I think The Brown Butterfly is about escapism, in a very profound sense. The first part of the novel is necessary to see what the second part is escaping from. I was a high school English teacher for thirty-seven years and can say that the portrayal of political correctness in these Norwegian schools “of the near future” is actually understated, not exaggerated, when compared with American schools today. Our emphasis on equality has worked against every other value; as teachers, now, instead of imparting knowledge or virtue, as in the past, we’ve become purveyors of popular culture, teaching kids to be equally bad.

I also appreciate how deeply this book engages with both the words and ideas of lesser-known writers like Adalbert Stifter or Arthur de Gobineau. Even Bonhoeffer, Dinesen and Gibbon aren’t exactly the kind of sources you’d expect to find in a novel today. And it’s wonderfully transgressive how Felt uses Gibbon to defend rather than attack Christianity. Who knows, in today’s world, perhaps even Gibbon counts as an apologist. What else would Gibbon have to say about our Decline? But I doubt even he could say it more eloquently than Christian Felt. The main pleasure of this book is probably its exquisite, unique, superficially old-fashioned, and deeply subversive prose. (Though I wonder if Felt hasn’t confused the words “homogenous” and “homogeneous” in his list of things that are not allowed in heaven?)

And I’m not sure Felt does himself any favors by identifying his work as “conservative." After all, his critique is of contemporary politics in almost any flavor. His luminaries come from an aristocratic European tradition that has little to do with either Democrats or Republicans. So don’t read this as a political novel; read it as a religious one. That is, read it as art, not propaganda. For those of us who love classic literature and deep down do believe in magic—for example, the Atonement—this book is more than just a lot of fun. It’s a monument.