Test of faith for American dream

If the 20th century belongs to any nation, then it belongs to America. The 'Land of the Free' has stamped its mark upon the world like no other, and who better to chronicle the myriad twists and turns in its complex history than its greatest living writer, John Updike.

Updike is no stranger to the past. His 1992 novel Memories of the Ford Administration coupled the life of 19th-century president James Buchanan with a retrospective on the 1970s.

Perhaps his best-known body of work - the Rabbit quartet - chronicles the sexual and materialistic mores of American society through four consecutive decades with Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, Updike's 'Everyman'.

As we approach the millennium, Updike has dipped into the past again, to encompass the sweep of the century through four generations of one family. The resulting saga is as impressive as it is voluminous: a stunning, often moving, yet always heart-warming study of the human condition.

Borrowing its title from the Battle Hymn of the Republic - 'In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea/ With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me' - the book is a monument to faith, in all forms.

From the tangled fabric of American social history, Updike teases out what he considers to be the two dominant strands: religion and the cinema. They lead back to Paterson, New Jersey, in the spring of 1910, where D W Griffith is filming the 17-year-old Mary Pickford in The Call To Arms.