Berwyn Mountain Press

In a sense his story is the story of all baby boomers and many of a certain age who read this book will come to understand more about their lives than his.

Then, a few years later, while teaching with Voluntary Service Overseas in North Malaya and working on his own sex and violence riven novel, his search changes completely when, in an astonishing few days of blistering revelation, God finds him. In a series of visions, Davies sees the world under attack by writers and artists like himself. He also comes to sense that God is in a great and almost unendurable pain.

Davies returns to Britain and becomes a journalist on top London newspapers. He begins meeting the people who are attacking the world, as described in his visions but, more importantly, he comes to a new understanding of the trouble spots of the world, including a devastating analysis of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which he sees as being run by a violence-loving media. He also unearths the way the media runs worldwide terrorism and encourages soccer hooliganism and campus massacres.

In particular, the Rambo films, he argues, have become the template of the latter.

Our media has become the long-prophesied Man of Lawlessness, Davies asserts, a great tide of evil which is sweeping the world and all the more evil because no one, other than he, seems to understand or recognise it. The media meets all the terms of Biblical prophecy, including the way it practically runs our politicians and church leaders.

But soon now – and perhaps sooner than expected – this evil tide will be totally repulsed by the transcendental brilliance of the Second Coming.

Testament is a Pilgrim’s Progress for our time, a book written with a prophetic and trenchant rage. Devoid of cant and with an unflinching candour, this might even be the most exciting and original book ever written about one man’s painful progress along the Path of the Cross. No one who reads it will be unmoved, untroubled or not wonder how we have allowed such an empire of evil to so completely take over our lives. But most excitingly of all, what they will understand is that, in a world of growing anxiety, God has indeed broken his silence and finally made his thoughts and words known.

This book is about an epic struggle to relate an ancient faith to a modern world, the story of a young Rousseau, beset by all the usual ills of the young, who sets out to understand and know God.

Like most children growing up in post-war Britain, Tom Davies was a conventional Christian, attending Sunday School regularly enough to amass a small collection of Bibles for good attendance and be baptised by immersion.

But by the time he reached his teens, sex has become the be-all and end-all of his existence – and his obsessive and unsuccessful efforts to lose his virginity took him around the world by the end of his adolescence.

Davies does not know God, and nor does God seem to know him. He does find some early insights into the nature of God, particularly into the healing power of love, when he spends a summer looking after delinquent children on New York’s Lower East Side. But at university, he falls under the influence of inappropriate books, many of them novels steeped in sex and violence and which convince him that he, too, wants to write.

What with such books, raunchy rock’n’ roll and the ideas of the modern cinema he has become a creation – or mirror man – of his time.

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