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One thing I did find very disconcerting about this book is that it really seems to be two separate works. About the first third of the novel, up to the death of Brother Francis, is imaginative and lively. After that point, it becomes a polemic about the inevitable ruin brought by secularism, and this theme is laid down heavily:
"On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam's, Herod's, Judas's, Hannegan's, mine. Everybody's. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by wrath of Heaven."
Now, this theme is also in the first part of the book, but after that, the art is lost but the diatribe remains.
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