Peacemongers

A literary masterpiece, this latest book from award-winning author Barry Hill is a travel book, a history book, and a peace book. His odyssey begins with a pilgrimage to Bodhi Gaya in India, where the Buddha received enlightenment, and ends after he reaches Nagasaki, Japan, in the aftermath of its atomic bomb. His traveling is imbued with the life and ideas of India’s greatest artist and intellectual, Rabindranath Tagore, along with that of M. K. Gandhi, who Tagore called “Mahatma,” Great Soul. He’s then traveling, like Tagore, in Japan, and meditating on its militarist turn, its warmongering Buddhism, and the Tokyo War Crimes Trial with its riddled postcolonial legacy. He goes to Zen temples, secret islands, and into some of the recesses of Japanese history, all the while musing on his own capacity for inner disarmament. Hill also has his late father with him, a union man and Australian peace activist, whose dated left humanism may not be enough for the wars and ruins the West has recently created. The discourse of this incredible work—poetic, mobile, ambivalent—seeks to be an antidote to the political impotence of progressive thought over the last decade. But Peacemongers does not peddle hope, and when it sights hope it tends to be as an epiphany, as was the case with Tagore.