Religious Hypocrisy

The characters of Theophilus and Oscar Hopkins are wonderfully amusing instruments for Peter Carey's subtle brand of satire. Their often absurd religious convictions are presented so earnestly that the punch line is never a part of the story. The humor results from the reader's greater perspective on these close-minded individuals. What makes the satire so biting is that the views represented by the Hopkins men are actual views commonly held in various parts of the world not long ago. There is not an area of the globe that has not seen fatal fights over relatively minor religious differences. Europe in particular, the acknowledged seat of cultural development in previous eras, was host to bitter turf battles between splinter factions of Christianity. Christianity has suffered the flawed views of mortal men over the years, as its various factions insisted that their interpretation of the Christian Bible was the...