The Gates of Paradise

‘Can a novel be called short when almost every sentence has significance? The Inquisitors has the density of a bar of uranium.’ This is what John Davenport wrote in The Observer about Andrzeyevski’s first novel;and his second, Ashes and Diamonds,was greeted with a storm of praise from the critics. The Gates of Paradise is his best to date. The theme of this allegorical novel is the Children’s Crusade, around whose banner a great procession of children sets off to the Holy Land to capture Christ’s tomb from the infidel Turks.The Gates of Paradise is written with extraordinary skill: candid, delicate, earthy, it gives us a new and Ironic insight into the nature of idealism, and it looks sat love and lust with the visionary passion and anarchy that are common to the saint, the artist and theadolescent.