|
|
-
-
- BOOK
REVIEW:
-
- Holy
Innocents
-
Book Review by
Eloise Knowlton
-
- If it's true that all
great books explode their genres, we might also claim
that good ones stretch theirs. This is certainly true
of Bill Kassel's debut novel, Holy Innocents, a murder mystery, but one
that hardly conforms to the comfortable
peer-found-the-library formula. Eminently readable,
peopled with vivid characters, and blessed with a
gripping plot, this is no ordinary whodunnit, because
it is no ordinary murder.
-
- The corpse is that of
a baby boy, the victim of a partial-birth abortion,
found in the trash can of what had been a Catholic
school. Part of the poignancy of this tale is that in
this mystery, unlike the generic model, there is a
victim but no villain. In this case, there can be no
legal punishment, but only a revelation of evil's
source in prior evil done. It is this quality of
complex reflection, this willingness to entertain
moral complexity, that makes the book worthy, and
significant beyond the entertainment value it also,
fully, supplies.
-
- Alan Kemp, a
divorced, former Air Force military policeman, and now
music director at a small-town parish, is asked by the
bishop to investigate who dumped the baby. A history
of anti-Catholic vandalism in town, and a pastor with
a past make the situation delicate. Kemp's
investigations plunge him into a soup of diocesan
plottings, school reform politics, the debate over
abortion, and small-town Catholic-Protestant
tensions.
-
- Kassel's keen eye for
characterization offers us a vivid group of suspects:
an able, ambitious nun, her lapsed Catholic feminist
friend, a charismatic high school teacher with a
strong hatred for the Church, pro-choice and pro-life
activists, evangelicals with attitude, and, most
enjoyable of all, a slightly demented local eccentric
whom Kemp calls "Popeye." Each serves not only as a
possible solution to the mystery, but as a means of
deepening the perspective in this richly painted
portrait of how big issues play out in small
places.
-
- Kemp himself makes
for an unusual sort of gumshoe. This gentle musician
is no Philip Marlowe tough-guy, but they share
something of the same emptiness and isolation that
marks the American detective as anti-hero. His search
for love and community, and the tightness of this
linkage is one of the novel's greatest
strengths.
-
- Holy
Innocents
rejects the simplistic right vs. wrong agon of Romance in favor of the more mature
vision of Greek tragedy: the conflict of right against
right. The book's thunderous conclusion, deftly
handled, leaves the reader both satisfied at the
revelation of the proximate enigma - who dumped the
baby - and unsatisfied in not telling us what cannot,
in the end, be told: where cycles of violence begin,
and where they can possibly end.
-
- In short, Kassel's
book is a good read, but it is something more. It is
testimony to a thinking Catholic's viewpoint. There
are many tracts advancing the Church's pro-life
position. Holy
Innocents does
what polemic cannot do: depict with sensitivity and
nuance the irreducible complexity of moral
judgment.
-
Eloise Knowlton is the
author of Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of
Citation.
-
- Reprinted from
FELLOWSHIP OF CATHOLIC SCHOLARS QUARTERLY
- SUMMER, 2001
- Copyright ©
2001, Fellowship of Catholic Scholars
-
Return to Holy
Innocents
|
.gif)
- 203 Pages -
Softbound
- ISBN #:
0-938984-04-7
|
