The Voyage of the Short Serpent
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 1585679208 / Publisher: Overlook Press, January 2008
Evangelical missionaries, sent by a cardinal to learn why an Iceland colony suddenly cut off communications with the church, learn that the residents live a seemingly primitive lifestyle lacking faith and full of excess.
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Years ago, a group left Europe to start a colony in Greenland, "the northernmost part of the world," as they called it - a frozen, desolate place where it is difficult to survive. They called the place New Thule. But as the years wear on, communication between New Thule and the people back home has become less and less frequent, until finally it stops altogether. The Church fears that the people of New Thule have gone native - or, worse yet, gone pagan. A cardinal orders an evangelical mission in order to see what has become of the people, and to revive their faith.Told in an elegant, compulsive, and increasingly unhinged style, The Voyage of the Short Serpent is a masterpiece about mutable human morality in inhuman conditions, a parable of truth, obsession, and the myth of utopia.
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