The Tablet A Weekly Newspaper & Review
November 25, 1961 Vol. 215, No. 6130 pg. 1132
The Edge of Sadness. By Edwin O'Connor. Max Reinhardt.
18s.
Daughter of Silence. By Morris West. Heinemann.
16s.
The Burial. By Jennifer Lash. Rupert Hart
Davis. 13s. 6d.
The Catholic novel may take so many and such widely different forms that it is at least permissible to doubt whether it exists in its own right. Yet to most of us a "Catholic" novel is recognisable as such because of its concerns with the Church and with faith -- whether overwhelming as in The Edge of Sadness or barely perceptible as in The Burial -- has an urgency and a significance which transcend the function it performs in the story.
There is not much doubt, of course, about how to fit The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor's most ambitious novel so far, into such a definition: indeed it might be called the Catholic novel direct. The hero, Father Hugh Kennedy, is priest of a cosmopolitan American parish, whence he has been transferred from another part of the diocese by his bishop after almost succumbing to alcoholism. Lonely and isolated, a stranger even to his pompous, cheerful Polish curate Father Danowski, he is truly a moving figure whose character is drawn with subtlety and great humanity. His life among the shadowy world of his apathetic parishioners is lived perpetually on the edge of sadness: but he lives in another world too -- that if the turbulent Carmody family, and especially of rich old Charlie Carmody, the head of the family, who has known Hugh's father and Hugh himself as a boy and who plays the family despot with a mixture of bluster and sentiment. The Carmodys are a master stroke of the author's, for not only do they give depth and humour and external life to the novel, they also, by their noisy and for the most part extroverted lives, add poignancy to Father Kennedy's spiritual odyssey. The Edge of Sadness is an important book on a major theme, so it is not unnatural that it should be written in a leisured, expansive style. Just occasionally, in the middle chapters, the author tends to ramble and the narrative to become becalmed, but this is a small price to pay for its dignity and power.
In The Edge
of Sadness the Church us at the very centre of the novel and the development
of the plot turns chiefly upon spiritual values -- after all, the Carmodys
are in the end part of the background. In Daughter of Silence, Morris
West's new novel, on the other hand, we are given a first rate thriller
set against the background of Catholic Italy. Fifty years ago a reviewer
would have described this novel as a rattling good yarn: today the
apt phrase is no doubt "compulsively readable," yet the implied disparagement
must certainly be of the baseness of the critic's coinage, not of the novel,
for in this brilliantly told story of the trial of a young girl for murder,
the author has again shown himself to be a past master of dialogue and
of rapid narrative. His touch as a delineator of character, however,
is less sure, and only in the central figure -- the young counsel Carlo
Rienzi, overshadowed by the robust personality and celebrated talents of
his rakish old father-in-law, reduced emotionally by the infidelity of
his wife and yet ultimately, rising to the highest peaks of advocacy in
his defense of the accused girl -- is he unquestionably successful.
Nevertheless, despite the odd staginess of some of the minor characters
-- in particular the barely credible psychiatrist Peter Landon and his
French girl friend
Ninette Lachaise -- Daughter of Silence is a thoroughly enjoyable
and often impressive novel.
There is a
third type of Catholic novel which reveals itself, almost unwittingly,
by a chance sentence or paragraph -- perhaps there are only one or two
in the whole book -- glinting through the texture of the writing like a
rare silver thread in a Persian or Indian textile. The Burial is
such a novel, and although the silver gleams on the surface in more than
one place it does so most typically in the short passage describing the
heroine, Dilla Martin, standing in a strange church, numb with pain, immediately
after witnessing her mother's death in an asylum. It is not too much
to say that this short first novel by Jennifer Lash is an exquisite piece
of work revealing, in its account of the childhood and adolescence of an
emotionally unstable English girl, sensibility of a high order.
-------------Christopher Kent