Catholic Fiction

San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 215 pages.
Reviewed by Christine Sunderland

This thoughtful literary thriller addresses weighty and timely themes: not only challenges to belief in an unbelieving world, but the devastation of AIDS and sexual license, the disparity between first and third worlds, rich and poor, and the role of a Church guided by tradition. Secular versus religious, Muslim versus Christian, new versus old: who are the real combatants today? Our world is complex.

The author has chosen his characters wisely. An idealistic London reporter becomes enthralled with a charismatic relief worker, getting more than she bargained for. Her uncle, a conservative priest, watches over her, praying, guiding. A young British agent from Scotland Yard is pulled into the plot, as he seeks to thwart a terrorist threat. The stories intertwine in a fast-paced plot in which the smuggling of nerve gas is set against the death of John Paul II and the papal election. We move from London to Rome to Uganda to Cairo and back to Rome. With its careful syntax and spare structure, the story progresses to a profound and unforgettable conclusion.       Continue Reading »

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: Death of a Pope, ends justify the means, John Paul II, Piers Paul Read, thriller, vatican

ISBN-10: 1-60704-008-8
ISBN=13: 978-1-60704-008-8
published by Seton Books, $8.95

reviewed by Tannia Ortiz-Lopès

In his book, ”Numbers Up”, first time author Kevin Clark brings to the teens/young adult audience a crime story full of mathematical and science concepts woven into the storyline.

The story begins in the Institute for Applied Mathematics with the discovery of the body of renowned mathematician Dr. Michael Townsend. A call is placed to the Metropolitan Police Department and detective Paul Ondracek is chosen to lead the investigation. Continue Reading »

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Wired has published a short but useful list of what writer Bruce Sterling regards as digital-age difficulties facing “literature” as we have known it these last few centuries. The fact that, “wired” (relatively speaking) as I am, I am unable to follow a couple of his examples may be proof enough of the problem us literary types are having making an impact (let alone making a living) in the workaday wired world.

My favorite (if that’s the word) ot the list, however, has little to do with being “wired” or not:

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: literature, wired

National Catholic Register journalist Tim Drake has published an interview with Catholic novelist Piers Paul Read, author of Death of a Pope (which is on my to-read-next pile). The article is online at the Register site, but you need to be a subscriber to read it. Here’s my favorite quote:

Are there ways that you have suffered professionally as a result of your faith? Continue Reading »

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: anti-Catholicism, Catholic novelist, Death of a Pope, National Catholic Register, Piers Paul Read, Tim Drake

reviewed by Tannia Ortiz-Lopes

In his book, The Darkness Did Not, author William L. Biersach brings to the adult reader an urban fantasy thriller.

When corpses of young women with their bodies drained of blood suddenly start to accumulate in the morgue, the police are perplexed and extremely afraid. The police seek the assistance of Father John Baptist, a detective-cop-turned-priest, known for his sharp intuition and ability to discern the killers’ mind to help them stop the vampire serial killer. Continue Reading »

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: detective, mystery, priest-detective, The Darkness Did Not, vampires, William L. Biersach

After wasting an hour or two too many several years ago on the much-ado-about-patent-nonsense controversy surrounding Dan Brown’s laughable blockbuster, The DaVinci Code, I have of late been sedulously avoiding all references  to “Dan Brown”, “Angels and Demons”, “Ron Howard”, or “Tom Hanks”. But when I stumbled across Ross Douthat’s spade-calling op ed piece in The New York TImes, I had to take five to look. And it was well worth the read.

A brief excerpt:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

Bingo.

For the rest of the excellent piece, go here.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: Angels and Demons, anti-Catholicism, Dan Brown, DaVinci Code, Ross Douthat

Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland is this year’s recipient of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award, has written a piece on Flannery O’Connor for the recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly (using Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery: A Life, as the occasion). O’Neill describes O’Connor’s writing as “unfairly” and “wickedly” good:

The narrating third person hovers in an almost miraculous fusion of proximity and comic distance. With O’Connor, there never seems to be space between the words and their creator’s sensibility. You almost never catch a whiff of authorial self-consciousness. About how many writers can this be said?

Nonetheless, O’Neill has problems with O’Connor the “exegesist.” In other words, O’Connor the Catholic:

To decode her fiction for its doctrinal or supernatural content is to render it dreary, even false, because whatever her private purposes, O’Connor was above all faithful to a baleful comic vision derived, surely, from an ancient, artistically wholesome tradition of misanthropy. Nonetheless, a spiritual drama is playing out. Only it is not the one put forward by the self-explaining author, in which she figures as an onlooker occupying the high ground of piety. On the contrary, Flannery O’Connor’s criticism reveals her as scarily belonging to the low world she evokes. She was touched by evil and no doubt knew it. That is what makes her so wickedly good.

O’Neill fears that reading O’Connor in light of her Catholicism reduces her artistic achievement, rendering it “dreary, even false.” This is common for current critics who find her writing rapturous, but her self-proclaimed “thirteenth century” Catholicism distasteful. Yet his own summation of O’Connor as nothing more than a deep-seated misanthropist, “belonging to the low world she evokes,” rather than a faithful Catholic looking into the heart of human mystery, strikes me as far drearier and less convincing than O’Connor’s own conviction that her faith was the driving force behind her art.

She wrote: “Because I am a Catholic I an afford to be nothing less than an artist.” O’Connor’s concentrated vision of the Fall is “baleful,” to be sure, but not without hope, as it would be in the work of a genuine misanthrope (Philip Roth, perhaps?). O’Connor’s stories feature characters unquestionably “touched by evil,” but O’Neill misses the larger point entirely. That they are also, and more importantly, “touched by grace.” That grace may be darkly comic, shocking, or violent, but it’s there. And it’s a mystery. O’Neill’s reading of O’Connor may reveal more about him than it does about his subject.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: Atlantic Monthly, Brad Gooch, Catholic, Flannery O'Connor, Joseph O'Neill, review

The Nation has reviewed The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller, a memoir about Miller’s experience re-reading C.S. Lewis’ beloved Chronicles of Narnia as an adult. Now a successful editor of Salon, Miller was once enthralled by Lewis’ Narnia series. Her book — part memoir, part literary criticism — is her attempt to theorize why Lewis’ books have proved so enduringly popular and resonant with young audiences. The reviewer writes:

Justifying her interest in Lewis-as-writer, as opposed to Lewis the apologist, she (Miller) states that the Narnia books have not succeeded in overturning her resistance to Christianity, that they furthermore are not allegories and that she will not be taking up the religious aspect of the stories. But by his own testimony Lewis did indeed find himself retelling the story of Christianity for children: “Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.” The Passion of Christ provides his first book with a shape, and Genesis and Revelation are behind his sixth and seventh books, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle. But the second through fifth books derive more clearly from secular books, some from altogether non-Christian traditions: the Odyssey, the Metamorphoses, the Arabian Nights, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, The Faerie Queene, Gulliver’s Travels, the poems of W.B. Yeats, the fairy tales of George MacDonald. Lewis’s aim was always to tell stories, to do something with the pictures he saw: “Some people seem to think I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children…. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.”

The full review is here.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: Christianity, Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis, Laura Miller, The Magician's Book, The Passion of Christ

We have two significant news items of interest to readers of Catholic fiction.

First, J.R.R. Tolkien’s heretofore unknown and unpublished epic narrative poem, Sigurd and Gudrún, written in the 1930s and edited by son Christopher Tolkien, has just been published. According to this article in the Guardian UK,

The 500-stanza poem is closely modelled on the Elder Edda, a collection of Norse myths preserved in a 13th-century manuscript, a pedigree Christopher Tolkien described as “unknown territory” for most people….

“My hope is that some of those who appreciate and admire the works of my father will find it illuminating in respect of Old Norse poetry in general, in his own treatment of the fierce, passionate and mysterious legend, and in this further and little known aspect of him as both philologist and poet. Above all I hope they will take pleasure in this poetry.”

And there’s big literary news about a very different but equally brilliant writer of what I, at least, regard as “Catholic fiction”, and whose works I hope to be able to review soon: Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer Prize winning author of No Country for Old Men, The Road and Blood Meridian, has been awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Lifetime Achievement Award for U.S. literature.

Here’s an article about the award from the CBC.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: Blook Meridian, Christopher Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, epic narrative poem, J.R.R. Tolkien, No Country for Old Men, PEN, Saul Bellow award, Sigurd and Gudrun, The Road

Michael Dirda, Washington Post’s perspicacious literary critic, sets his sights on a new collection of correspondence by Graham Greene, the great Catholic novelist. He writes: 

His men and women are murderers, traitors, unhappy adulterous lovers, sinners of every stripe–and he doesn’t glamorize their seediness, their misery, or their desperation. Evelyn Waugh bluntly called them “charmless.” Nearly all of them dwell in a shadowy fictive world of hunter and hunted, where love itself leads mainly to anguish and loss. Nonetheless, even Greene’s “entertainments,” such as This Gun for Hire and The Third Man, are more than just tautly written thrillers of revenge or pursuit: In the distance one can usually make out the baying of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years; / I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind …

After the death of Henry James, according to Greene, “the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act.” Consequently, Greene’s own work–especially the major books of what one might call his middle period: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair–sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

Tags: Catholic, Catholic fiction, Graham Greene, letters, Michael Dirda, The Power and the Glory, Washington Post