AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD BY PETER MATHIESSEN
At Play in the Fields of the Lord was written in 1965, a symbolist snapshot of religion by famed author and adventurer Peter Mathiessen (who co-founded The Paris Review literary digest). Filmed in 1991 by Hector Babenco, the book resurfaced briefly in the popular eye. As a novel, it is an intensely visual and tactile evocation of the jungle world. Rich, and experience-heavy, the plot charts the visit of Christian missionaries to a relatively untouched Eden in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. The inescapable consequences of this visit are ruthlessly related in a cascade of symbolic imagery and events. Louis Moon, the rough Indian pilot who parachutes down into the jungle and becomes a God, only to destroy his people with a sickness contracted by an illicit kiss with the head missionary’s wife. The story has a wonderfully magical cynicism about it which mourns, in the scale of a miniature epic, the exile from Eden and the devastating ramifications thereof.
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