In his loudly acclaimed novel The War of the End of the World … Vargas Llosa sets down with appalling and ferocious clarity his vision of the tragic consequences for ordinary people of millenarianism of whatever kind. He has written before, in his novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, about the emergence in remote rural parts of an ascetic figure who becomes a focus of resistance to a militaristic state. That was primarily a comic novel, however, whereas the new book is as dark as spilled blood. And while it is most impressively got up as a historical novel—based, we are told, on a "real" episode in Brazilian history—its value as a text is entirely contemporary. In an age such as ours, plagued by bloodthirsty armies and equally violent gods, an account of a fight to the finish between God and Mammon could be nothing else...