Acts of Faith Author:Hans Koning John Balthasar is an outsider, an American of troubled conscience with a growing affinity to a Dutch ancestor whose questioning of sixteenth-century religious dogma branded him a heretic. When Balthasar returns to Pamplona, Spain, he is haunted by the memory of an earlier visit. While researching a magazine story, he had become invol... more »ved in an attempt to smuggle a Basque nationalist across the border into France. Having balked then, he feels guilty about that failure of nerve now, ten years later. Through a strange sequence of mysteriously sinister events and encounters, he experiences a nightmarish vision of a latter-day auto-da-fé, the Inquisitional rite of death by fire.
Back in New York, resuming his dropout job as a librarian, he marries a woman important to him for not having dropped out, for retaining her optimistic expecations and her hold on life. He is also drawn into the secretive activities of a group of New York Spanish exiles connected with his experiences in Spain, which lead to a military cell of Cuban emigrés in Florida and the mysterious death of a friend of Balthasar's linked to both groups.
The further John Balthasar delves and tries to reason out his discoveries, not only in terms of his immediate experience but also by way of historical induction, the more convinced he becomes that he has fallen on a conspiracy to instigate a nuclear war as a twentieth-century auto-da-fé, in the long, "purifying" tradition of similar "acts of faith."« less