Peter the Second

by Bruce Marshall

183 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1976

About the author

Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Cunningham Bruce Marshall, known as Bruce Marshall was a prolific Scottish writer who wrote fiction and non-fiction books on a wide range of topics and genres. His first book, A Thief in the Night came out in 1918, possibly self-published. His last, An Account of Capers was published posthumously in 1988, a span of 70 years.

Reviews

[Josiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the last of a series of three (possibly four, depending on how you count) comic dystopian novels about the future of the Catholic Church. This time the pope is a former Soviet official who had a conversion experience and became a priest and then a bishop. He is very much an "old school" pope, returning to traditional doctrinal and liturgical practices and doling out harsh punishments to anyone who doesn't see things his way. At the same time, he's entered the Vatican into an alliance with the Soviet Union, which has given the Church a level of temporal power unrivaled since the middle ages.

The pope's main adversary is the wife of the former liberal pope, who along with a bishop miraculously transformed into a women as punishment for his philandering in the previous book, have started a schismatic church in the Netherlands. And it gets weirder from there.

This book is considerably darker than the previous books, and you can sometimes feel the author's sense of hopelessness come through, but there is still plenty of absurd comedy as well.