The violent bear it away

O'Connor's second novel follows Francis Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old boy raised in the backwoods by his great-uncle, a self-appointed prophet. The old man has trained him to become a prophet too, and to carry out a sacred duty. After the old man's death, the boy is pulled between this calling and the influence of his uncle in the city, a schoolteacher who believes in reason and wants to reshape him.

The book is a stark and sometimes comic story of inheritance, faith and resistance, with the boy fighting a call he does not want. Intense, strange and poetic, it shows O'Connor's conviction that religious belief is a matter of life and death.