Michael Tobin's study is part literary criticism, part biography. Tobin follows Bernanos and his family from France to Spain during the Civil War and then to Brazil and North Africa. He also provides a thematic synthesis of Bernanos' novels and his extensive body of non-fiction, demonstrating that one fundamental theological truth — the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ — was the the unifying factor of Bernanos's entangled political and social criticism and the engine of his creative imagination.