From Publishers Weekly
Keneally steers a young, na‹ve Australian priest through a series of complex moral choices in his latest novel, which takes place early in WWII with the Japanese forces steadily advancing southward. The insular existence of Catholic cleric Frank Darragh is disturbed when he is approached by a beautiful married woman named Kate Heggarty, whose husband has been captured by the Germans in North Africa. Darragh tries to comfort her, but Heggarty retains her combative stance toward traditional Catholicism as she drifts toward infidelity as a possible means of solace. In spite of his halfhearted efforts to deny her charms, Darragh's growing infatuation becomes an issue when Heggarty is suddenly murdered and the local detectives try to implicate him. Darragh also faces trouble from his conservative monsignor, who sends the priest away on retreat for involving the parish in the investigation. Despite the admonitions of his superior, Darragh puts considerable effort into trying to clarify his role in Heggarty's death, until a U.S. soldier from a nearby American base provides a stunning and compromising revelation regarding the killer's identity. Keneally portrays his protagonist's innocence with a keen but subtle sense of irony, and the surprising plot twists help him steer clear of the usual clich‚s afflicting novels about compromised clerics. But the true excellence of the book lies in the author's ability to blend his depiction of a seaside village in crisis as the Japanese threaten to invade with the nuances of morality and faith that constantly keep Darragh at odds with himself. The novel lacks the weight of Schindler's List or Keneally's narrative history The Great Shame, but it is a sterling effort on a smaller scale.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Keneally's return to fiction, after the nonfiction
American Scoundrel [BKL F 1 02], may, in its first slow-going pages, initially disappoint readers. But once his fiction engine begins hitting on all cylinders, readers will be swept away on a poignant but never sentimental tale of a young Australian priest, who, not long after his ordination, questions his vocation and his own version of its practice in the early years of World War II, when a Japanese invasion seems imminent. Father Frank Darragh intellectualizes his actions as soul saving, but his heart is often his true prompter, especially when ministering to the young Mrs. Heggarty, who has lost her faith and whose soldier husband is interned in North Africa. Father Darragh's attention to Mrs. Heggarty causes undue public and jurisprudential attention on Church goings-on when the woman is found murdered. What could have been a cliche-riddled and soap opera-like romance becomes, in Keneally's sensitive and intelligent hands, a gripping, resonant novel about the power and problems of faith and love.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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