and even state-funded murder of pre-birth children, as well as
the growing practice of euthanasia of the elderly and infirm, are ominous
signs. Yet we tend to minimize what these signs really mean because we presume,
quite na•vely, that we are living in a democracy, and we endlessly talk about
it as if it were a permanent fixture of our world. What the survivors of the
wars and tyrannies of the past century have to teach us is that democracy can
disappear more swiftly than we think, if certain psychological, economic, and
cultural forces are manipulated by social engineers. I find it fascinating that
the overwhelming majority of survivors whom I know are consistent in their
warnings about the current state of the West.
Q: What warnings do they offer us?
O'Brien: They say practically with one voice that we are
morally and spiritually unprepared to simply recognize, let alone resist, the
accelerating corruption of our civilization. I am not so much speaking of threats
posed by radical Islamicists or the very real dangers of an expansionist
Communist China, but rather I'm referring to our own internal auto-demolition.
As a number of Catholic philosophers have warned, notably Josef Pieper and
Etienne Gilson, and the historian Christopher Dawson, the rhetoric about
freedom and democracy always increases as the real thing declines. Our capacity
to exercise civilized co-responsibility—to live in a free and
responsible way has been steadily declining since the late 1960's,
and this social revolution has primary come about by the top-down imposition of
radically immoral laws. We must not presume that democracies are immune from
degeneration into totalitarianism. It is also worth considering that a
totalitarianism with a "democratic" face may bring about a more comprehensive
and long-range corruption of what is best in the human community, because it
can always argue that it is not what, in fact, it is.
Q: So this novel is a warning about new forms of totalitarianism?
O'Brien: Unlike some of my earlier novels that explicitly
warn about the new totalitarianism, Island does so implicitly.
Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have warned us explicitly about
the dangers we face. Although in this novel I dramatize
some of the dangers they have discussed, I do not so much teach or preach as I
try to reveal a living truth about each and every human person. To violate
any one is to violate all. Moreover, such violation is an assault against the
fatherhood of God. My objective is to raise the questions that are absolutely
necessary for the sustaining of a truly human civilization.
Q: What are some of the specific spiritual insights
you're trying to bring forth for people reading this book?
O'Brien: I hope to
communicate the truth that man is born into, and lives in, and dies in a war
zone—the War that will last until the end of time. Equally, that the
world is inexpressibly beautiful and full of unceasing wonders. And that within
ourselves, and within each other, the greatest wonders are to be found. I try
to show through the unfolding of providence in the narrative that man is not
locked into a mechanistic universe, that he is not a number or a cog, but
rather a phenomenon created for love, for life in a community of persons. I try
to show through the central character that we must never lose hope.
Q: Hope is the subject of Pope Benedict's latest encyclical. How does your novel
reinforce his teachings?
O'Brien: What
Benedict has taught with such clarity and strength in Spe Salvi,
I hope I have incarnated in the form of fiction. My central character Josip
Lasta suffers grievous harm because of the blindness of men of power. He
endures trials that would, I think, destroy most of us, and indeed he comes
very close to despair. The Holy Father has frequently spoken of our need to see
beneath the surface appearances of our times, to look up and beyond the prison
walls of contemporary false solutions to the human condition. To recognize the lies and the despair beneath much of the
grand rhetoric of the new world order. Both he and John Paul II were
unhesitating in their analysis of what is destructive in all forms of
materialism—including Marxist-socialist and certain Western Capitalist forms of it, by which I mean Capitalism
without conscience, an anti-Personalist form of Capitalism. In contrast, the
Holy Fathers have urged us to think with the mind of Christ, and not with the
mind of social revolution. They teach us to call God our Father, to be in
relationship with Him as a Person, and in this way to come to know ourselves as
beloved persons—with unique identity, with names—not as numbers.
Q: How can we find the mind of Christ?
O'Brien: By
seeking him earnestly and prayerfully, by letting go of our ideologies and our
obsession with security and comfort, which all too often function as idols,
consciously and subconsciously, that block grace and reject true vision. We
must wake up—and part of this awakening will demand the self-honesty to
see how far we have been indoctrinated by false concepts of man's nature. Of
particular concern to me is the way we in the West form our opinions and
judgments about all things human and social, and how our perceptions of
practically everything have been warped by materialism. We must understand that
the sane and reasonable ground (where surely most of us want to be) can never
be the precise mid-point on a horizontal line between two ideological or
perceptual poles. Poles are always shifting. Cultural poles, with all their
power to influence politics, are especially unreliable. And the poles in men's
minds are more unstable than these. The true center is above. Right choices,
right politics, healthy cultural life, will flow from that re-orientation to
the hierarchical nature of the cosmos. May I say it again? — The true
center is above.
Q: Are you working on another book?
O'Brien: I thought
I had written everything I could possibly write, and was happy to return to
relative silence. Completing The Island of the World was rather
like giving birth to a child, as much as a man can understand that. But as with
human love and fecundity, life never ceases to yearn towards fruitfulness. In
recent months I've been experiencing a new story upwelling in my heart and
imagination. I've only put a brief outline and a few crucial scenes on paper at
this point, but the inner fountain just doesn't dry up. The provisional title
is My Dear Theophilus. I envision it as
a novel about the man to whom the apostle Luke addressed his Gospel and the
Acts of the Apostles. Who was he?
I'm also pondering a sequel to my novel Fr. Elijah. This is something I promised myself I would never
do, for all kinds of good reasons. But now this same upwelling of story is
flooding my imagination. If it ever makes it into print, it will be about what
happens to the priest Fr. Elijah when he goes down into Jerusalem to confront
the Antichrist.
Curiously, I didn't want to write any more books, and
certainly never decided I would start another. They just arrived, unannounced.
The Croatian language edition of this novel, titled Otok
Svijeta, is being published by the Catholic
publisher TRECI DAN in Zagreb, and will be available in early 2008.
Contact information:
Treci Dan
Stara Cesta 25
10251 Hrvatski Leskovac
Croatia
e-mail: mato.krajina@zg.t-com.hr.
The Italian language edition of this novel is being
translated for publication in 2009 under the title L'Isola del Mondo, by Edizioni San Paolo, Milan.
Island of the World is the story of a child born in 1933 into the
turbulent world of the Balkans and tracing his life into the third millennium.
The central character is Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher
in a remote village high in the mountains of the Bosnian interior. As the novel
begins, World War II is underway and the entire region of Yugoslavia is torn by
conflicting factions: German and Italian occupying armies, and the rebel forces
that resist them--the fascist Ustashe, Serb nationalist Chetniks, and Communist
Partisans. As events gather momentum, hell breaks loose, and the young and the
innocent are caught in the path of great evils. Their only remaining strength
is their religious faith and their families.
For more than a century, the
confused and highly inflammatory history of former Yugoslavia has been the
subject of numerous books, many of them rife with revisionist history and
propaganda. The peoples of the Balkans live on the border of three worlds: the
Islamic, the orthodox Slavic East, and Catholic Europe, and as such they stand
in the path of major world conflicts that are not only geo-political but fundamentally
spiritual. This novel cuts to the core question: how does a person retain his
identity, indeed his humanity, in absolutely dehumanizing situations?
In the life of the central
character, the author demonstrates that this will demand suffering and sacrifice,
heroism and even holiness. When he is twelve years old, his entire world is
destroyed, and so begins a lifelong Odyssey to find again the faith which the
blows of evil have shattered. The plot takes the reader through Josip's youth,
his young manhood, life under the Communist regime, hope and loss and
unexpected blessings, the growth of his creative powers as a poet, and the
ultimate test of his life. Ultimately this novel is about the crucifixion of a
soul—and resurrection.
Read more about Island of the World or order a copy today.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Interviews:
• The Opening Pages of Island of the World:
A Novel | Michael O'Brien
• Novelist of the Last Days | An Interview with
Michael O'Brien. An April 2005 interview with Michael about his novel Sophia House.
• Two-part interview with Michael | August 2004. Michael talks
with IgnatiusInsight.com about his novel, A Cry of Stone and the work of a novelist. Read
Part One and Part Two.
• "Thought
Crime Becomes a Reality in Canada" | An article by Michael
from August 2004 about a new Canadian federal hate crimes law that will
include speech against sexual orientation.
• "Are
Christians Intolerant?" | An excerpt from A Landscape with
Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind.
• Review of
"A Cry of Stone" | From National Catholic Register,
July 2004.
Michael D. O’Brien is the former
editor of the Catholic family magazine,
Nazareth Journal. He is also the author of several books, including
his seven volume series of novels published by Ignatius Press, notably the
best-selling Father
Elijah. For more than thirty years he has been a professional artist.
Michael and his wife Sheila have six children. He writes and paints full-time
at his home near Combermere, Ontario.
His paintings and published articles can be seen at his gallery website:
www.studiobrien.com.
Visit Michael's author page at IgnatiusInsight.com
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