Going dancing with disaster

Edward Fox THIS is an interesting variation on the travel book. It is a highly personal journey to '7 sites round Europe where Our Lady has appeared in visions and the sun has appeared to dance in the sky above the enraptured pilgrims. Within the travel narrative, its plot is the author's struggle to believe and finally understand these phenomena.
The best travel writing tells you as much, or even more. about the narrator as about the places visited and Seward demonstrates this in an erudite and engaging way. He is a Knight of Malta and a traditionalist Catholic. His authors are Waugh, Greene, Belloc and Chesterton and he shares Waugh's infatuation with English recusant aristocracy. virtually equating noble blood with sanctity.
Yet he writes with compelling openness about his Graham Greene-ish burden of doubt: "I am a very unsatisfactory Christian. There have been totally godless periods in my life when I worshipped money or a woman, even, briefly, the bottle."
Seward's position on the phenomena of the shrines is one of simple acceptance. Although he sets out in a doubting frame of mind, wondering whether his faith itself was slipping away, his attitude becomes fixed in the first chapter, when he visits Medjugorje in the middle of Bosnia. At first, he writes: "Why had I come to this madhouse?" The fairground element inevitably associated with popular miracles put him off. But by the following paragraph a transformation had occurred. "Next morning I awoke a different man... my whole attitude to life had altered: all depression, all worries, had gone."
From this point on, it is a simple matter for him to accept that the Marian phenomena he describes are true miracles. He pityingly recounts the explanations of the sceptics. in all their manifest inadequacy. For him, it is sufficient proof to feel genuine holiness wherever he goes. He has a nose for it. He was moved by the Black Virgin of Krakow: he was left stone cold by Walsingham.
He also believes that the point of the Marian visions is to warn the world of imminent danger. He ends on an ominous note: "I am quite certain that the dancing sun really does mean global disaster." Edward Fox's book Obscure Kingdoms will be published in October by Hamish Hamilton.