Catholic Fiction

Reviewed by Debra Murphy

“Whoops!” Brother Jerome clutched at the headstone on Father Aloysius’s grave in an attempt to steady himself on the icy ground, but on the frozen grass his feet slid from beneath him. He pitched forward, his head hit the headstone with a thud and he slumped down, blood trickling from the cut on his temple.

His fellow friars gave him a good send-off. The Provincial traveled up for the funeral, and Jerome was interred in the same grave as Aloysius.”

So begins, with a bang rather than a whimper, Robina Williams’ delightful tale of the curious, rather in-between-worlds afterlife of Brother Jerome and the Seraph. Not quite Hamlet’s “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,” Brother Jerome’s post-mortem existence proves surprisingly and disconcertingly fluid as he moves in and out the world of the living and the dead in his familiar monastery precincts, frequently in the company of the ginger monastery cat, Leo.

But this mysterious tomcat, Brother Jerome quickly learns, occasionally bears a more than passing resemblance to Lewis’ Aslan. He is clearly no ordinary rat-catcher, but a powerful angelic creature whose task, it would seem, is not only to keep an eye on the occasionally wayward brethren of this rural English monastery, but to help them navigate their otherworldly transitions as well. With the bumbling Jerome, it would seem, Leo will have a bit of a challenge.

Williams’ writing displays a clear style, a benevolent sense of humor, and a forgiving touch with her quirky religious family. She also has great deal of fun with certain “quantum” notions of Time and Space. While it wouldn’t do to give too much away, I found her introduction of beings and themes from classical mythology particularly imaginative. The author answers very few of the questions she seems to raise in the story, the first in a series—is Jerome’s afterlife experience an eccentric “mansion” in heaven, one of the more pleasant spots in Purgatory, or some in-between place?—but one suspects that this is just as well; like Brother Jerome himself, the reader is on something of a voyage of discovery in this new world, and there will be plenty of nooks and crannies to explore if we will just be patient…and perhaps dip into the next book in the series.

Though not a mystery, and set in our own day, reading Jerome and the Seraph provided me with many of the same pleasures to be had in curling up, preferably with a nice cuppa, with one of those “cozy” English detective stories from the Thirties. I highly recommend it for a lazy Sunday afternoon.