The novel arrives in England accompanied by a small truckload of hype the cover declaring it to be a "thriller, novel of ideas, the cult European bestseller". While this is hardly a new reading of history, it's here that Q starts to show its contemporary hand.
If the heretics are early Marxists, their real enemy is burgeoning capitalism: church and state hand in hand with commerce and banking, intent on enforcing authority and stability in the face of the call for radical reform. Gradually a wider political conspiracy reveals itself, one in which the heretics are pawns in a chess game of power played out between the Papacy, the German princes and the Holy Roman empire. Throughout this sprawling epic are scattered letters from the eponymous anti-hero, Q, a spy reporting to his Catholic cardinal master on his attempts to infiltrate and betray the Anabaptists from within. This is the world of Dürer with elements of Bosch thrown in, and though it is occasionally confusing and repetitive, the very chaos and crude violence of it mirror the madness and apocalyptic vision that must have propelled so many to their doom. The air is full of blistering debate, revolutionary preaching and the smell of smoke, both from burning icons in the churches and the pyres on which the heretics are burned. Told through the increasingly war-weary voice of the student, an Anabaptist turned mercenary, the novel leaps between towns, dates and battles. "Along the walls of the university curiosity grows like ivy young minds craving new topics to test their milk teeth on." The first 300 pages chart the most turbulent and violent years of the Reformation, the radicalism inside cities like Frankenhausen, Munster and Mulhausen unfolding as a catalogue of bloody encounters, with ever wilder prophets leading peasant uprisings against ever more brutal suppression from German princes (who are often in league with Lutherans, by now equally intolerant of their more radical bedfellows). Q opens with a young theological student studying in Wittenberg two years after Luther's denunciation.
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